David A. Windham

High School

The older I get, the more it feels like high school… I’ve used that as an expression for at least the last fifteen years. I found myself saying it again at lunch the other day during a discussion about an upcoming fundraising event and I wrote it down in my notes. For whatever reason, I can’t help but notice that the basic social dynamics of high school are still the preeminent legem terrae… law of the land.

Perhaps it’s just our learned social psychology. I deal with a bunch of high school kids on an almost daily basis coaching tennis teams and I’ve watched how they interact with one another over the last several years. As much as I’m dismissive of their behavior as naive, I’ve been pretty quick to notice that the reality is that not much changes between the age of 15 and the age of 50. At this point, I’m expecting to see the same in a retirement home if I make it. I used to like to compare human behavior with that of chickens, but I’ve now found that high school is a much easier-to-understand reference because of our shared experience.

I suppose it’s an important element here to inform you exactly who I was and how I felt in high school for a little perspective. In retrospect, I’d like to think I was a bit like Ferris Bueller1.

I’m not sure you could pin me on a typical high school social group because I liked to float between them. I wasn’t exactly nerdy, emo, stoner, rebel, jock, rich, or poor… but just a little bit of each which I still tend to identify as an adult. I liked high school and thought it was fun. And I’d like to think that I was liked in high school… except maybe the fella I punched in the face before his big football game because he was accosting my girlfriend. I might have been handsome because I seemed to get the girls but I also dated a girl from another school so that helped me out of the small social circle. I was in advanced academic classes but sometimes performed lackluster for sport. My school wasn’t really big enough to have many enemies but it also wasn’t exactly small enough to not have cliques. I still chat with about five or six fellas I graduated from high school regularly and we sometimes reflect on it. I’ll ask them who I am or was. If anything, I was likely the cynical humorist exploring bildungsroman2 themes just like I’m doing here.

The town I currently live in is small enough that I stop and chat with at least several folks every time I go to the grocery store and I usually recognize several others. It’s pretty close ideologically with my high school graduating class with a bent towards monoculture and religious conservatism. Although not necessarily in the majority, I still find it comfortable. What’s particularly applicable for my point here, is that a good chunk of them went to high school together or at least in neighboring towns, not unlike my wife and I. I don’t think I’d be too far off the bat to assume that the majority of them pretty much occupy a similar socio-economic status as they might have in high school minus some exceptions that remain obvious due to their overcompensation.

What’s unfortunate is that adulting is often full of the same artificial hierarchical caste systems as high school. Our basic values of friendship, community, respect, tolerance, and honesty seem to be learned at some level. The closest I could identify it would be the ‘social contract’ theory where a person’s moral obligations are dependent on an unwritten agreement to form the society in which they live3. The theory was first mentioned by Plato and is the most identified in Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes who lived it through the English Civil War4. John Locke adopted it for his Two Treatises on Government5 and Jean-Jacques Rousseau for his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men6.

It’s actually fairly naive to believe that our social contract has changed that much since adolescence as this should be perfectly apparent in our current state of political affairs. The principles that guide our civil, social, and economic liberties are forever entrenched in our own needs to be both accepted and individual. Our morality and political obligations are dependent on an unwritten social contract that still guage the legitimacy of the state or church over our personal affairs. I’m sometimes smart enough to shut my mouth long enough to listen to adults talking with one another and I can’t help but to hear the subtle references. “I’m cool, I went here, I know that person too, our new whatever toy, I heard Sally went with John, l want to have this, or I know whatever”.

Part of this thinking was inspired by a deep dive on the filmaker John Hughes7. Hughes wrote and directed The Breakfast Club8 and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, two films I leaned heavily on in adolescence and I really enjoy dissecting my early influences in retrospect. Hughes friend P.J. O’Rourke9 wrote the best piece about him and his films in The John Hughes I Knew10. Ferris could be interpreted as an existentialist text convincing Cameron to cut loose while The Breakfast Club is a direct commentary on our social contract. After I got into a serious car accident as a teenager, I had a very distinct feeling returning to high school that everything felt somewhat stupid… like how can these adults and kids fool themselves into what they seem to be prioritizing when life if fleeting. Now that I’m older, I can’t help but to watch older adults reflecting on their lives and I try to pay close attention.

I’ve always wanted to write something in which the children are wiser than the adults because I know there’s a bit more to it. I’ve noticed over the years some recurring themes and I wonder to myself at certain crossroads in my life if I should try another road, but I tend to think of my place as the observer and I can’t help but to notice how I keep coming to the same crossroads. I’m not lost, I’m just enjoying the tour. I’m just glad I enjoyed high school so I’m not perpetually trapped in knowing the older I get, the more it stays the same. Life moves pretty fast, if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

  1. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferris_Bueller’s_Day_Off
  2. Bilungsroman – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildungsroman
  3. Social contract – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract
  4. Leviathan – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_(Hobbes_book)
  5. Two Treatises of Government – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Treatises_of_Government
  6. Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_on_Inequality
  7. John Hughes – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hughes_(filmmaker)
  8. The Breakfast Club – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Breakfast_Club
  9. P. J. O’Rourke – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._J._O%27Rourke
  10. The John Hughes I Knew – https://www.thedailybeast.com/dont-you-forget-about-me-the-john-hughes-i-knew