The author's writing style does an excellent job of bringing these young people to life, and it seems easier to feel sympathy for these youngsters than it was to empathize with the rather bitchy young adults she described in "Pledged".
But Walt Whitman is not only a school for highly achieving, stressed-out, Ivy League strivers. It is also a school for average kids, quiet kids, goths, drug users, dope sellers, artists, devoutly religious kids, and single-pointed nerds who are the farthest thing from the polished, well-rounded, resume kings and queens portrayed in this narrative. At least, it was when I attended the school and graduated nearly twenty years ago, and to a large extent, it probably still is today.
The average students are rarely featured in the narrative, except in terms of their relationships with the overachievers, but it would have been interesting had the author focused a little more on how an elite public school like Walt Whitman shapes the expectations of its average kids.
Many of these youngsters probably benefitted from exposure to high achievers, particularly since they may have shared at least a few AP classes with them (not every AP student is a classic overachiever). But many of the average youngsters also feel the same stress that overachievers experience, along with a greater sense of inadequacy when comparing their modest achievements and SAT scores against the gold standard established by Whitman's top twenty percent. Some of the these average kids may deliberately model their academic and social behavior to contrast with the norm established by the school's dominant elite as a way of establishing their own identities, but whether this helps or harms them in the long run is a topic the author didn't get around to addressing.
On the other hand, one issue that Robbins does not shy away from is the way that schools like Walt Whitman give selected students better grades because their parents are community VIP's or on a school board or committee. In that sense, it becomes a private school for the top-performing students and/or children of elites, and a public school for the rest of us.
I found myself sympathizing with the "stealth achiever" who asks to see the paper that an English teacher may have graded unfairly, only to be told that the paper was unavailable in the classroom. This triggered a memory of my own experience with a 12th grade English teacher, an encounter that sadly recalls "Stealth's" anecdote.
I received "B's" all year on the papers I submitted, right up until the month before the school year ended, when our AP English exam scores became available. My score of "5" must have been an unexpected upset for this teacher, because she wrote a large "A+" in red ink on my two remaining papers that she graded after our scores were posted. Fortunately, I will never forget the look on her face when I tossed the papers on her desk after class during the final week of my Whitman career, and asked her to change the grades back to "B's", because I "preferred consistency to hypocrisy". Still, it is sad to see how little appears to have changed at Whitman in nearly twenty years.
Robbins' book will hopefully make the alumni readers of Walt Whitman and other elite high schools begin to consider if this is the same sort of experience they would want for their own children. My own informal inquiries among my peers have yielded the entire range of opinions, from "Of course not, its a public school, and we've given up on the public schools", to "Its hard on the kids, but its a necessary preparation for the real world", to "When it comes to my own kids, I want the experience to involve a little more happiness and contentment".
My own gut feeling is predisposed towards 'more happiness and contentment' - as a nondescript "average" kid, I went on to some solid achievements once high school and college were over -volunteering as a Peace Corps teacher in one of the world's poorest countries for two years, completing the necessary prerequisites to apply for a master's degree as a physician's assistant, and currently researching and writing what I hope will become my first book. What college did I attend? The University of Maryland, which was widely perceived as a dumping ground for average kids at the time I graduated from Walt Whitman.
M. Miller
Walt Whitman High School, Class of 1988
