What Have They Learned?
He said it lasted about half an hour. Then the cops came and everyone scattered.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
When journalists got around to explaining the ongoing fascination with the May 4 hazing incident at Glenbrook North High School, they laid it to the existence of videotape that the TV stations happily played over and over and over. But the focus on perpetrators and victims, litigious parents and posturing administrators, obscured what it was in those videotapes that was so fascinating.
Facing History is a national program with an aggressive Chicago chapter. Rooted in the lessons of the Holocaust, it goes into high schools and gets students and teachers talking together about prejudice, mob violence, individual responsibility, and moral choice. To Facing History, the hazing scandal was a “teachable moment.” At least one Glenbrook North teacher who’s had Facing History training seized it. His response was to lead his students through a set piece called “The Bad Samaritan.” Because the high school’s teachers have been ordered not to talk to reporters, Facing History’s Chuck Meyers, a senior program associate in the Chicago office, wouldn’t tell me the teacher’s name. But Meyers explained that “The Bad Samaritan” is based on a 60 Minutes segment about a young man who passively watched his friend commit murder, and that it addresses “bystander issues–those who knew nothing, those who did nothing, those who denied responsibility.”
The point being made about Blair is that in a world where a single mistake brings death, his many mistakes didn’t. That’s why anyone with a hard-on against affirmative action or corporate suckups has the name Jayson Blair on his foaming lips. But those are somebody else’s issues. Mine is this: an internship is a pressure cooker, and it’s not the only way of bringing young reporters along. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch used to have an editor named Carl Baldwin who ran a weeks-long school for new reporters. Once he’d decided a young reporter had learned the ropes, the kid was shifted to the suburban desk to write about school bond issues for another year or two until he or she was deemed worthy of more. The weakness of this system was that it was stultifying: many of the best writers threw up their hands and resigned. The strength was that it produced no Jayson Blairs.
8 Nothing nags like an unasked question. A few days before last weekend’s Colonial tournament began, star golfer Phil Mickelson was asked about Annika Sorenstam’s chances.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/William L. Brown.
