The May 1 issue offered a potpourri of stories on people and events at Ramsey.

• A report on Earth Day at Ramsey and students joining with kids from other suburban schools for a Walk for Environment.
• A feature on a Ramsey senior learning to pilot an airplane and another senior devoted to horseback riding.
• A look at student musical groups at Ramsey, including two different brass bands playing Beethoven and a bluesy rock band inspired by Credence Clearwater.

The rock band’s drummer was Ramsey sophomore Gordy Knudtson, who would join the Steve Miller Band in the 1980s and later play with other major artists including Ben Sidran, Nachito Herrera and Booker T. and the MGs. He now lives and performs in the Twin Cities.

The issue’s main feature was a two-page essay on the state of high school education in America by Ramsey senior Grant Blank. It was unusual to feature such an analysis, an academic thesis, rather than journalistic reporting. But editors believed Grant’s insights would contribute to a conversation about how Ramsey could better prepare students for life after high school.

“What does high school really teach?” -- the title of Grant’s essay -- was not just about high school. It was about adolescence, the search for one’s identity and students’ social and psychological needs. It was about the relationship between teacher and student, the decline of adult authority, and the role of television in creating the expectation that teachers and learning should exciting and fun. Grant, inspired by American social critic and scholar Edgar Friedenberg, argued that high schools needed to change to teach students more about themselves as persons -- with feelings, potential and limitations.

Grant Blank would go on to earn his PhD in sociology at the University of Chicago. He is now a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford, where he studies the social and cultural impact of the Internet and other new communication media.