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The Atlantic | July/August 2004 | The Kids Are All Right | CarsonBooks
The Kids Are All Right
Teens aren't as warped as some of the books about them

In no other culture does secondary education evoke the enchantment and trauma that high school does for Americans. As the single collective experience that most of us in this diffuse society are likeliest to share, it's also our handiest analogy for virtually every social realm we encounter as adults, no matter how exalted. Showbiz? High school with money, People and Entertainment Weekly tell us. Politics? High school with power—and man, could Grover Norquist use a wedgie. For all I know, the people in today's military call it high school with guns—which, after Columbine, I realize may sound redundant.

The basic difference is that our fellow developed countries treat secondary school as the beginning of responsibility. If little Jean-Pierre's fate is to be a mechanic, the stench of cooked goose is mingling with the incipient reek of motor oil by the time he turns fifteen. But for American teens high school is the beginning of freedom—their first crack at making choices. The autonomy involved is restricted, though not as much as parents might wish, and its purposes are generally frivolous—from the outside, anyhow. But the project of self-definition thus gotten under way is neither.

Consciously or not, we take it so much for granted that high school is a social education, with the formal kind eating dust, that we have no idea how exotic a spectacle it presents to the rest of the planet. "I always thought all of the notions about cliques and crowds, and the preoccupation with fashions that I had seen in American movies was the invention of Hollywood," says a Turkish grad student quoted in Murray Milner Jr.'s Freaks, Geeks, and Cool Kids. "Then when I came to the U.S. for the first time as an exchange student my junior year in secondary school, I was stunned to see that many of the images actually existed." Perhaps predictably, a professor from Germany, hearing our author expatiate on "the importance of parties and proms," gets downright icy: "We don't have that kind of thing in our schools; we tend to business."

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