Wilk’s Rant: The Politics of High School

By: Richard Wilk

What is a bureaucracy? It is a choked morass that panders to the rich and popular, while it shuns and oppresses the hard working backbone of its structure. In other words, the politics of High School. Students quickly learn the magic of conformity and how it is directly related to popularity and power. They observe the wonder of how intellectualism and originality are not respected and how intellectuals and ‘originals’ are typically shunned and ostracized. It is to be observed that the politics of high school are not unlike the politics of the real world, with the popular majority holding all the power and who have no problems using it to crush the non-conforming minorities.

At the top of the hierarchy of school are, as they always have been, and always will be, the ‘popular’ conformists. By ‘popular’ I mean, surfers, cheerleaders, athletes, Democrats, etc. It is a truth universally acknowledged that the more people one has backing them up the more power they seem to have. So these groups drastically control the spheres of political control within the school. Occasionally their goals differ, in which case they use their puppet government, the ASB, to mediate their conflicts. Though no single individual holds a great deal of power, due to the fact that they are mafia type organizations, each person can throw around the weight of the entire group thus making them extremely powerful.

Following these groups are the extremely rich students and their posses. If they fail to fit into one of the ‘popular’ groups, they tend to have enough purchased friends to backup whatever crazy ideas that they may happen to stumble upon in their money induced stupors. It is frequently heard that money doesn’t buy love, but it does buy is influence and people; powerful people, with large muscles and who have no qualms about throwing them around at any hapless students who happen to disagree with their rich friend. Due to the fact that the goals of the rich and those of the popular tend to be greatly aligned, there is very little conflict between these groups.

Following the popular conformists, the rich and their posses, come the academically challenged. Like the popular, these people, though not particularly powerful as individuals, are part of such a large group that their ill-conceived notions are staunchly protected by the others classified here. These people are the ones who are always offended when someone with half an IQ point tells them that their opinions are wrong.

After this group comes the first of the oppressed, the non-conformists and their friends. These groups include the punks, goths, Republicans, intellectuals and anyone who refuses to conform to the will of the blond haired blue-eyed surfer athletes. These people, though they can be well known, lack the power of numbers to impose their beliefs upon anyone. These groups are also shunned by the larger more conformist groups because they are ‘different’ and anything different is clearly evil and must be feared.

And finally at the bottom of the political totem pole come the freshmen. Though these ‘things’ may one day evolve to a higher form of life, they currently hold no power in their micro-organic states. Larger groups occasionally pretend to ‘befriend’ them, but that is only a ploy to recruit more people to help their particular causes. Once the freshman has been used, they are dropped back down to their rank and file positions for the larger fish to feed on. Though many upper classmen fear the inevitability of a freshmen uprising, this scenario seems highly unlikely seeing as how the freshmen are extremely unorganized and seem to lack to cognitive ability to even consider the possibility of such a move.

So there you have it, the political power structure in the High School. But what kind of power is actually thrown around by these groups? The power in high school comes from how many people any one group or person controls. Though there is no true government in the organization of the students, these groups can be said to have massive amounts of political sway due to the fact that they control so many people. It says something about modern society when conformity is the goal, and originality is shunned. Perhaps Hitler’s vision of a society of completely conformist, unoriginal people is closer than we think.