Macur
quotes psychologist Susan Lipkins who argues that “hazing is a sports tradition
that has endured for generations … The adults in the room [coaches and
administrators] leave the room and let the mayhem ensue.”
Lipkins
argues that coaches who leave athletes unattended in the locker room are
basically leaving “the inmates in charge
of the asylum” and Macur makes the case that those adults are “only asking for
trouble when they leave teenage boys unsupervised because those boys are often
testosterone-fueled and power-hungry, a perfect combination for hazing to
occur.”
So
adolescent (and athletic) boys are basically the equivalent of inmates in an
asylum? Without adult supervision, they are inevitably going to engage in
violent and brutal behavior?
Surely,
adolescents deserve the chance to unpack the assumptions here.
First off, note that Golding’s Lord of the Flies makes a remarkably
similar argument. And who can ignore the incredible and shocking similarity
between the specific brutality Golding imagines and the hazing incidents Macur
describes? Alas.
But
is Golding’s novel an endorsement of Macur’s and Lipkins’s argument? Is the
criminal and cruel masculine behavior on Golding’s island the inevitable result
of lack of adult supervision of teenage boys?
All the boys, after all, do not
behave this way, and many clearly do their best to resist.
And
what is the role of adults and particularly male adults in shaping the behavior
in both these worlds? After all, Macur isn’t talking about a lack of
supervision by female coaches (of course the football coaches are always male).
Golding pointedly offers us a tantalizing hint at the male modeling children encounter
in the world of his novel: the figure of the naval officer, complete with his
revolver, who comes to rescue the children at the end of the novel and
intriguingly cites R.M. Ballantyne’s imperialist The Coral Island as the reassuring model for the boys’ behavior on
the island.
Hmm…
Surely
all young adults deserve the opportunity to think about the source of the bad
behavior of some of their peers. Suggesting that a lack of adult supervision is
the source of (not to say the necessary corrective to) the problem of violent
hazing among male athletes offers an image of young men as mindless,
animalistic brutes. If I were a young person, I think I would want an
opportunity to talk about that.
And talking about that assumption and about the details of Macur’s challenging and
horrifying article (and the nasty realities it describes) offers our students
an intriguing and compelling connection with Lord of the Flies that surely will make language arts class both
more compelling and perhaps more important.
