Pericles (495 – 429 B.C.), an Athenian citizen during the Peloponnesian War once opined caustically that “We alone regard a man who takes no interest in public affairs, not as a harmless but as a useless character.” The array of clubs available at RM leaves no shortage of interests, considering how their creation is within the reach of any student. This versatile range is not limited to the topics they are dedicated to, but furthermore the variation in time-intensiveness for their members. The cause of dysfunction in clubs seems paradoxical: club membership is a readily available material necessity for the college-bound students but an atmosphere of opportunism coincides with this abounding congregation.
Hypotheses concerning the decline in club participation have been varied, and yet only one seems to come close to adequately explaining ours. The exigence for examining this phenomenon stems from our natural dissatisfaction with the asocial state: a state which still echoes despite our preponderance of meetings. For instance, Athens viewed social participation as a virtue in itself, following the Aristotelian view that humans are naturally a “social animal.”
At the turn of the second millennium, sociologist Robert Putnam published evidence that American civic participation was declining then. According to his book, Bowling Alone, the amount of Americans who reported “serv[ing] as an officer of some club or organization” declined by 35 percent. In his survey, an “organization” was not strictly defined as a formal and widely-recognized organization, but could be anywhere from a local policy movement or a school club.
Most eminently, the question must be asked whether the reduced participation in these social organizations and functions is a natural consequence of them being seen as a largely sterile endeavour. According to Putnam, the reduction in 25 percent of those who reported engaging in activities such as writing to a senator cited a lack of political efficacy; in short, the average layperson felt that there had been an immense chasm between their representatives and themselves.
For high school students, a similar claim could be made about efficacy. Since colleges have adopted a holistic process emphasizing extracurriculars as co-equal to grades, participating in a club from an executive or member position is increasingly a pragmatic decision motivated by the admission process. Clubs at Richard Montgomery have usually taken the form of student presentations, ranging from only 15 minutes of active somewhat undivided listening to the duration of an entire lunch period.
At RM, the function of many clubs seems almost to be perfunctory in fulfilling the unwritten requirements of the college admission process; while their sociological function (leisure, or social gathering) is of reduced importance. Those who participate in clubs for social reasons have seemingly befriended each other in classrooms long before the inception of their clubs. Worse than all, many clubs simply seem to be the efficacious formalization of soldered friend groups: the doling out of largely symbolic leadership positions as an effort to inflate their resume like sinecures.
“Clubs I find have the best structure and have led to the most success are actually ones with a smaller team. I think at some point when there are three, or four different levels of hierarchies in club leadership, more than half the club becomes leadership, and it really becomes a bloodbath,” senior Grace Li said. One can only make a comparison to France’s various revolutionary governments. In 1789, the initial revolutionary period provided a landscape which fostered the intercourse of political views as diverse as the democratic Cordelier club to the constitutional monarchist Girondins, created with ease not unlike ours.
The more egalitarian and yet dysfunctional French Directory government, which replaced in 1795 the intimidation diminishing the liveliness of clubs, selected jaded national heroes as rulers. The issue had not been intense suppression by tyrants, rather members of the parliament simply did not care since progress in their career was guaranteed regardless.
The Directory’s tax code had been said to be so incomprehensible that no two publicans collected it in the same fashion, so too do our clubs carry such mystical positions whose roles are more a matter of speculation than fact: an inefficient aspect which reduces enthusiasm and promotes the same pragmaticism. “What often happens is we have a lot of people all trying to work towards the same goal in the end, yes, but it gets a little chaotic, or sometimes responsibilities aren’t very clear, which can make it more difficult,” Li said.
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