- Denis Fontanini
- Brookfield, WI
- United States
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Why do kids create social cliques in high school? Do they hinder the growth of others?
I am a Highshool Senior and see this all the time. Cool kids, Girls thinking that there all that. But what I have noticed that has become a problem in my mind is, does this hinder the growth of the other people in the school. When Senior Ball, or Homecoming comes around, and the vote for the king and queen come out, it only contains the "Cool Kids" or the "cliques". What about the other kids, don't they get a chance? ( yes I am one of those other kids). I'm not trying to sound like I want to be there im just noticing a pattern. And I feel bad for the other kids. So what is your input, personal experiance? Any thoughts in general.
Alan Russell
Some schools do take steps to de-emphasize cliques, but I don't think one can eliminate the human need to associate and belong. Some teachers do let "Cool Kids" get away with things, so sometimes we are tacitly part of the problem.
I do take issue with characterizing the "Cool Kids" as amounting to nothing. It's too individualistic for such a generality to be true. What Peter asserts is true, though, and one of my kids and I were talking about that very thing yesterday. She realized that she had begun to reduce her circle of friends to the handful she actually enjoyed talking to and spending time with. She said it's much better than trying to fit in with a larger group of superficially homogeneous classmates. She has recognized that, in a few months, she and her classmates will scatter to colleges near and far and build new lives.
I have run into some of my old kids who defined themselves completely in high school as kings or queens; these folks are neither happy nor well-adjusted because they never figured themselves out as unique individuals. Another old kid, who was a "Cool Kid" and clique leader in high school, teaches down the hall from me and seems quite normal and happy (well, as normal as a teacher can be).
Gail . 50+
I think that our educational system actually encourages this. It's certainly not discouraged, is it?
peter lindsay 30+
Fritzie Reisner 100+
I think most kids value feeling that they have a connection to something, but I think there are lots of more satisfying alternatives for many kids than social cliques. It might be the math team, the programming club, the literary magazine, the band, drama club, or a school or community service organization.
I would guess that being part of the cool clique hinders growth of the members more than it does of the non-members who engage instead in their most compelling interests.
greg dahlen 20+
peter lindsay 30+
Morton Bast 200+
But I'm not sure what I feel about whether it hurts others. It seems to me that part of that pain is just not being sure where you belong, which might be healthier and more correct than believing in some kind of superficial identity. But of course it's also a structure that easily leads to bullying, which is much more definitively harmful.
William Seitz
Not having a strong pack can be painful and it forces you to struggle more with your identity since you don't have the pack to help you with a sense of identity. Sometimes this struggle can have positive outcomes (high academic achievement by 'nerds') and sometimes negative ones (anti-social behavior by 'loners'). Where ever you fit in the spectrum of pack versus individual you should try to use it to make yourself a better person.
Now a couple quotes since I have space...
"He who attends to his greater self becomes a great man, and he who attends to his smaller self becomes a small man." - Mencius (couldn't find the Mencius quote I wanted, but this one works) [translated from Chinese]
"There is no one who does not carry scars on the heart. If there were someone in the world like that, it would be a shallow soul." - Hiei [translated from Japanese]
Aja Bogdanoff 20+
"In fact, one of the reasons that high schools may produce such peculiar value systems is precisely because the people there have little in common, except their ages. “These are people in a large box without any clear, predetermined way of sorting out status,” says Robert Faris, a sociologist at UC Davis who’s spent a lot of time studying high-school aggression. “There’s no natural connection between them.” Such a situation, in his view, is likely to reward aggression. Absent established hierarchies and power structures (apart from the privileges that naturally accrue from being an upperclassman), kids create them on their own, and what determines those hierarchies is often the crudest common-denominator stuff—looks, nice clothes, prowess in sports—rather than the subtleties of personality. “Remember,” says Crosnoe, who spent a year doing research in a 2,200-student high school in Austin, “high schools are big. There has to be some way of sorting people socially. It’d be nice if kids could be captured by all their characteristics. But that’s not realistic.”
The whole article is pretty interesting.