Do American schools really have this rigid class structure that we always see on TV?
 

Hey guys, I think this is my first thread. Washingmachine is a good friend of mine and decided he's convince me to sign up!

Since watching so much 'Daria' I've been wondering if all this class stuff in schools is true. Are there really Popular/Unpopular/Jock/Cheerlead cliques? And can cheerleaders and football players only go out with each other?!

I've been fascinated by this for some time now..

No, not really. The "rigid class structure" you're getting at is a pop-culture idea that's a caricature of real life. There are cliques in high schools, but that's not just an American thing is it? Football players and cheerleaders are usually pretty popular, and uh, band geeks and math team dorks just aren't. That's natural, right?

But there was a cheerleader in my high school who was dating a guy who was in the drama clique. It happens. I mean, hybridization is an important aspect of the process of natural selection, right? Where are my biology people?

i attended a catholic school in south america and we had no such social segmentation-- sure there were groups of friends but come the weekend everyone got drunk together. perhaps it helped that it was a boys school so there was not much posturing to be done-- no girls to impress. i would have liked to sniff a girl though, it was quite horrid to be locked up that way.


hell yes. natural selection requires diversity & mutations as the environment changes. homogeneity guarantees extinction.

Ohhh yeah, there is no popularity structure in wales is there? That must be so nice! Here it's terrible with the social subcultures. The football players generally get the most attention, and the wiggers are up there too. You would often find cheerleaders going out with football players, but they're not obligated to, but they pretty much stick to other popular people.

Daria certainly exagerrates it, but, at least in my school, it's not too terribly far from the truth.

the jocks hang out with each other, the cheerleaders go out with the jocks. that doesn't mean they're not cool people; i have classes with a bunch of them and they're pretty nice.

the artsy/music kids have their own circles but aren't really considered to be freaks or outcasts.

the only real pariahs are the kids who talk about anime all the time and play Pokemon after school.

eh. my school has groups that all intermingle. we're known more for our band and rigorous courses more than our football, so even though the jocks and cheerleaders are high on the ladder they're pretty even with the band people and arty freaks. there's the gangstas, anime people, and wiggas but they're just a group of their own. we mostly stick to our circles but more often than not the circles overlap.

My high school was pretty small, so those groups had to overlap on occasion, but all in all, it's pretty close to the truth. If you were into anime, then you could pretty much kiss your social life goodbye. "Social life" of course meaning your invite status to the big parties the popular/rich kids would throw. The outsider groups probably overlapped the most...I mean, if you were queer AND you liked anime as well as fanfiction AND you were in band AND you were completely unathletic AND you shared no common interests with the general population of the high school then you were probably still more popular than the kids who made up their own language, because it sucks to be those kids.

this conversation reminds me of "pretty in pink" where the lines cut across the social classes. (of course the movie "conveniently" disposes of brown people by just not showing any). vote for pedro!

I think its true to a degree, like others have said but its highly exagerated.
The pretty people do tend to stick together and go out with one another, if approached by say someone like me, i will get a "oh you" kind of look.

I notice the rest of the groups just went down by looks, there were the skaters and riders that went off on their own group, but i think looks is what holds the groups together.

I was friends with all the skaters, but then i got sick of them, so it ended up being me and my friend in the corner pissing our selves laughing at everyone.

Cliques occur in every culture and in all circumstances. From pre-school to the workplace.

sure there are hierarchies and social stratification and personal affinities, but not everywhere do they evolve into rigid caste systems.

Ah for the simple social divisions of the secondary school playground, it was so much easier to hate someone until they had proved themselves worthy of tolerance. With this whole adult world you're supposed to accept people and tolerate them despite their faults blah blah blah.

The abiding memory of secondary school is that the "skateboarders" (And i use that term in the sense of people who used to buy expensive skating clothes rather than expensive sporty/trendy clothes) were far more pretentious and annoying than the "sporty" people, all doing the same things and liking the same things as one another without question just so theyd fit in.
Which i guess is fair enough, idve done it if the thought of it hadnt made me feel like a large part of me would die every single day.

I guess it sort of depends on what school you go to. I mean, there were cliques at my highschool, but it wasn't really like on TV. Television portrays that shit in a very exaggerated way.

Highschool did suck though. Thank God for college.

I validate this.

i was homeschooled.

Yeah, I'm thrilled to have traded in the cliques for academic snobbery.

Because seriously, college kids just aren't that great. Without the alcohol, they're not pleasant at all. I mean I would rather hang out with my family any day.

I start at my new school in Hicksville, Missouri on Tuesday, and I am so happy just to be out of the city I can't even tell you.

I agree, they all seem so tearfully ordinary and uninteresting. I miss home in ways, but not completly.
The more I think about what school was like the more confused I get. I think people just generally formed groups fairly independent of interests, certainly in lower school. You were either accepted or not by the masses. When we got to about 15 it changed a bit and you'd have obvious groups of stoners and skaters. But other than that I don't think people seperated themselves much. There was nothing stopping people intermingling, and no politics to it. Oh, and the only people who cared about sports were those who played it. What about the stereotype of the reverence of the football team as a symbol of school mini-nationalism?

It sucked a bit really, as far as I know there weren't many arty/music types in my school, and its the biggest in Wales, seemed really undiverse.

Really Macro Dollar is right. This thing really doesn't exist in Cardiff apart from in the first 2 years of high school. Of course cliches exist in every part of society but this particular one doesnt seem to exist in Wales. For one people in bands are usually very highly regarded and there are no 'cool' parties that only certain people are invited to, there were, when we were there just parties with a 'invite people you vaguely know' attitude. It Probebly helped that me and Macro Dollar kind of created are own circle of freaks that defined our own sense of 'cool'. Certainly being different became something more celebrated as the years in school went on. The Last 2 years were the most fun i've ever had...some real amazing memories....the Welsh have this 'he's a character' mentality, accepting people for what they are that probebly helps.

However, this is not universal if we are to beleive the tenious evidence supplied by a certain person who attended school in Cowbridge. He claimed that the emos, skaters, chavs, trendies and whatever other groups all seperated themselves and frequently had fights and all picked on each other. Though I really am not sure if the source is reliable...Though it is beleiveable since its kind of in the valleys!

Well the valleys is the valleys lol....less said about that the better