I have been a lifelong fan of the Beach Boys, but I’ve never been able to understand their 1963 hit single, “Be True To Your School.” That probably says more about me than the Beach Boys, but I think it has a lot to do with my high school, which has been in the news quite a bit lately as I write this column.
“Be True To Your School” is a frothy ditty, of a piece with the band’s cars, girls and surf early heyday. The song uses a bit of the melody of “On Wisconsin!” the fight song of the University of Wisconsin, which was adopted by Hawthorne High, the Los Angeles County school that Brian Wilson and his brother attended. Most schools have fight songs; my alma mater had one, which was taught to us in our first week at the school – a chant composed mostly of nonsense syllables, which I can still recall with no small irritation today.
There was something reactionary about “Be True To Your School,” even for its time. Instead of featuring the lovelorn loser or rebel as its protagonist, Wilson and Mike Love of the Beach Boys wrote the song from the perspective of the Big Man on Campus – a high school jock with a letterman jacket and a girlfriend on the cheerleading squad.
It’s a juggernaut of top 40 school spirit, with the Honeys, the group’s backup singers, doing cheers between verses and even a break for a bit of “rah rah sis boom bah.” As much as I love the music that Wilson made with the Beach Boys during this period – “Be True To Your School” was released with “In My Room” on its b-side, a swooning masterpiece of introspective teen angst that I imagine nearly any teenager, former or current, could understand – this song has always been confounding to me. This anthem of school pride might as well be a detailed lyrical description about how to restore a septic system, sung in a Lapp dialect, so utterly does it fail to resonate.
I don’t think you had to go to Toronto’s St. Michael’s College School to develop an attitude this indifferent or even hostile to your high school alma mater, but it definitely helped, and current events seem to be vindicating me.
Late last fall news broke that there had been some sort of incident at the school, which had led to the suspension, then expulsion, of several students. Criminal charges were laid, and the school’s principal and president both resigned after a deluge of bad press, and the revelation that the school had delayed reporting the assault to the police.
The incident was truly disturbing – an obvious sexual assault with many witnesses that one of the bystanders had captured on video and uploaded to the internet. It took a day or two for the worst details to be revealed by the media, but my daughter already knew about them before then, as it was widely shared on social media by students in the city’s Catholic school system.
The obvious implication was that the video made it impossible for the school to cover up the incident as it had previous ones, which began making their way into the news cycle in the weeks that followed. Initially the assault, which happened in a team locker room, was initially described as a hazing ritual gone wrong, but that fell apart when it was revealed that the victim wasn’t on any of the school’s sports teams. Attempting damage control, the school canceled football and basketball programs for the following year (but not St. Mike’s athletic gemstone – its Junior A hockey program), and a meeting of school alumni turned acrimonious very quickly.
Talking with my own school friends as the news broke, nobody expressed surprise. When it was obvious that this all happened under the auspices of the school’s sports programs, most of them said that they’d heard stories about this sort of thing for years, and that it was probably only a matter of time before it reached this point.
I don’t want to suggest that anything that happened to me at the school was close to the horror of the alleged assault that led to this crisis. It would probably come as no surprise that the atmosphere in an all-boys’ school in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s was full of casual abuse and endemic bullying. It’s where this discussion tempts in trendy and pointless phrases like “toxic masculinity.” (Though I don’t know anyone who went to an all-girls’ school who couldn’t share stories of not-dissimilar “toxic femininity”; few of us operate at our moral or emotional best as teenagers.)
Discussing the incidents at St. Mike’s before Christmas with a table of fellow old boys –lifelong friends made during my time at the school, and the best legacy of my five years there, along with a firm foundation in touch typing – the worst memories were reserved for the bullying handed down from teachers.
It’s hard to forget having your head beaten against a bulletin board by a teacher who wanted to get the attention of a class of boys who were talking at the start of a period. It’s the sort of thing that puts a target on a kid – if you’re fair game for teachers, you’re fair game for almost anyone else.
Complaining did nothing; I was told, after a protest following one particularly humiliating bit of bullying, to just suck it up. That this was the disappointing outcome after I’d escalated my complaint to the principal and vice principal taught me a valuable lesson about mistrust of authority and arbitrary power; it probably wasn’t a lesson the school wanted to teach, but it’s one of the few worthwhile principles I got from five years at St. Mike’s.
I feel bad for the students at the school today, only a tiny fraction of whom can be implicated in the incidents now coming to light. I remember that, once you knew that athletes operated with near impunity in the eyes of the administration, you learned to structure your schedule and social life as far removed from the school’s jocks as possible.
It wasn’t particularly difficult; there were plenty of extracurricular activities. (My refuge was theatre, and the school stage crew.) The St. Mike’s I attended was far poorer than the school today, which has grown thanks to massive investment and after going wholly private and increasing tuition far beyond what my family could have afforded.
One of the early villains in the media’s coverage of the school scandal was the parents – or more specifically a small group of mothers who were captured on video by a reporter just a few days after the story broke. They were confrontational, blaming the media for making the assault such a controversy, insisting that things were being handled, that things were being blown out of proportion.
They’d made themselves targets, to be sure, but I felt sorry for them. They were paying massive tuition fees – many times what we paid over 30 years ago – so it was inevitable that they’d feel defensive about the investment they’d made in the St. Mike’s brand, and that their sons were being judged unfairly for the actions of a few. But then it’s worth remembering that the parents of the victim of the assault that broke the story had paid many thousands of dollars for that dubious privilege.
I don’t, however, have any sympathy for the administration, which has clearly allowed problems that were fully present when I attended the school to metastasize. St. Mike’s was founded over 160 ago by the Basilian Fathers, but they were a waning force when I was at the school, and apparently a vestigial one today – one of a long list of dissipating religious orders that aren’t being renewed or replaced quickly enough.
The Basilians were the authors of the school’s motto – Doce me Bonitatem et Disciplinam et Scientiam– “Teach me Goodness, Discipline and Knowledge.” It was printed on the crests of our blazers but, even then, it was hard to regard the phrase with anything but mild cynicism.
There was knowledge, to be sure – to be had if you were able to summon up the requisite discipline – but it was fairly spotty in supply. A perceived need for natural resource engineers meant that our geography and science courses were rigorous and relatively well-funded – to this day I can read the strata in a layer of exposed rock, and recognize a moraine or a glacial till. Theological education, however, was about as flaccid as you’d expect in the languorous decades after Vatican II.
As for goodness, well, that was entirely up to you. And in a school where you had to fight a gauntlet to establish your place on the pecking order for at least the first two years of classes – a social and physical harrowing that the administration seemed to encourage by neglect – goodness was a concept difficult to define, never mind put into action.
Since no crisis will ever be allowed to be politically wasted, it’s worth watching how the incidents at St. Mike’s will be used, while the very real damage created by feral students and complacent administrators plays out in the courts. It might have been an issue to turn into a bludgeon against the separate school system in Ontario, but St. Mike’s is a fully private institution, and has been for years.
It might help fuel an attack on single-sex or private education, but I don’t imagine that the media, politicians or their backers will have much enthusiasm for a campaign against institutions that many of their own children attend, in spite of what powerful teachers’ unions might demand. It’s already fed into the animus against Catholics and Catholic institutions that’s at least as old as a city and a province founded amidst sectarian principles, but that’s an old battle, and one that exists in a state of perpetual attrition.
I’m of a far more radical mind: I think it should be forcing us to question the institution of school itself, which evolved long ago into a form of human warehousing, roughly organized along the lines of religion and class, unevenly and inefficiently funded, and increasingly designed mostly to enforce a system of credentialism that fossilizes itself in college and university.
The best advice I’ve ever had for kids suffering through high school is to assure them that those four years go by very quickly, and that as long as the mistakes they make there aren’t repeated afterwards, the worst memories of the place can be forgotten, or at least recalled without wincing.
I would hope that young men and women can be taught goodness, discipline and knowledge, but my own experience has taught me that these virtues come from within, and not from a distracted faculty or many hundreds of people grouped together in a building by the arbitrary sorting of demography, class, and geography. If you can emerge years later with a few good friends and the ability to differentiate shale from limestone, you’re one of the lucky ones.
