If a primary purpose of education is to sharpen our sense of the world, then it should follow that students are expected to go out into the communities that surround them to practice empathy toward those with different lives.
It is for these reasons that the “Lab Bubble” should trouble us more than it does. For years, students have shrugged off our cultural insulation almost as a self-deprecating joke. We are content to watch the shadows on the wall and trust that someone else, outside our cave, will provide the answers.
Across the country — from Elyria, Ohio; Jackson, Mississippi; Long Beach, California, even to Washington, D.C. — high school students are walking out of class to protest immigration enforcement, gun violence and wars abroad. Chicago students have done the same in Little Village and River North, organizing walkouts to protest U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and to demand greater protection for immigrant communities.
Walkouts, what the Museum of Protest describes as “visible demonstrations of dissatisfaction,” are disruptive by design. They are organized around the belief that issues outside our classrooms deserve more attention than they are receiving. They are, at that moment, more important than what is happening in the classroom.
At U-High, that disruption is conspicuously absent.
This is not because students are apathetic. Social media posts circulate, anti-ICE posters hang from lockers, and a sprinkle of students attend citywide protests. However, the difference between expressing an opinion and participating in a movement often lies in whether there is any meaningful risk or consequence attached. At U-High, the structure of our school environment tends to minimize that risk through excessive supervision of student expression — you may think of last year’s termination of Senior Assassin or prescheduling senior skip day — an institutional version of helicopter parenting.
Robert Maynard Hutchins, the president and chancellor of the University of Chicago from 1929-1945, believed universities have a single purpose: “They must be centers of criticism.” U-High is part of a university that prides itself on free expression, and Lab students are the youngest members of this academic community. If Mr. Hutchins’ principle is to mean anything for students, it requires friction.
Opportunities are everywhere. On May 1, the organizers of the No Kings movement are calling for a nationwide general strike, asking people to step away from work, school and shopping. It’s free to attend, free to support and open to anyone willing to take part — and risk the consequence.
If we are to take student expression seriously, then we should not try to manage it into harmlessness. Meaningful impact requires a willingness to engage with a movement, to actually stand for something beyond yourself.
Otherwise, the Lab bubble is not just something we joke about but something we quietly allow to be maintained and never burst.
