[nostrademons]

My high school years also were not like this, but I always assumed that was because my high school made a special effort to stamp out the sort of ostracism and cliquishness that the article described. It seemed like the natural tendency was toward these, but when the school first started up, teachers made a point of making clear that these sorts of behaviors were not okay, and then as the students grew up, they propagated the culture to the younger students. Our first essential question was "What is community?", and much of the first year of the school's existence centered around that.

It probably also helped that when you're in a graduating class of 32, there are no labels. Everybody's an individual, because there aren't enough people to form useful abstractions around social groups.

My middle school years were like this, which makes me think that the natural order in a public school tends toward the social system the article describes.

[menloparkbum]

I always wondered about the size of PG's school. My high school was pretty bad, academic wise. The parodies of teachers as portrayed on South Park are not far off the mark. However, there were only around 60 people in any given graduating class. This seemed to dampen any rigid social hierarchies. There were lame aspects - stupid, quasi-criminal guys who were good at hockey often got a free pass. Since it was a small town, there was often collusion between school officials (the hockey coaches) and external authority figures. A couple hockey players were always drunk driving, and getting pulled over, but there never seemed to be any repercussions. Perhaps because all the law enforcement officials in the area also had kids on the team.

One group that was notably absent was the super-smart outcast nerd group. There were a few people who looked and acted like stereotypical socially inept nerds, but they weren't actually very smart. Sadly, when I think back, the people in that group (we're talking like 3-5 people) were probably dealing with weird stuff that mostly happens in rural communities, like semi-abusive parents involved with cultish religions. Most of the smart people who went on to do interesting things were either relatively popular, and if not explicitly "popular" they still had friends and weren't really picked on.