I dogeared the Easy Chair reading from the April 2015 issue of Harper’s Magazine. (Easy Chair: Abolish High School by Rebecca Solnit)
Rebecca is an obviously successful person; in my mind because she is an editor for my favorite magazine. However, she did NOT go to high school. The essay goes on to argue for the abolition of high school - not the abolition of learning, but the abolition of a particularly barbaric (to some) and narrow (for all) means of learning that the large majority of us experienced between the ages of 14 and 18.
I find this argument interesting because I hated high school. Of course, I loved my friends, and outside the typical teenage dramas, I have very fond memories of SOME of high school. However, I remember going to college and feeling like I was going to get to finally become who I was meant to be, though there were certain strings that remained stubbornly attached well into my sophomore year. I hated high school for making me feel like I needed to conform to some idiotic ideology of what sort of person I was supposed to be - this was particularly frustrating in a conservative (and hypocritical) Catholic institution. Go Saints!
Also, everyone in high school was an asshole. Like, there were tiers of assholes, and everyone got to be an asshole to anyone not in their tier - how these tiers were defined, I am still not aware. I was an asshole, my friends were assholes, and I was treated like garbage by the assholes in the other tiers. Not to mention, we were all young and stupid, so how could any of us defined anyone else’s worth? To Rebecca’s point, why are we all spending our most formative of formative years around a bunch of jerks who can’t teach us much more than we’re teaching them? “There is a real human cost. What happens to people who are taught to believe in a teenage greatness that is based on achievements unlikely to matter in later life?”
I left high school behind a LONG time ago. Since my family is still in my hometown (and barely anyone from my high school actually ever LEAVES B-town for bigger and better things), I did occasionally get to run into high school though never by my own efforts. I used to only spend 3 days or so in Bloomington so as to minimize too much re-exposure.
The reason I’m writing about all of this is I’ve started dating a boy (because that’s what he is in my mind) that I dated in high school. He still lives in Bloomington, and he’s still friends with all of his friends from high school who were some of the assholes I was friends with when I was in high school. This is very weird for me. I’m still trying to reconcile my overall hatred and loathing for that period of time in my life for my love for this man (boy) who is entirely representative of that time in my life. I mean, his garage code is his high school football number. Really. (I love your face, DJP, but really.)
I’m 36. Would I like to be the younger and cuter Christa of 17? Hell no. I feel sorry for anyone who wants to go back to that hormone-ridden angst. In my mind, they’re all just Uncle Ricos making video tapes of themselves throwing a football. “How much you wanna make a bet I can throw a football over them mountains?... Yeah... Coach woulda put me in fourth quarter, we would've been state champions. No doubt. No doubt in my mind.”
Today, I know my issues with high school are minor. I wasn’t completely ostracized or bullied. The miseries that some kids are going through today (being LGBT or black or poor or acne-scarred or any of the other million differences that define us as people) they are going through largely because they are “imprisoned by cliches” created solely by these institutions alone. Maybe Rebecca has it right. Maybe abolishment is the answer, to let these kids be around other people (older, younger) who aren’t so self-involved and self-loathing as to want to create and punish anyone in these cliched groups. It’s an interesting argument.
Also, just for the record, I am supposed to say DJP is ALL MAN. His one objection to this scribbling was that I insinuated he was a boy, which he is no longer. That is my lesson from all of this - I kinda like him so I need to get over it.
