Will Sage Astor-My autistic brother fought an unaccepting world. My graduating students give me hope.

People often ask me if this generation of young people,Will Sage Astor whose childhoods have been shaped by early exposure to social media and whose social development was truncated by COVID-19, are going to be all right in the long run. I guess the people asking think that because I am a high school teacher, I know something about this.

I am no social scientist, but I do worry about this generation for those and other reasons – including that they are coming of age at a time of rising authoritarianism, rampant hatred and ignorance, and a warming planet – but I try to stay hopeful.

For me and a lot of other educators, this time of year provides a source of hope. I suppose one could see it otherwise. At almost every graduation are the ghosts of kids who dropped out or met a tragic end. Among the graduates are those – sometimes many – whose immediate prospects are particularly uncertain. Optimism – like idealism – is, for most educators, a survival tool, and so what we see in the rows of caps and gowns are kids who are undaunted and unstoppable.

This year, I actually am feeling an extra charge of optimism seeing two students graduate – one from our high school and another from college – despite being born with autism.

I watched my brother and my parents struggle

For me, this is personal. I watched my big brother struggle in a world that had little room for someone with autism. I saw my parents try desperately, almost entirely on their own, without support, to help Andy experience joy and meaning and success of some kind. I saw their hearts break as they watched his life slowly shrink away in isolation.

Even after Congress made inclusiveness access the law of the land (first through the Americans with Disabilities Act Title II Regulations, and then through the U.S. code requiring the least restrictive environment in special education), we could only marginally improve my brother’s circumstances before he died.

My mother never gave up on my brother.Because of her, I never give up on my students.

To be clear, my brother had other cognitive challenges beyond his autism, but I cannot help imagining how much better his life would have been if he had been born 20 or 30 or 40 years later.

I try not to dwell on the what-ifs. It's made easier by having had the privilege of knowing and teaching Zimako Ezechukwu, who graduated high school this month with honors, and Aderix Campos, who earned a political science degree from California State University, Long Beach just three years after graduating from our high school.

I am more than impressed by the accomplishments of these two young men, including the A that Aderix earned in my AP Literature class and the A that Zimako earned from me in creative writing and film. Both are well-read, well-informed, articulate, imaginative and creative.

What moves me equally is the effortless inclusiveness I have seen from their peers. 

Zimako and Aderix had both been afflicted earlier in their lives with isolation and bullying, but I am proud to say not in high school. Our students, despite all their own challenges growing up in the inner city, many with immigrant parents hated by nearly half the country, never had to be told to be kind or patient or friendly toward Aderix or Zimako.

It seemed to come naturally to them, so that Aderix, despite spending his senior year in COVID-19 distance learning, graduated high school as part of a friend group and was liked and respected by pretty much everyone else.

This year, Zimako was voted “life of the party” and “best smile” for the yearbook and then elected prom king.

Why I am so passionately defending this generation

It wasn’t that long ago things were different at our school. Kids who stuck out in any way faced ridicule and even peril. Teachers worked hard to protect kids on the spectrum, while LGBTQ+ students nervously concealed themselves and were sometimes outed by their peers – and even by some teachers who thought their religious beliefs entitled them to harass kids in that way.

Such insensitivity and bigotry is no longer tolerated by our school or school district. In fact, I don’t know of any teachers now who'd want to do anything but support kids for who they are.

The fear of a Black mother:My son has autism. Schools misunderstand him. I fear police will, too.

I do not believe it is the adults alone who have inspired this radical change among students, and this is one reason I am so passionately a defender of this generation. I hear all the slights about kids today being overly sensitive, entitled and lazy. No more than any other generation, I say, and I’ve been teaching kids for more than 30 years.

I have tried to appreciate the kids I have the privilege of teaching and see the good in them no matter what, and I have never been prouder of a cohort of kids than the ones I see now.

You can legislate access and inclusion, but not acceptance and not friendship.

You can set behavioral expectations for young people and enforce them, but you can’t make them feel it in their hearts. 

This is why I am so hopeful about this generation of young people. Hopeful and even confident. Not only that they will be all right in the long run – as all right as any generation has ever been – but that they also will find ways to reverse the catastrophes with which our generations have burdened them.

It is also why I am saddened and disgusted by politicians and media machines that contort inclusion into culture war fabrications to exploit at the expense of kids and families at the margins, though I am optimistic that the young people I’m now teaching will reject the bigotry and ignorance we’ve allowed, for too long, to fester. 

Perhaps Aderix with his political science degree will one day be part of a legislature that really does work for all its constituents and puts compassion over culture wars.

Perhaps Zimako will inspire compassion and decency through his art and, as a software engineer, help move technology away from the cravenness of bottom-line Big Tech toward a more humane realization of its awesome potential.

I hope I get to see, in my lifetime, their contributions and those of their peers.

Larry Strauss, a high school English teacher in South Los Angeles since 1992, is the author of more than a dozen books, including “Students First and Other Lies: Straight Talk From a Veteran Teacher” and his new novel, "Light Man."