Society is really not at all dissimilar to high school. It's
the same thing. It's wanting to belong, it's wanting to hang on to a
group that you feel is the privileged group …It's simply a matter of
feeling like you belong and that in a way is an affirmation of your existence.
— David Patrick Columbia, society
columnist
In a country where class differences are often willfully
ignored, high school is one place where social divisions
are on display in their rawest and most natural state.
At Anderson High School in Austin, Texas, the social
hierarchy is as finely-tuned as in any Edith Wharton
novel. It's a place where many kids drive nicer cars
than their teachers, where having the right clothes
(all preps, for example, seem to own at least one piece
of Abercrombie and Fitch) and the right car determines
who one is friends with, and where kids are unabashedly
cliquish and confident in their decision to stick with "people
like them." In a wide-ranging tour of this largely
upper-middle-class school, we meet the insiders (the
preps and the jocks), the outsiders (the nerds and
the oddballs), and the intruders (bused in African
American and Latino kids who feel surrounded by rich
whites). As one might expect, we learn that class has
everything to do with life aspirations (preps see themselves
as future advertising execs, psychologists, and lawyers,
while poorer kids seem much less sure of their prospects).
We're left with the question: are the people who are
confident, popular, and successful in high school the
same people who are confident, successful adults?
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