British TikToker Mand included our “weird obsession with high school” among the things that irk her about Americans. As someone who frequently writes about high school in my blog posts and books, I got this one. The reason goes a lot deeper than what’s portrayed in the media about mean girl cheerleaders and brutish jocks who stuff nerds in trashcans. High school is the last real community many of us have.
In most of the United States, the schools you go to are determined by where you live. (Only the wealthiest send their kids to boarding schools.) The kids you play with in the neighborhood are the same ones who go to elementary (primary) school with you. From there, you go to secondary school that typically starts in middle/intermediate/junior high school. By the time you get to high school, you’ve known a number of your classmates for a decade, and the most formative one at that. At that age, even classmates you’ve known for a few years feel like people you’ve known all your life.
We all go through the same experiences. The regimented school day from 8:00 am to 3:00 pm that starts with the Pledge of Allegiance (another strange American cultural phenomenon), followed by morning announcements and a bell schedule. We go to the same classes, attend the same assemblies, and struggle through the same homework and tests. We may join clubs, activities, or sports where we build camaraderie with other students that get strengthened when we play teams from other schools. We experience first loves and first heartbreaks. We share triumphs and defeats. In the case of when I went to high school, we also shared a terrible tragedy.
Then we graduate. We get our diplomas and go our separate ways. For the most part, we never see each other again. Since I graduated high school 46 years ago, I’ve only seen a few of my classmates face-to-face. A number of them have already died, including a good friend who passed before our ten-year reunion.
It’s hard for us as Americans to find a community like the one we had in high school. We could join a fraternity or sorority in college (another stereotyped community, especially in 1980s movies), but that only delays our inevitable isolation. We can’t find community at work where employees are treated as disposable cogs that can be laid off when profits aren’t large enough. We don’t find community in our neighborhoods where most of us don’t know our neighbors, and we’re lorded over by homeowner associations. In a society that preaches competition and rugged individualism, and cooperation is seen as weak and suspect, we find ourselves alone.
This brings us to the situation we’re in today.
The scariest thing about Charlie Kirk’s assassination is that it showed us how deep the divide is in our country. When I look at the flags flying at half-staff throughout the neighborhood, I see people who would want to see my family and me dead. I see neighbors who, if we lived in Germany 80–90 years ago, would watch us get dragged off by the Gestapo and go back to their breakfast as if nothing had happened. I no longer see community.
That is why we turn to high school, especially now. It was the last place where those differences didn’t matter because the bonds of school were much stronger. In our school, it didn’t matter whether you were red or blue as long as you wore navy, Columbia blue, and white on game day. As one of my characters said in Christina’s Portrait, “They’re Reseda Regents. They’re a part of our school. An attack on them is an attack on us!”
So we work hard to stay connected. We go to reunions. We go to homecomings, like the 70th anniversary our high school is having next month. We stay connected on social media. (We’re boomers, so that means Facebook.)
If we Americans seem overly fixated on high school, it’s because it’s the last real community most of us have. And as our other communities crumble around us, it’s the one we hold onto the tightest.
