Hell-Mouth High

Horror movies, T-shirts for death metal bands, grainy tabloid photos depicting aliens experimenting on drugged-out abductees—none can compete with medieval Europe’s lurid iconography. Poverty and plagues, persecutions and executions provided medieval artists with inspiration for their depictions of Hell and its torments. In manuscript illuminations, demons drive scrawny naked souls through perdition’s portals, represented as a monstrous Hell-Mouth. Hell is not just a place but a beast that will digest their souls over an agonizing eternity.

Once I showed my brother Will a Hell-Mouth reproduced from a fourteenth-century manuscript. He said, “Hey, that’s high school!” We immortalized Will’s realization in a drawing: “High School, a.k.a. Hell-Mouth,” a toadlike monstrosity devouring jocks, preps, and nerds.

Some people remember high school as their glory days. Although few clouds of glory trail the hours they spent “just hanging around” after school, gossiping and passing beers, I can understand why those luxurious stretches of idle time seem like nirvana when compared with the soulless hours they now lose at work. The rest of us lug our high-school wounds around like a scruffy backpack we can never jam into a locker and forget about. After all, maybe some bruiser stuffed us into that locker after our baggage.

Hell-Mouth High is an equation with variables that add up to a beast that devours young souls right when they’re at their most vigorous, hopeful, and promising.

First come the cliques with their relentless nastiness, their power to mock, batter, and exclude. Remember the famous conformity experiment where animal behaviorists painted a red spot on a bird’s beak—an avian Scarlet Letter—and the bird’s flock-mates viciously pecked him? That’s high school (and middle school, my personal Inferno). Michelle Anthony and Reyna Lindert, authors of Little Girls Can Be Mean: Four Steps to Bully-Proof Girls in the Early Grades (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2010), describe how children discover early on that exclusion is a powerful way to create group cohesion. The king- or queen-pins of a friendship group define the group not so much by shared interests but by who can’t belong, and they enlist the others to police the boundaries. By high school, the “in crowd” has honed cliquishness to a fine (or brutal) art. And until the Columbine school shooting woke the post-adolescent world from the illusion that social cruelty was normative (something for which the sensitive and different just “have to grow a thicker skin” to fend off), willfully ignorant adults turned their backs and allowed the kids to perpetuate a teen society that was part fascist state, part Lord of the Flies, where the adolescent Ubermenschen stamped on the misfits.

The social aspect of secondary-school suffering looms large in our memories, but the academic travail was just as abhorrent. The prevailing rote-learning and over-testing educational practices quashed our curiosity and exuberance for learning. By drawing our focus away from inquiry to memorizing trivia and navigating multiple-choice tests, these outdated approaches drain any subject dry of whatever excitement could’ve enticed young people to study it. In The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and “Tougher Standards” (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), educational reformer Alfie Kohn notes that although some elementary schools have embraced progressive curricular changes that facilitate creative, exploratory learning and critical thinking, few high schools have adopted these approaches. Instead, they are bastions of traditional “drill and kill” methods that keep kids bored, unmotivated, and in trouble. The class schedule fragments learning into discrete subject areas, bounded by a 50-minute period and a noisy bell that terminates further discussion, discouraging intellectually stimulating interdisciplinary learning. And if you think you can escape it all when you get home, there’s homework: more of the same empty busywork requirements that prepare students for the meaningless workplace activities that await them when they graduate.

How did high school become hell? Why did North American mass-consumer culture elect to abandon its youth to bash their way through the pubertal wilderness without meaningful mentorship and a supportive community to embrace them when they emerge as new adults?

Traditional societies practiced rites of passage, celebrating the transition between childhood and adulthood. These rites weren’t fluffy. People understood that the transition was perilous, wrenching, and glorious at the same time, and challenge and pain were prominent features of the rituals. On the other side awaited adult responsibilities, but also acceptance into the community as a full person, imbued with dignity, grace, and (eventually) an elder’s wisdom.

Some societies still practice these rites, although altered to fit new times and new challenges. This society, distanced from natural cycles and processes, has relinquished the powerful idea of adolescence as a sacred time.

High school is hell because adolescence is hell. We don’t remember the power and the strength, the passion and the sheer stubborn goodness of teenagers. Instead, we focus on the indignities. Here’s the usual narrative: until puberty strikes, we go along companionably with our bodies, which jump, climb, run, and pitch fastballs when we tell them to. But then lo, those dependable vehicles go haywire: shooting up, spreading out, sprouting hair, odors, protuberances, and emotions we’re unprepared to handle. Worse, we spend our days thrust in among other new adolescents, equally clueless and mortified about these bestial metamorphoses. Adults are no help. Teens are either too chagrined to ask them about the biochemical body-snatching, or time’s passage has softened their remembrances and they give teens no useful directions through the humiliating, sweaty-palmed, gym-sock-smelling labyrinth.

And the worst of it all is that so often, those who’re safely past adolescence turn around and lash at “kids today” with the perennial older-generation complaints about young people being self-centered, hedonistic, irresponsible, and threatening to the social order to which we’ve submitted. Some of these annoying features are consistent with adolescents’ developmental stage. Others arise because older folks expect the wrong things of teens (instant obedience and undeserved adulation) and grant them so little respect.

The Hell-Mouth images of the Middle Ages had a triumphant side, a theme called the Harrowing of Hell, where Jesus as Warrior holds demons and Hell’s very jaws at bay to release righteous souls who’d waited there for him to free them. The high-schoolers we love need us to help them pry open the Hell-Mouth and become free. To keep the infernal jaws from closing around our young people, we need to become active participants in their education, opening dialogue with teachers and administrators about practices that restore the excitement and meaning to learning. We need to provide prosocial education to kids long before they reach high school, to create what Anthony and Lindert call “caring communities” where pint-sized Social Darwinism is transformed into mutual caring and respect. We need to be active presences in young people’s lives, not condescending and micromanaging with “tough standards” and “zero-tolerance discipline,” but as confidantes, mentors, and encouragers, helping teens to release their true beauty and power—not just to escape hell but, with their fiery idealism and drive, to create their own earthly heavens.