Rethinking the Day of Silence

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/Cameron Whitman

Back in 2006, 7th and 8th graders at Green Acres, the K-8 independent school where I taught in suburban Maryland, participated in the Day of Silence.

The Day of Silence is a national event: Students across the country take a one-day pledge of silence to show that they want to make schools safe for all students, regardless of their sexual orientation and gender identity/expression. The idea is for students to better understand, and to express solidarity with, people who feel they must remain silent about who they are.

In theory, the event is a good one—after all, who doesn't want students to develop empathy and understanding? But in practice, we found that the Day of Silence presented two fundamental challenges:

1.  Middle schoolers are not very good at being silent.
2.  Students wanted to know how their silence actually helped people who felt they weren't free to be themselves.

Several students gave their best effort to remain silent for the day, but for the majority, an hour was the maximum. If the purpose of the day is to teach students how hard it is to be unable to fully express themselves, it did not take students more than an hour to figure that out. Telling middle-schoolers they are not allowed to speak is akin to telling teachers they can't teach—it just goes against their essence.

In that first year, we figured that perhaps we just didn't enforce the no-talking rule well enough, so we tried it again, but year two yielded the same results. When it came to LGBT topics, the students did not want to be silent—they wanted to talk.

The second challenge is the one that ultimately led our school to reinvent the Day of Silence as the Day of Action. At the end of our second Day of Silence, the director of diversity, the school counselor and I debriefed the event with students. We wanted to know what, if anything, students gleaned from participating in the event and how we could make it better. We asked: How has the Day of Silence impacted your thinking about the freedom to be yourself? What changes would you recommend to the Day of Silence organizers?

As we listened to students, it became clear that nobody wanted to name names, but that students were concerned about one of their classmates:

“I think the Day of Silence is a good start, but I want to know how to help. What if there was a student who was out at our school, but couldn't come out at home? We might be the only safe place for that person.”

“We need to do something besides be silent all day. The Day of Silence should really be a Day of Action where we have different workshops and learn how to be allies.”

“Yeah! How does my silence help someone who doesn't feel safe?”

There was a collective pause in the room. Among the student body, there was at least one student for whom the Day of Silence was every day and everyone knew it. The student felt safe at school, but not at home. For this student's peers, understanding what it was like to be silent wasn't the issue; figuring out what to do about it was. How could we, as a community, support this student? Surely, there were more students like this one. What could we do to ensure that our school was as safe and informed as it could be?

“What would be helpful?” I asked.

“First of all, let us talk! And then, rather than just hearing from each other and our teachers, let's invite different speakers who we could talk to. Teenagers would be good. I want to know how to be an ally or what it's like to be gay from a teen's perspective,” pleaded a student.