Rock n Roll High School

Mike Musilli

School. One of the great cultural American institutions. A place we’re all forced to go to, and a place that always leaves its mark. After all, every one of us has indelible experiences with teachers and school, and some of us even refer to our educational experience as turning point moments in our lives. Sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse, teaching and schooling deeply affects us all.

Similarly, we often point to our musical experiences as benchmark moments in our lives. For many of us in the punk underground, our musical consciousness is most literally what gives us our identities and our ideological perspectives. But what happens when these two worlds, of music and of education, converge?

As the punk underground continues to grow and expand, its followers grow and expand, and get older. Life sure doesn’t wait and so we find ourselves drifting into different professional spheres. Teaching has, for reasons we’ll get to, become one of those spheres that is increasingly populated by people of the punk hardcore world.

There is a correlation to be made clear between teaching and punk. Both worlds seek to help others, at least in a foundational sense. I mean, punk has never been solely about sound or musicianship in much the same way that teaching has never been solely about lessons in trigonometry or Shakespeare. There exists that something more to both.

Much of By the Grace of God frontman Rob Pennington’s educational pedagogy is developed from his experiences in punk subculture. “My world view as it relates to equity and justice has been heavily influenced by the music and peers introduced to me within the punk community. I can trace my personal ideology back to some of my first exposures to music. This ideology reflects advocacy and that is how I proceed in my educational endeavors,” says Pennington when asked about how music developed his ability as an educator. For Rob, advocacy bridges the gap between punk and education. His is an ethos of social equity and justice, particularly focused in advocating for students with disabilities. Sift through the professional terminology, and we find a guy whose experiences in punk somehow translate to his award-winning efforts (he’s won multiple educational awards in Kentucky) to improve the educational experiences for students with disabilities.

Current Free and former Have Heart singer Pat Flynn associates much of his calling to teaching from his experiences on the road. What he saw traveling the world with Have Heart moved him. Like many of us who’ve hopped in the van and traveled the pilgrimages of punk touring, Pat found a world that he wanted to change. “What I saw in the years that Have Heart was travelling, whether it was in Johannesburg, Santiago, Beijing, Budapest or Mississippi – was a world that did NOT confirm the stereotypes that my education or surrounding popular culture taught me. This struck a chord within me,” Flynn reflects. Pat found himself in places whose young people needed access to education and, as much as punk set him on that traveler’s path, he remembered teachers early in his life who moved him to creativity. Flynn acknowledges, “I owed too much to Sister Louise, Mr. Hall, Mr. Frates, my parents and the good people I met in the world to not give my life to a profession of helping young people discover new ways of how to think about themselves and the world around them.” It was Pat’s elementary teachers, his parents, and the hardcore kids supporting Have Heart that drew him to give back to his world. And ironically, it seems he wanted to give back in part because he found himself confronted with a world that didn’t match his own educational experience.

And yet for others, it is simply the punk community itself that translates to the classroom. Duncan McDougal, a mainstay in Long Island hardcore, proposes, “The music community taught me that people can make things happen on their own without the help of big companies or outside entities waving some magic wand to get results. I’ve seen my friends’ bands tour the world and put out records because they worked hard and made it happen. I try to impart this to my students as best I can.” The DIY ethic of the punk community in full show, right? Interestingly, Colossal’s Jason Flaks offers similar sentiments. “There is a sense of community that has to be present in any musical group for it to succeed. There was no better place to learn and respect ‘community’ than the local music scene we had when I was growing up. Bands helped each other and everyone really wanted everyone else to succeed. I don’t see that as much in our society right now so it’s something I try to be intentional about teaching my students,” says Flaks. Flaks himself grew up in Elgin, Illinois, nearly a thousand miles away from McDougal on Long Island. Yet, both draw on such a strong sense of community in fostering positive learning environments in their classrooms.

Now educational admiration aside, community is the truest of testaments to the power of punk subculture. For the lot of us, punk is a safe-haven, a shelter away from a cold world. That sense of displacement binds our community so very strongly. Hard work. Independent motivation. Collaboration. Problem-solving. Any seasoned punk knows that these are the attributes of a strong and inclusive musical scene. Coincidentally, a veteran teacher is likely to assert that those are the very same attributes of a strong and inclusive classroom.

The interesting balance here is that so many of us can point to school as a major contributor to our alienation. We hated school, the feeling of being lost, the uber-masculine jocks, the pretentious popular kids, the vapid pop music and culture that permeated the hallways of our high schools. Pennington’s story certainly parallels the archetypal experience for a young punk. In middle school, he “was bullied and then quickly shaped into an outsider.” Only to find high school a bit easier to work through as “social groups were more clearly delineated, [he] easily marched with the punk kids and found a collective anthem in the lyrics of the bands of that time.” Being outsiders is who we are. While not necessarily a badge of honor, it’s certainly a badge nonetheless. And being an outsider is one of the polarizing and defining characteristics of the punk experience. McDougal faced similar issues in school. He too remembers, “It wasn’t until middle school that I started to hate school all together. I’m not sure if it was a result of the changing hormones, the rebellious music I started listening to, or the unapproachable teachers that I had…but this is where my attention started to drift away from getting good grades and I stopped caring about sports.”

Flynn also found himself disillusioned as an adolescent, recalling, “Regrettably I believe I experienced some non-examples of teaching history throughout high school. I turned elsewhere to find purpose and meaning and luckily my love for aggressive music had an actual community…I felt pretty welcome in [the New Bedford hardcore] scene and it inspired some great individuality within me, which is what I needed because the high school I was in was so fast paced that I felt like I was much more of a number than a person.” The paradox in Flynn’s experience is compelling. He at once pays homage to his elementary teachers for their guidance and recognizes his own marginalization in later grades. We can probably all relate too. School is difficult terrain to navigate. It’s utterly complex. Social mores, academic rigors, and personal vulnerability all serve to make school a minefield for young people.

Pennington, Flynn, and McDougal certainly faced treacherous, disenchanting, and maybe even redemptive experiences in school. Experiences that led them away from the academic setting and very much into the punk underground.

So then why are some of us finding our way back to the very locales that cultivated our discontent? How is it that people like Pat and Duncan and Rob, all deeply attached to their local punk scenes, find their way back to the very institutions that ostracized them and sparked their inclination towards anti-establishment culture?

I go back to that something more. Punk and hardcore, and all of their derivations, are built on the premise that music isn’t the only defining characteristic of the subculture. That there are ideas and emotions and connections swirling around us that make this community something more. We want to help. We want to give. And as young people, many of us felt like we didn’t get the help we wanted or needed. So maybe some of us find our way into teaching because we don’t want that happening to others.

For Colossal’s Jason Flaks, it is indeed about just that. He affirms, “If we as a society have not created a stable environment for a child, we shouldn’t be surprised when they struggle in school. We have to make sure every kid is provided the basics of a happy life: love, food, stability, and a feeling of safety.” Just take a moment and think about the people in your local scene, the people you spend your weekend nights with, the friends you sing along with, the bands you love that most of the world couldn’t care less about. How many of those people, those friends, and those bands struggle with the very issues Flaks and others want to combat?

Now, we do have Bad Religion’s Greg Graffin and Descendents’s Milo Aukerman paving the way as usual. They’re punk’s most celebrated academics, and rightfully so. Both are professors and work in prestigious fields of science. But that’s not quite what we see in these stories. Where Graffin and Aukerman seem to be drawn to academics for intellectual pursuit and refined educational endeavors, Rob and Pat and Duncan and Jason see their journey to the classroom in a much more fundamental sense. Rob, Pat, Duncan, Jason and growing numbers of people raised in the punk subculture find their way to teaching because they want to make good on the opportunities that our music offered them. They found a scene that challenged them to think for themselves, to question the world around them, to take risks, to be comfortable in their own skin. As Flynn himself admits, “I do think that the hardcore scene, when it is at its best state promotes individuality and introspection.” Pennington too reflects, “The [punk hardcore] community has fostered in me a strong sense of philosophic doubt…It taught me respect and love.” How can they, and we, not want to pass all of that on? And not just to the one or two punk kids in our schools, but to all of the kids we’re lucky enough to teach?

Maybe Duncan sums it up best for us all. For him “teaching [is] a way to stay close to what it means to be human.” I mean, isn’t that what punk does for us too? Isn’t punk how so many of us found our most ‘human’ selves? And isn’t it also punk that keeps so many of us young and inquisitive and vibrant?

The world may scratch and burn away at our youthful identities, and it may cast down the cold reality of bills and paychecks and labor. But the punk and hardcore underground forever lets us be the best versions of ourselves without apology or explanation. It keeps us that much closer to our truest selves. And if that’s truly what our subculture does for us, how can some of us not find our ways into careers that promote those very ideas? We love to wave our flags of anti-establishment individuality and of judgement-free inclusivity. And now some of us are bringing those flags to more mainstream institutions, try as we might to etch out a paltry scratch of change on the surface of the status quo. And what better institution to effect that change than school? I trust that none of us are so romantically naïve to think that we’ll leave indelible marks on every student who graces our classrooms. But we do believe in the possibility of change, a possibility first revealed to us by way of punk music. So we’ll teach, and quietly embedded in our daily lessons on Frederick Douglass or The Great Gatsby or Sir Isaac Newton will be the lessons that brought us back to the classroom in the first place, lessons first learned in the sweaty venues and raffish misadventures of our punk youth.

Duncan MacDougal sang in Thieves & Assassins and played bass in Capital. He works in a public high school in Long Island, NY.

Jason Flaks plays guitar and trumpet in Colossal. He works in a public middle school in Elgin, Illinois. He also conducts the Elgin Youth Symphony Orchestra.

Pat Flynn sang in Have Heart and sings in Free. He works in a public high school in Massachusetts.

Rob Pennington sang/sings in Endpoint, By the Grace of God, Black Cross, and Black God. He works in the department of special education at a publicly-funded research university in Kentucky.

Mike Musilli works in a public high school in Long Island, NY.