School Isn't Real
Irradiated by LabRat
….Or, well, it is, in the sense of being a thing that happens to you from the age of 5 or so to 18, it just in no way will resemble the rest of your life.
Backing up a bit, last week I ran across this post at Jennifer’s place, featuring a video by Felicia Day and the Guild crew. They seem to do one big music video release per season, and they are always awesome, and this one is no exception. As is a common theme with geeks and other people who spent middle and high school on the part of the social totem pole which is buried in the ground, and go on to wind up as perfectly respectable and likable people who are awesome in their own right, the theme is celebrating going from the bottom to the top.
I tapped my foot along with it and thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing. Then I got to thinking, successfully transcending the social realities of high school isn’t that much of a thing to celebrate so much as getting over with as quickly as possible, just because life immediately ceases to be like school the second you leave it. Lots of people continue going through the motions as though it were, but it’s because the only patterns they know and no one bothered to tell them that contrary to preparing them with rigorous accuracy for adult life, school gave them a highly artificial reality that must be adjusted away from. There should really be some sort of an exit briefing at or after graduation, just so you are warned, whether or not you choose to listen to any of it.
1. Never again will the norm of your life involve moving through a highly regimented schedule you did not choose with a peer group that all closely resemble each other, monitored by authorities who take an interest in everything you do.
Unless you go to prison or join the military, which are the only two adult-life environments that have any close resemblance to school. Even in the military you volunteered to be there and the end goal is for you to either leave after having performed adequately, or become the authorities. Only in prison are you treated as an incompetent population to be managed as closely as possible for a time-based sentence.
After school, you are free- and expected- to manage your own time, which you may do as well or poorly as you choose to, though if you consistently do it badly you will find yourself with a shortage of people willing to give you money in exchange for your time and efforts. Authorities largely do not care about your life beyond your performance, though strong leaders may take an interest in helping you manage those areas of your time that relate strictly to your job. If no one is paying you for your time currently, you can do whatever the hell with it you wish so long as it’s not actually illegal, and no one but you will care. This is the point in your life where you find out for yourself that staying up all night all the time and eating ice cream for dinner actually make you feel like crap with no input from your parents or any other authority at all.
This is one of the areas of transition from the school system to universities that is easiest for students to miss completely. College looks like school, and feels like school, but now you have a lot more freedom, including the freedom to look at a scheduled class you don’t really want to go to and then not go. However, instead of being warehoused by an educational system, now you are actually paying to be taught things at specific institutions; using your freedom to blow off “authorities” is actually a shot downrange at your own feet. This phenomenon is one of the major disconnects between adult students and students transitioning in from high school.
2. Your social life isn’t a zero-sum game anymore.
You are no longer bound to a particular age and location-based peer group who can only be escaped via a major life upheaval that can only be ordered by some other authority. Never again will you be with any people other than your family who care what you did when you were thirteen, unless that something was the sort of thing that will get the justice system to try you as an adult. If they find out anything about your life when you were in school, it will be a mildly interesting background note in contrast to who you are now, rather than finding out Who You Really Are.
If there’s a clique and they don’t like you and exclude you? You can just leave, and find some people who enjoy your company. They need have no relevance to you at all. At the absolute worst, they could be your co-workers, but at least then you can be making an evaluation of how much your job is worth to you in money, time, and aggravation factor to remain there even though the working environment is chilly and hostile- and you can go get a different social life outside of work.
You still do need social skills, you don’t get allotted friends, and acquiring them may be an uphill battle if you were raised by wolves and are essentially starting from scratch.
However, you aren’t restricted to a single pool of people who all know each other and have all known YOU since the third grade, you aren’t in a hierarchy in which every person who gains in popularity must do so at the expense of someone else, and the people you think are really cool may not think this of themselves and probably don’t really think of themselves as being in any way above you or others. (If they DO, this is generally because they are a narcissist. People behaving the way high school students do normally as adults are behaving pathologically.)
If absolutely no one wants to spend time with you and you are regularly expelled from the company of others, it may be time to do some serious self-examination (especially if you have the vague inkling you may have been raised by wolves and do not know any of the social rules others seem to take for granted), but for the most part even obnoxious trolls can find other trolls to share under-bridge space and trollish camaraderie with.
3. Your hobbies are just your hobbies, not your identity.
Adolescents are in a weird psychological space where they’re transitioning from having their identities mainly defined by their parents to being self-generated, and being adolescents in a social species, they tend to accomplish this first by letting anyone OTHER than their parents start providing some of the definition. Our culture has a lot of easy tropes for kids to fall into and build a self-image around, so that art mirrors life and life mirrors art pretty much Because. This is how a kid can believe whole-heartedly by the time he’s twelve that if he excels at math he must shun athletics, or if he excels at athletics as part of the conditions for membership in his tribe he can never reveal he really likes Star Wars.
In the adult world, your hobbies are what you do or work on because you enjoy them, not defining aspects of your identity. At your job you’re just another person in a business suit or uniform, and no one gives a shit if you were a geek or a nerd or a jock or a stoner or a metal kid or what have you. You can be a powerlifter and also have a serious investment in your D&D group and no one will care. Your gym buddies will probably not want to talk about your campaign and your DM will probably not want to know about your squat PR, but who knows, especially if members of both groups are actually friends rather than just friendly.
Speaking of, nothing of what you internalized in school about what you can and can’t learn or do, for fun or otherwise, is true. Even if you were fat and slow and uncoordinated in school, you can be a powerlifter or rock-climber or be a speed skater or whatever the hell you want to, as long as you’re willing to put in the work and practice at it. Even if you sucked at math, you can learn it later, and better yet you can shop around for a teacher who can show it to you in ways you can grasp. If you really want to you can put all your focus into developing your strength to mass ratio and join the damn circus, though it will be a tremendous amount of work and sacrifice for not much unless you REALLY want to be an acrobat.
The bad news is that seriously doing anything takes work, practice, and tolerance for frustration and failure, and due to the limited number of hours in the day and weeks in the year, you have to pick only a handful of them to be really good at any of them. But you aren’t restricted from any of them because of what little tribes in the artificial world of school you belonged to.
4. You can never count on everyone having closely shared experiences again unless you work at it.
In school, everyone is your age, most other people are probably your ethnicity, if they aren’t the standard norms of gender/sexuality they probably won’t have admitted it yet, you’re probably from about the same socioeconomic background, and everyone is, obviously, in school together. If nothing else they have a shared experience called Mrs. Johnson’s Math Period.
As an adult, any given other person you meet may be from a radically different background from yours, may be from an entirely other country or culture, may have had formative experiences so different than yours you may as well be from different countries. You may have nothing whatsoever to relate to each other over other than whatever experience you are currently sharing.
If you work hard enough at it, you can avoid this as much as possible, and some people do spend their adult lives making as sure as they can that everyone they are likely to encounter is going to be extremely similar to them. This does come with the downside of having the same narrow perspective, and the same constant experience of everyone constantly comparing each other to everyone else, forever. It can be very refreshing to be dealing with a group where nobody thinks to make very many comparisons because there are very few meaningful ones to be made.
5. In the real world, people’s tolerance for bullshit is directly proportional to the rewards of putting up with it.
The most common incentive to put up with inefficiency, byzantine and bizarre rule sets and authority structures, bureaucracy that exists for its own sake, and other soul-suckers familiar to anyone who’s been through a school system, is called a paycheck and it can make up for quite a lot. In school you do it because the alternative is not-school, which is generally a much harder row to hoe, in real life you are much freer to put it down and walk away, and people will. This is particularly true if whatever activity you’re engaged in is a for-fun hobby group where the paycheck incentive is absent.
In an extra-curricular group in school, you do it because you signed up to do it and because it will nebulously look good on your college transcript. You learn a handful of things about how people behave in small groups and if you are very lucky one or two other things.
In a local sports league, gaming group, book club, cooking circle, or any other collection of enthusiastic amateurs who get no rewards other than those intrinsic to the group or the activity, either someone or several someones have excellent skill at managing people with no reason to be there other than those rewards, or you find out what it looks like when a group of people collectively realizes they do not have to put up with bullshit and the only authorities are self-appointed.
If you were wondering, I went to a good school (private), and while I definitely wasn’t climbing the social ladder, I wasn’t the fat kid in the cafeteria getting milk poured on her either. You can make things better or worse with different school systems and approaches, or you can sign up for an entirely different set of problems via homeschooling, but a lot of things that make school a weird and artificial world stem entirely from the fact that the people inhabiting them are children, and as such are not yet mentally or emotionally mature. Everything that happens in school is of devastating emotional import even when the people involved are worthless jerks because the world of a schoolchild is very small, because they ARE still a child.
We shouldn’t celebrate becoming better and stronger and cooler people than we were in school, though broadly speaking being better and stronger is always nice. We should celebrate having left the world where any of it matters more than an footnote.
April 16th, 2012 at 8:16 pm
I remember in college watching three different people (two women and one guy) who had been ‘big’ in highschool enter college and…..nothing. They ALL had a very hard time adjusting to the fact that no one cared. I feel bad now that at the time I enjoyed their pain. This was at a college that didn’t have fraternities or sororities, which I imagine to be a bit like high school extended.
April 16th, 2012 at 9:10 pm
Boy, does this look familiar.
Back when I was school-aged, my parents were doing the daring thing and trying to educate me (and my brothers) at home. It wasn’t strictly legal at the time, but there weren’t State authorities chasing down parents who home-educated their kids.
And I heard several variations on Point 1 as an explanation of “socialization”, and how school wasn’t the best preparation for Real Life.
There were a couple of knocks on the way to Typical Adult Life, but I can’t say I would have escaped those knocks if I’d attended a “real school.”
April 16th, 2012 at 11:18 pm
I’ve rewritten this comment several times to elide things I might regret later (or have to address in court); let’s just say that I fully endorse your theses and am glad that I don’t have to put up with that particular social environment any more.
April 17th, 2012 at 5:50 am
Okay, this just made it to the list of things to discuss with my daughter before she gets to college in the fall. Well said!
April 17th, 2012 at 6:19 am
I’ve never forgotten the day I got into the first of the colleges I wanted to attend-opposed to my dreaded “backups.” It was the same day that the biggest jock, the semi-literate bully who had tormented me for five years got her own news. She had not been accepted anywhere. Not even at the dumping ground for stupid catholic girls that took everyone else in her status from my school. She walked around the whole day saying “am I really that dumb?” until I felt bad for her-and then went right back to her asshat self 24 hours later.
So my question is, how do we make high school or under something that does not have to be endured or survived or recovered from? I see less and less hope of making it better every year and this drives me crazy.
April 17th, 2012 at 6:37 am
I’m following Bluntobject’s model of discretion as the better part of valor, and will echo his gratitude at not being there anymore.
April 17th, 2012 at 6:43 am
I never attended one of my own high school reunions, but I did attend my wife’s a few years ago and I went with an old girlfriend to one of hers. It was amazing, the cheerleaders got fat, the jocks got bald, the musicians/stoners had fulfilling careers in adult-beverage-service. The skinny little kid with the thick glasses and pimples now drove a Mercedes and had a SMOKIN’ hot wife.
Many years ago I read a book, can’t recall the title, that revolved around a middle-aged guy who played football in high school. He once caught a real long touchdown pass, during practice no less, and that was the high point of his life. Even though I was barely out of high school myself at the time, that just seemed pathetic.
April 17th, 2012 at 7:00 am
Paul Graham has a few essays near this same space. “What You’ll Wish You’d Known” and “Why Nerds are Unpopular” are worth clicking.
April 17th, 2012 at 7:26 am
As an adult, any given other person you meet may be from a radically different background from yours, may be from an entirely other country or culture, may have had formative experiences so different than yours you may as well be from different countries.
I would just note that for this to be true, one would have to leave the rural agricultural 1,200-population hamlet one grew up in.
Which I did, largely because I desperately needed this particular point to be true.
April 17th, 2012 at 7:26 am
Observations Upon Leaving High School By A Person Who Has Done It Recently
1) If you get your best work done at 4 am, no one is going to stop you from staying up to 4 as many nights in a row as you like.
2) If your best sleep schedule is two blocks of four hours, ditto.
3) If the college class is bullshit and it doesn’t affect your grade to not show up, you don’t have to go. (Make sure you note when the tests and homework are due, though.)
4) In college, all classes are elective. True, there are gen ed requirements and major requirements, but you can pick a different major, and there are usually many diverse options for classes that fill the gen ed requirements, and you can test out of them.
5) If you do not do laundry, you’ll wear dirty clothes. If you do not go grocery shopping, you will starve. If you do not take out the trash, you will acquire the Leaning Tower of Trash-pisa.
6) If you lose your keys it is very rare that anyone will lecture you about being a flake and why can’t you ever just put things in the place where they belong, and if they do they are generally called “assholes.” However, if you keep losing your keys, you will have to keep looking for them, which sucks.
7) No one is going to stop you from having sex. No one cares if you have sex, except the roommate you’re sexiling.
8) The world’s greatest luxuries are a washer and a dishwasher.
April 17th, 2012 at 9:18 am
Laura: Public school is unrecoverable.
Its original intent was to create docile workers for the social elite, and so was not interested in training people how to think. It has been taken over by a group that wants to create a socialist nanny state, and has become worse. And to top it all off, they think letting kids socialize amongst themselves into Lord of the Flies is a good idea.
If you have kids, get them out before that get damaged. I know I got bad habits that will last me a lifetime from that institution.
April 17th, 2012 at 9:47 am
We should celebrate having left the world where any of it matters more than an footnote.
Yes, exactly. Also, I am so very thankful that we have the luxury of making the whole school experience different for our son.
April 17th, 2012 at 11:10 am
Having been away from High School for 20 years now, it’s kind of fun running into old classmates. Those old dramas now tend to be more the topic of a funny anctidote then a well of bitterness.
Or, real life changes things- some of my sister’s current best friends are ladies who would not have given her the time of day back then.
Life is a funny thing…
April 17th, 2012 at 2:03 pm
Jennifer: Um…how?
Kristopher: I agree to an extent. (and no I have no children.)It’s one of the reasons I’m not going into teaching. But this is nuts. My husband went through crap in the 70’s that I dealt with in the 90’s, that the (smokin awesome) video and post reference; the stuff is going on today…but if the majority of us are (likely) never going to afford a private school that claims to beat the statistic (but where they hand out their own level of shit), if most of us won’t have resources to homeschool then what happens?
I learn more from the HS students in the youth group I advise than I teach them. They’re not perfect little angelic flots. They do smart things and staggeringly dumb things. In YG they just have a safe envrionment to be themselves and the creativity and good qualities shine through. (and make me laugh myself into coughing fits several times an hour). I don’t delude myself; I bet they have all kinds of defense mechanisms they have to use in their school envrionments. I doubt many of our kids are at the top of the social strata.
Someday I hope I’ll be taking care of a whole parish and it drives me nuts to think that the only haven the kids there might have is a youth group like ours. Maybe the pressure can’t come from parents, maybe it can’t come from inside the system but something has got to happen.
This is not a rant designed to promite religious interference in schools either. I’m a Unitarian; we are not down with that. not to mention that a bunch of my YG kids get crap or duck and cover at school for being aetheists. But there are so many smart people out there, and so many on this blog, is there any way to fix this?
April 17th, 2012 at 7:21 pm
I was certainly on the low-to-middling levels of the social strata. The younger years were more brutal to me than high school was. I was the scrawny kid with mild cerebral palsy that was really into nature, in a world that viewed athletic prowess as the measure of success.
I was blessed to have a good home life outside of school-I shudder to think of what it would have been like without the support from my few friends and family. In late middle school/early high school I met a group of similar minded friends. None of us was ever popular but nobody ever really crapped on us either.
At the age of 24, I’m still an unabashed dork when it comes to anything wildlife related. I’m also an OIF veteran and Combat Medic, and I’ve got me a smokin’ hot woman who adores my geeky side as much as she enjoys my blunt military manner.
In short, I agree, wholeheartedly. Public school has absolutely NOTHING to do with what you become later on. It’s all what you work for.
April 18th, 2012 at 8:24 am
Nice article.
I suffered through public school and managed to make it out the other end, but just barely. My chief difficulty was that I was born and raised on a horse farm on the edge of a newly developed suburbia. At home I was expected to behave like an adult with the responsibilities and authorities of an adult. I handled any problems I came across as a responsible adult would handle them - for instance, when you got the tractor stuck in the field, you didn’t call AAA; you got the thrice damned thing unstuck by yourself and sometimes with the help of a sympathetic neighbor. I was polite, because people are polite to each other. I pitched in without being asked, because that’s what is done. I expected people to be cordial - what else would you do?
Try taking that attitude to public school and deal with the howler monkeys that are supposed to be your peer group and the incompetents that you’re supposed to be learning from.
April 18th, 2012 at 5:37 pm
Laura:
I’m not sure anyone’s smart enough to fix it, but I’ll take a shot at defining the problem.
Seems to me that LR’s post breaks down into two categories:
-In the real world, actions have consequences; in school, consequences are distant and artificial; and
-In the real world, you can more or less choose your peer group; in school, you’re more or less stuck with an arbitrary peer group
Schools seem to do their damndest to shield kids from any actual consequences of their actions while simultaneously ranting about those consequences in abstract, hypothetical ways. See for example Ozymandias’s comment about losing your keys. In school you get lectured on every damn thing that might mess you up later on if you turn it into an obsessive habit, but because lectures are more or less the only consequences on the table in school (leaving aside the sorts of schools that make the front page at Reason‘s blog), you get the same bullshit lecture whether you forget to answer your homework questions in complete sentences or you actually set someone’s hair on fire.
The peer group thing should be pretty self-evident. About my best experience in public school was going from junior high to high school and the International Baccalaureate programme. My high school was big enough that it was pretty easy to self-segregate and avoid any groups I didn’t want to have contact with, and IB selected for people who were at least broadly alike in that we were all a sigma or two smarter and more academically motivated than the average kid.
School populations go all Lord of the Flies where the two points come together: Bullies learning that they won’t suffer any meaningful consequences for assaulting other students. I have never seen or heard of a teacher, principal, or other school official doing anything meaningful about a pattern of bullying. I’m sure it happens. I’m also sure that photon-antiphoton pairs spontaneously appear out of vacuum before annihilating with each other, but I don’t have evidence of that either.
Maybe things are getting better as the internet lets kids grow their own online peer groups independent of their classmates, and makes it harder for adults to write off school violence as “kids being kids”. Nick Gillespie claims that school violence is in decline.
But if I was going to try to “fix” things, I’d look at those two points — and wonder why they both continue to hold. I bet there are a ton of tangled incentives that preserve the status quo.
April 19th, 2012 at 9:28 am
Bluntobject-I agree with your setup of the problem-I certainly observed it in public and religious schools undergrad and then as a University TA a few years ago.
I take issue with Nick Gillespie’s reference to Helicopter parents because in my experiences as a kid and also as an adult interacting with parents, it seems that bullies have helicopter moms and dads as much as their victims. if not hovering, certainly their parents reinforce and even endorse, or enable a lot of morally reprehensible behavior. I think bullying victims fall between the cracks of school politics and bullies escape any real consequences more often than might be apparent.
In any case, it is an issue that continues to make smoke come out of my ears so the only solution I can see from my end is that I must keep learning more about it.
April 19th, 2012 at 9:31 am
JKosprey-awesome. I had (in my biased opinion) the incredible joy of three years with my smoking hot husband who embraced my geeky nature and had one of his own. It is wonderful being able to move beyond high school and explore the possibilities in your adult life-and thank you for serving our country. (totally cheezy, sorry but sincerely meant)