Thoughts of High School

During this last week I have gotten to miss school. Lots of school. The sad thing is that this time spent not at school sucked. Having a small allergic reaction cause autoeczematization on one's entire front side of the body is no bueno sir. However the good part of this is that I had tons and tons of hours to think about things. I thought about things that ranged from the random pointless things that emerge from the male mind such as why women are so difficult to topics that actually seem worthwhile to write about. The one that seemed to stick in my mind the most is the idea of identity and society in general from my view as a high school student.

Identity has interested me lately. As a high school senior, one must think about identity a lot when contemplating how to bs an essay to get into college, bs an essay to get an A in English, or bs to someone to pretend to know something you haven't the faintest clue about. Of course I am exaggerating a bit, but it really is quite interesting. What I find the strangest is that colleges actually base their entrance upon such essays that require the fragile high school mind to reflect upon their short lives and find meaning. I find this especially humorous due to the fact that they are asking people who have lived less than 20 years. Not to mention the fact that everyone changes over time, though it may depend on their situations and personality. What this leaves colleges with is an essay that may show how much someone wants to succeed now, or at least how good they are at pretending they do. Ah the fun of the high school essay.

High school is not meant to make a person magically enlightened. If anything it is a sort of system to supposedly prepare one for the world that exists outside of the sheltered high school community. This thought was strange because almost a year ago, I had an intense MySpace message chat going on about this very topic with my friend Rhea. We both were rather fed up with school, the concept seemed incredibly boring to us. However, through our messages we determined that in a way high school was a necessary.

We figured that high school is nothing more than a kind of microcosm of society that the older and supposedly wiser adult conspiracy had created to control and force feed us youngsters the rules they had put down. Everything that the real world has exists in high school, though in a lesser form. There are always stoners, overachievers, dealers, stealers, perverts, losers, winner, etc. Additionally, the high school government/student council was very much like our own ruling government and the ones who make the rules. In this sense, school was almost like a gauntlet. It didn't really determine what kind of person you were because there were plenty of good people in every clique, ethnic group, intelligence level, etc.

What high school did do was put everyone into a larger environment. This larger environment was very much like the world. It had all sorts of people from different backgrounds and different strengths and weaknesses. This gauntlet can best be described as the Battle Royale effect. These giant pools of maturing teenagers are given the chance to "learn". Those who can survive through the trial and make it to the real world, the ones who drop out cannot seem to handle the standard brainwashing that society has set in place and choose to remove themselves from the testing system to instead try their luck at the real world.

The ironic thing about this chat that went on for a while was that we were new high school juniors. We had been pointing these things out mostly from our limited experience and much was probably based on either emotion, or the need to feel like a rebel. Such strangeness, these high school days of self discovery. Such primitive animalistic instinct buried within our dated system of education.