The series “We Create the Culture We Want,” named after the school mantra, highlights different aspects of culture that impact the community. This installment explores cancel culture at the high school.

In every classroom, there are some kids who religiously raise their hands for every question and others who never contribute their thoughts to class discussion. But the silence of the latter group can’t be chalked up to shyness alone: many students intentionally hold back from sharing their opinions in school for fear of being “canceled.”

According to the Oxford Dictionary, cancel culture is a term that emerged in the 2010s to describe “a social environment in which publicly boycotting or withdrawing support for people, organizations, etc. regarded as promoting socially unacceptable beliefs is widespread practice.” In other words, it’s a tendency of people to jump on the bandwagon of socially ostracizing individuals they believe have said something offensive.

Fast forward another decade, The Pew Research Center found that 61% of U.S. adults say they have heard at least a fair amount about the phrase “cancel culture,” which is an increase from 44% in September 2020. From pop culture and social media to business and education, cancel culture can be applied in every sphere.

Cancel culture at the high school

Senior Liam Coddington said cancel culture leaves no room for discussions about contrasting opinions and leads to division in the community.

“Cancel culture has a specific meaning, and it’s not the same as calling someone out. When getting canceled, it’s like everyone hates you, they’re going after you like a pack of wolves,” Coddington said. “There’s no room for discussion in cancel culture. It’s not rational. It has to do with the quality of a person instead of the quality of their ideas.”

Even at a high school this big, Junior Amber Huenneke said word travels very fast, and if someone says something remotely controversial, all their peers will know about it by the next day.

“One of the reasons why some people are scared to share their views on some things is because they’re like, ‘well, if I say it here, who’s to say that someone else isn’t going to go around sharing that, and then all of a sudden people look at me differently,’” Huenneke said.

English teacher Nicholas Rothstein said that cancel culture also plays a role in curricula, referencing how the classic American novel “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain was stripped out of syllabi. He said teachers couldn’t even express the desire to teach the book.

“Huck Finn was soundly canceled. It used to be a core book: every junior was going to read Huck Finn,” Rothstein said. “Then, somewhere in the mid 2010s, it was taken off that list. And then eventually by somewhere in the late 2010s, there was a very strong anti-Huck Finn vocal [group] in our circles that said: ‘Do not teach it. If you teach it, you are perpetuating racism. You will absolutely harm our kids by teaching it.’”

Sharing political views in class

According to history teacher Kate Leslie, cancel culture in the high school is not as aggressive as online crusades against individuals and has more to do with which topics students see as safe versus risky.

“I haven’t had a lot of conversations with students who’ve blatantly told me, ‘I just feel like I was canceled by my classmates because of saying X, Y or Z,’” Leslie said. “But I think I have seen a hesitancy to wade into certain conversations that I sometimes attribute to cancel culture.”

Huenneke said she feels comfortable sharing her opinions in certain school situations but not in others because she worries about how others will perceive her. She said students should be able to share political, religious and economic views at school.

“I just don’t really think people feel comfortable sharing [personal views] all the time, especially when you don’t know who’s sitting next to you, and you don’t know their thoughts, their feelings, what they could say about you, what they could say to you and how their view of you is going to change,” Huenneke said.

Freshman Avishai Lindenboim said he is most comfortable sharing his political views in small group settings.

“I have a Learning Center class, and there’s not a lot of people,” Lindenboim said. “There’s one teacher, and if we’re talking about something, it’s much easier to have a discussion when there’s no peer pressure.”

Because of the pace and subject material associated with the classes, Leslie said political conversations can be harder in mainstream history classes as compared to elective social studies classes.

“Teaching US History, there’s a lot of content to cover,” Leslie said. “There’s just a lot of demands on each day of how much I need to get through, and so I find that I haven’t been able to do the same scaffolding for the current events sharing, which I think is why students end up just avoiding hard topics.”

Lindenboim said certain classes are less welcoming to a variety of opinions than others. He said he is least comfortable sharing his political opinions in English class, because there is little room for differing opinions. Specifically, he said units on Young Adult books from middle school only allowed a singular perspective to be shared.

“The books they make you read, a lot of [them are] one sided. I mean, sure you could [still] have a whole unit about [that book], but then talk about criticisms of that sort of book,” Lindenboim said.

According to history teacher Sydney Hou, moderating political discussions surrounding contentious topics like the Israel-Hamas War or Russia’s war in Ukraine can be especially challenging, particularly when students in the room might be deeply affected.

“When the topic itself is so complicated and not clear cut and requires such high level nuance, and you’re trying to boil it down to teach teenagers about it, when you yourself are not a deep, nuanced expert, I think that becomes really hard,” Hou said. “Then you do worry about this cancel culture, not necessarily like, ‘my face will be slapped on the front page of the newspaper,’ but you do worry about stepping into a territory that could be really offensive for other people.”

Conservative opinions

According to a February 2025 report conducted by the Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth, Brookline had 41,548 registered voters, of which about 54.5% were not officially affiliated with a party, 41.2% were registered Democrats and 3.6% were registered Republicans.

Because Brookline is a majority Democratic town in a liberal state, Lindenboim said that conservative views are censored more than others.

“Most people probably vote Democrat in this town, but there’s still a lot of people who don’t, and a lot of students are like, ‘that doesn’t really represent who I am,’” Lindenboim said. “And when you have one view that’s so popular, that happens to be the Democratic one, other views are shut down, like conservative views.”

Leslie said liberal opinions are often considered the default stance, and many people jump into conversations assuming others share these views.

“I think that especially socially conservative views face more pushback,” Leslie said. “There’s often an assumption amongst students, and sometimes an assumption by faculty, that students are going to hold more left leaning political views, if not even progressive views.”

Rothstein said in his English class, he emphasises to students that they need to think for themselves, and they shouldn’t say things just because they think it aligns with his views.

“In my classroom, conservative kids get to say whatever they want. If you’re feeling inhibited by some of your classmates, that’s the town we live in, and I can understand that. But again, you’re more than welcome to say it, but you have to be able to defend it,” Rothstein said.

Lindenboim identifies as conservative but not necessarily Republican. After the assasination of right-wing political personality Charlie Kirk, Lindenboim said he faced backlash from friends for his views on the topic.

“I don’t think that anyone should just get killed for what they say. But other people in my friend group were saying, ‘he deserved it,’ and other people were saying, ‘he shouldn’t be killed, but I don’t feel sad.’ Some people asked [me], ‘What do you think about this?’ And I was trying to say in my true view, but [I] got really anxious about the effects of what [I] have to say,” Lindenboim said.

Lindenboim said he often feels the need to censor himself around his friends, the majority of whom are left-leaning.

“I frequently hold back because I’m like, ‘If I say this, what is going to be the effect? Are people not going to talk to me anymore? Are people not going to want to be with me? Am I going to be controversial?’” Lindenboim said.

Where is the line?

Huenneke said ideas should only be shut down if they are extremely hateful towards a particular group.

“Unless your views are extremely discriminatory just based on who they are or based on the community they’re in, then I’d say that’s a problem. Don’t share those [ideas] because obviously people are going to have problem with you, because people shouldn’t be hateful towards others for no reason,” Huenneke said.

Rothstein recently assigned a synthesis essay on cancel culture to his junior students. Students read several different articles on the pros and cons of cancel culture, then formulated their own argument.

“My students are writing about cancel culture, and they’re like, ‘it’s an important practice. If somebody is online, spouting off and saying terrible things, the rest of the online community should work to capture that and maybe silence them,’” Rothstein said. “Well, that’s a dangerous slope.”

While moderating classroom political discussions, Hou said she has to determine the line between discourse and disrespect. She often leans on colleagues in the department to get opinions on that line.

“Students might have feelings and reactions, but that’s not necessarily always what the teacher should respond to,” Hou said. “Students can feel upset about conversations that happen in a class, but it’s hard when you’re in it and you care for your students to have an objective lens of, ‘was it really out of bounds, or are people just feeling hurt feelings?’”

Lindenboim said speech crosses a line when it is violent in nature, and reasonable backlash to such comments is necessary.

“When you’re supporting killing people, when you’re supporting hurting people, then I don’t think about [backlash] as a culture,” Lindenboim said. “I think of it more as a specific action, like, ‘we need to take responsibility, because this person should not be doing this stuff,’ but not as a culture.”

However, Coddington said a negative and unintended effect of cancel culture towards instances of hate or cruelty is that it entrenches people more firmly in their hateful beliefs.

“If it’s something you’ve been taught for a long time, then you’re going to keep having those opinions, and if you get canceled for it, it’s just going to reinforce your own point,” Coddington said. “It makes you angry at the people who are canceling you.”

Addressing the problem

As a former teacher of the Social Justice class, Leslie said she was able to introduce difficult conversations to her students. She said this goal was easier to approach in part because conversation across differences was a tenant of the class and Social Justice students are united by deep care for doing right in the world.

“I had the great fortune of having the time and space because it was an elective class to really purposefully pick controversial topics and then do a lot of scaffolding and a lot of education before we weeded into something tough to help students be able to disagree and not have it blow up into a huge fight,” Leslie said.

Codington said he founded the Civil Discourse Club last year, which meets every X-block in room 277, and discusses controversial issues. While new members of the Civil Discourse Club often start off reasonably reserved, Coddington said over time, people became open and more comfortable speaking their opinions.

“All discussions start measured, especially when they’re talking with people in the new settings. My close friends usually don’t mind saying anything, because they know I’m not gonna cancel them, but around people they don’t know, they’re cautious about what they say,” Coddington said. “There’s a difference between having manners and feeling like you can’t express your opinions.”

For political class discussions, Hou said she takes a variety of measures to ensure people feel able to speak and be heard.

“My job is to make sure protocols are in place so that not one person’s dominating the conversation,” Hou said. “I have a speaking order on the list on the board written clearly so that everyone gets a chance to speak, and that I do a processing with them after the fact, and then allowing space for students to come talk to me individually too, if they had some feelings that came up in the conversation.”

According to Lindenboim, cancel culture encourages people to jump on a bandwagon of censoring and outrage.

“I don’t think we should call it a culture. I don’t think that it should be like a community of people who all they do, or most of what they do is just hating people,” Lindenboim said. “I think that’s really not going to be good for your health, for your happiness, because what do you get out of that?”

Leslie said dismantling cancel culture has to start on the interpersonal level.

“I think it takes a very small scale people voluntarily being willing to sit down, get to know each other and share difference of opinion, and then slowly scaling it up,” Leslie said. “But I don’t think it happens in a big way all at once. It has to happen bit by bit by bit to start to rebuild the trust.”