Freshman Friday is still here. That is a fact that should give the Paly administration pause.
How is it that Freshman Friday has remained for so long when all of the trademark Freshman Friday activities – egging, paddling, throwing water-balloons, and, this year, shooting at freshmen with paint-ball guns – are unambiguously classified as battery, or worse, in the California Penal Code? The whole situation becomes much more surprising when one considers that Paly students, for, at the very least, several years, have seen Freshman Friday as an accepted tradition.
Obviously, the administration does not see it the same way. However, rather than teaching Paly students that Freshman Friday is not, and never has been, an accepted tradition, administrators expect them to already know that fact and to change their behavior based on that knowledge. But if students already knew that Freshman Friday was unacceptable and understood that, in knowing that it was, they were obligated to change their behavior, then they would already have changed, right?
In supposing upperclassmen to understand both the unacceptability of Freshman Friday and the idea that they ought to change as a result, administrators essentially state that real upperclassmen behave differently than they actually do, a contradiction that simply cannot be made a truth without some sort of educational intervention.
Administrators often say that they treat Paly students as young adults and expect conduct appropriate for that treatment. This policy is a flattering incarnation of the administration’s fundamentally flawed notion that Paly students should be what they are not. The administration hopes to make Paly students into adults by pretending that they are already. Administrators need only look at Paly students now and Paly students a few years ago in order to prove that their well-intentioned, but misguided approach is not working.
If there is to be real change in how Paly students act, administrators need to start treating students not as adults who already know how they ought to act, not as children who need to be told how to act, but as students who do not yet know what to do in every situation they face, but who are intelligent, fundamentally kind, and can learn how to conduct themselves properly if they are actually taught; expecting students to learn from minimally explained punishment will not do the trick.
This change in the administration’s outlook would aid immensely in the future prevention of Freshman Friday and other similar events. A large part of the reason that Freshman Friday still exists is that the Paly administration, due to its ideas about how students should behave, keeps expecting each new batch of upperclassmen to conduct itself in a completely different way from all preceding batches of upperclassmen. This expectation makes even less sense than it would otherwise when one takes into account the fact that new upperclassmen see their predecessors in action and come to assume that they are supposed to follow that example, replicating or worsening undesirable behavior that the administration presupposes to have disappeared.
Though administrators are trying to do what is right and, to their credit, have ideas for preventing such appalling transgressions as took place this past Freshman Friday, change will only occur to a certain degree so long as the administration continues to pretend that Paly students are what they are not.
When the administration decides to change the way it sees Paly students, and starts to teach them, there will be incredible potential for positive change not only in major debacles such as Freshman Friday, but in the way students treat each other on a day-to-day basis.