A Microcosm of America
This was a response I submitted to Tikkun Magazine’s Young Writer’s contest. We had to write a prompt based on a series of questions about social justice and political matters in America.
“What was your high school experience like? High schools in the United States train students to be productive workers but are not always as concerned with the development of students’ self-knowledge, sense of ethics, or conflict resolution skills. How has this affected America, and what can be done to change this?”
I knew I was an anomaly in my orientation group at my university. My new friends hailed from schools called College Prep or American Heritage, their pathways to matriculating at an elite college carefully micromanaged since their inductions into exclusive preschools. My two college best friends had attended private institutions since birth, and my old roommate graduated with a class of twenty.
I began public high school in 2001 as one among 730 freshmen. I graduated with around 520 students, a generous portion dropping out during freshmen and sophomore year. Many of my college classmates may have spent their adolescent years in a one building haven they took standardized tests to gain admission into, clad in legacy sweatshirts from their parents’ alma maters. My typical path to homeroom involved navigating around security guards. It was not uncommon to see some of my female classmates sporting mommy-to-be shirts or police cars arriving on campus to arrest fighting students.
My high school was practically a microcosm of America, composed of people from different economic and racial backgrounds, people of all faiths and abilities. Some of my classmates eventually were accepted into doctorate programs or drafted into professional sports leagues. But there were too many who became parents in their teen years, entered rehab, and took up minimum wage jobs as their career, shelving their dreams at all too young an age. Unfortunately, it seemed like my school catered to this majority, people who entered associate degree or technical programs after high school. I agree that some education is better than none, but it seemed as if the school did not know how to adequately assist the minority of successful students. My guidance counselor had not even heard of my two top choices for college, which were among the best universities in the country. My college search and application process was a solo endeavor, my letters of recommendation generic templates with one teacher ascribing me with the wrong gender. Each teacher and counselor had countless numbers of students to attend to. It was sink-or-swim.
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