
Why You Truly Never Leave High School - mhb
http://nymag.com/news/features/high-school-2013-1/?imw=Y
======
unimpressive
My previous post: [0]

As somebody who interacts with high schoolers on a regular basis, I attribute
their nastiness to the snowball effect.

They can't read long form information because they didn't want to before high
school. Now they can't without a great exertion of effort.

They can't write because they don't read, which is where it is easiest to
learn new words.

They think social studies is boring because it's a lot of reading and writing.
That the class usually focuses on stuff that happened too long ago to be
visible in their lives doesn't help.

They don't understand mathematics because their earlier instructors taught it
as algorithms without context, the beautiful axiomatic nature of mathematics
is never revealed.

By contrast, everyone can do PE. Even kids who stay indoors a little too long,
slowly giving themselves radon induced lung cancer. If you're good enough, you
can even get a scholarship to play on a college team.

It's no wonder in most schools so much emphasis is put on sports games.

So what do you get when you have a bunch of illiterate teenage prisoners in a
room trying to read Shakespeare?

About the same thing you get when you have a thousand monkeys try to write it.

[0]: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5125650>

~~~
entropy_
The emphasis on sports in US high schools has nothing to do with the fact that
everyone can do it and everything to do with the entertainment industry built
around sports in the US. The fact that you can get a scholarship to college
just for playing sports well is a symptom of that.

I live in a country where sports aren't as watched or cared about as in the
US. And if they are it's other countries playing it(like the world
cup/champions league/eurocup in soccer). But the whole not being able to
read/write well and not liking mathematics thing holds just the same here as
it does in the states. However, people don't turn to sports to derive social
status(we do have your equivalent of "the popular kids" but they aren't
"jocks"). Furthermore, I know of no school that puts almost any kind of real
emphasis on sports.

I think by far the biggest reason so much emphasis is put on sports in US high
schools is precisely because of the importance sports holds in overall
American culture due to the entire entertainment industry built around it. Not
the other way around.

~~~
cpursley
Please tell me this magical place where people aren't obsessed with watching
sports (playing themselves is fine). My passort is in hand :)

I completely agree. Athletics should be decoupled from public schools - K-12
and public universities. As someone who attended public school in the US, and
who's wife currently teaches at a public school, I can say with certainty that
these places are just training camps for the best athletes. In the place I
currently live, the adults speak of their children always in the context of
how good they are at a particular sport - never about academics or other
achievements. For the parents, a child who's a good athlete is the same as
winning the lottery.

~~~
henrikschroder
Where I am, in Scandinavia, and I think also in most of continental Europe,
sports are decoupled from the schools. You don't have school teams or schools
competing against each other, instead various junior sports teams are simply
local and geographical, drawing kids from surrounding schools.

And junior sports activites are completely extra-curricular. A local team
might have its activities at a single school, so as a student you might have
your after-school basketball at your school, or another school, it all
depends. You still have a lot of people watching professional sports, and
working their way up through junior sports, but the "high-school jock" cliché
simply does not exist.

And, consequently, athletic proficiency isn't mixed with academic proficiency,
the school doesn't care about how good a student is at basketball or football
or whatever, that's completely outside its interests. And academic
scholarships based on athletic skill is unheard of. (Then again, scholarships
are pretty unheard of, university education is free... :) )

~~~
bps4484
If the social structure of high schoolers in Scandinavia isn't related to
sports, what are the attributes which dictate where you rank socially?

~~~
henrikschroder
It's a subjective popularity contest, much like high-schools everywhere. Dress
"right", talk "right", listen to the "right" music, be attractive, and pretend
to be confident.

------
hexonexxon
I did nothing in highschool except get wasted with my friends and play cards
in the cafeteria pretending we had spare blocks when in reality we just
skipped every single class. Eventually we would check into homeroom for
attendence then just walk out the door to go skateboard or drink tall cans of
pure swill on the beach. We gave the school voicemail lines and had my older
sister leave the message pretending to be my mother, so if they ever called
wondering why I was never in class I just deleted the msg and nobody followed
up.

Somehow we kept passing with low Cs for showing up for the odd test and the
finals. It was almost an automatic pass I guess our teachers just wanted to
get rid of us to the next grade and never see us again. My English Lit 10
final was just to write an essay on anything, so I did and got a P. Good
enough.

I eventually dropped out in Grade 11, did the GED test, and 2yrs later after I
was off probation for some hacking charge only had to do a semester of precalc
at community college before being admitted into university, and eventually a
compsci major. Piece of cake, this highschool is.

The author of this nymag post seems traumatized by it. I treated highschool as
the joke that it was, had epic good times and as a result have no problems
talking to a room full of strangers. I can't even remember being stressed one
day in highschool all the fights and problems I ran into were outside in the
streets school was just party time all the time.

~~~
dshefchik
Sounds very similar to my own high school experience actually..never really
cared, never stressed, smoked a lot of weed, had a lot of different friends,
partied, had fun. Could have gotten more girls I suppose, but I'm making up
for it now. Girls just love software engineers don't they?

~~~
zalzane
>Girls just love software engineers don't they?

what the fuck are you smoking and where can I get some

------
invalidOrTaken
I'm glad to see this article, because it questions what has become an
unquestioned building block of American society. Attempts to trivialize it
come, as I see it, from two sources: repression ("Who cares about high school?
They're all in jail or barefoot and pregnant now." _I care. Wow do I care_ )
or ignorance ("What? High school was a great time! I miss those days!" _Well,
I might have been part of the 1%..._ )

The reason we can't ignore high school is simple: sexual maturity. We cannot
transcend our origins. Delay of the _responsibility_ of having/caring for
children into late (or even early) 20's is a leaky abstraction. Pretending
kids are kids until they graduate does not make it so.

And with sexual maturity comes...aggression. Especially because high school is
like Silicon Valley on steroids: there's so much change going on that
everyone's at risk of becoming "disrupted" when one girl hits puberty the
right way or one dude makes varsity in $SPORT to everyone's surprise. With the
presence of adults whose roles are less in flux (like the environments the
home-schooling families in the article implied), things are less turbulent and
reward aggression less. But there are none; the teachers exist for (and get
fulfilled by and paid for and punished for doing other than) teaching, not
enforcing discipline.

"Your "'use case' should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in
the dorms. How will this software get him laid?" ~ Jamie Zawinski, _Groupware
Bad_

Also, props to PG for independently coming to the conclusion that it's the
"middle classes" of high school that have the most reason to be nervous[1].

[1]<http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html>

~~~
graue
Tangent: that JWZ quote always seemed like obvious inspiration for Facebook.
I'm surprised to find out that the rant it's from postdates FB's creation...
feels like it was a different era when I first read that.

<http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html>, 15 Feb 2005.

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lvturner
I never truly attended high school either. So I guess it holds true.

------
kazuya
Where's the obligatory xkcd reference, anyone?

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Evbn
Such a long meandering ramble to say that personalities tend to settle at the
same age that the rest of our bodies reach maturity.

~~~
neltnerb
And such a sad sentiment too. I think about high school days... almost never?

And I enjoyed them at the time. What's the saying, "If high school was the
best time of your life, you've wasted your life?"

What an article of pointless sentiments. I would have probably gone to parties
with cute popular kids in high school, but I hardly care about such things
now. I throw far better parties, and know far cuter people now...

~~~
jpxxx
How lovely for you. Now: the thrust of the piece is that for many, the status
you assign yourself (and have assigned for you) in adolescence persists
through adulthood.

------
kbar13
<insert grammar nazi here>

