Entertainment For Lively Minds
High school to hell
I’m very much enjoying Glee on E4, though it does reaffirm my long-held suspicion that attending an American high school must be the most hellish form of education available in the developed world. All those tightly-defined categories – jocks, cheerleaders, nerds - and the idea, promulgated in Glee, that every kid has their box and they’re expected to stay in it.
While I’m at it, how come every American high school portrayed in film and on TV is exactly the same? From the 50s to the present day, from California to Vermont, they all look identical, and all feature the same stock characters. The schools in Back To The Future, Heroes, Glee, Election, The Wonder Years, Malcolm In The Middle – all the same. Is it really that uniform?
A comparative (ie equally top-of-the-head) selection of portrayals of British state schools reveals much more diversity. Think of Gregory’s Girl, Kes, Grange Hill, Love Actually, Please Sir... the location and period are easily detectable in every case, whereas with the standard-issue US high school, only the clothes tell you when the story is set.
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Jeebus, where do you begin with this one?
I guess firstly, there's a cautionary tale here about taking one's world view from popular culture. I went to an "American" high school and see common threads from my distant past popping up in the glass teat here in Olde Blightey but I don't lose a lot of sleep over it. By the way, you forgot about Heathers. Now there's a high school movie. I'm raising a couple of Londoner mini-me's and the level of bullying in UK secondary schools beats anything my edumacator friends in NoCal tell me about what's going on over there.
If you're making the point that UK portrayal through film, tv and television of life in secondary edumacation is vastly richer and more nuanced than what comes out of "Hollywood" then, wow, ok bro, point to you. But what's the point?
The point
Sorry if my post rubbed you up the wrong way. It wasn’t the bullying I was commenting on specifically, more the idea that (as portrayed in films and TV shows, at least) every kid is assigned membership of a category when they enter high school and is expected to stick to it, and follow the behaviour expected of members of that group.
As to the point, it was merely to wonder aloud if American high schools can really be as uniform as they’re portrayed (and not just in big-budget Hollywood movies)? And if they aren’t, why don’t we see a bit more variety in those portrayals, as we do over here?
I read one article on Glee which pointed out that the people who grow up to become novelists and screenwriters are often among the ‘inferior’ categories at high school, so it’s entirely natural that they should emphasise the stereotypes among the jocks and cheerleaders, as a form of belated revenge for the misery of their teenage years. I’m sure a psychologist could have a field day with that one...
13 years here
and I still feel like both a walking suggestion box and the root cause for all the ills of a country I left 25 years ago. Maybe I'm a little sensative. I blame myself for being a Guardian reader. No harm intended. Me, I put it down to lack of school uniforms. All you Wire-heads know that Balmer's inner city schools had uniforms. They started working with that in SoCal too, down in Inglewood, Downey, Hawthorn and other East LA areas. But that is not the norm. Lots of rules in schools about "No Colors" (please don't nobody correct my f*@%ing spelling). White middle class schools with no uniform policies still have uniforms and its what the various kids wear that identify them. Doesn't have to be about Crips and Bloods but Levis or Chinos. Kids generally like to fit in. Somewhere. So you're right, there's a pattern to the types. The first rule in popular fiction (guys, I said "popular") is widely identifiable character traits. You want something to be popular, make it easy to recognise.
I think you mean
"...don't anybody correct my f*@%ing spelling".
You didn't say anything about not correcting your grammar.