Do other countries in the world have the same experience?
I am not at all nostalgic for high school, it was a nightmare. Don’t know anyone in real life who thinks it was a good part of their life.
It’s a common setting for stories from all over, though. Coming - of - age stories are eternally popular. And here, kids are in high school as they transition from child to adult, so that’s where many of those stories are set.
I dunno if you watch anime but most mainstream ones start off with a high school kid discovering they’ve got a special gift.
Because the midpoint of a human lifetime, in terms of subjective experience of the passage of time, is at approximately age 22.
Because most people peaked in HS.
Unlike me, I peaked in middle school 😎
I peaked at birth, every choice from that point has been dubious.
Because being an adult in the U.S. sucks. Many people work right out of high school until they retire/die without ever going on a real vacation.
So people fantasize about the time when they weren’t wage slaves.
Largely universal experience. Lots of activities and clubs vs adult hood (sports, rallies, math club, robotics club, etc). High feeling of potential (every is wonder what they will become instead of the are).
Basically the premise for Offsprings “The kids’ aren’t alright” https://youtu.be/7iNbnineUCI?is=W0k-Q5A3aOE9YStq
In Canada we don’t care about it like that.
Canadian high school reunions really aren’t a thing.
I’m just gonna assume my school never had one and not that I wasn’t invited.
I genuinely have no idea, my HS was an absolute nightmare and I hold no nostalgia for it whatsoever.
“These are the best years of your life” is the WRONG thing to tell a teenager thinking about ending it.
Genuinely this, I was extremely suicidal during my HS years and I havent fully recovered yet.
I don’t think I see anyone else saying it: Because High School was the last school for the vast majority of people. It was the transition into adult life and responsibilities.
In American history a lot of people didn’t even make it to High School. You got enough of an education to work whatever job, or were forced to quit schooling and start working because of family financial needs.
College wasn’t needed for a good paying job that would be enough to own a home, car, have a family, etc.
So High School was the end of the line for being a kid in school and whatever freedoms came with that. Especially for the Boomer generation the economy at the time really allowed a lot more freedoms for High School kids than had ever been available before.
I don’t think I see anyone else saying it: Because High School was the last school for the vast majority of people.
87% of adults graduated high school. 60-70% of high school graduates enroll in a college or university program. So that means that 52% or more of people in the US go to college. Obviously that’s massively location-dependent, but it’s just not true that the “vast” majority of people don’t go to college. It’s about half.
Maybe you’re talking about historically? But it’s been a long time since any percentage you could call a “vast” majority left school after secondary. Certainly the majority or a very large minority of Americans alive today had some college or trade school education.
“Was”. Not “is”. “In American History…”
My use of past tense was deliberate.
The initial question from OP is present tense, though. “Does.”
This is one of the signs of stagnation. Sure, high school was enough education half a century ago but the world continues to get more and more complicated. Why haven’t basic education requirements ever risen to match?
Free public school needs to be through an additional two years of what is currently called college/vocational/trade school
Why are you asking about US when Japan got all that highschool themed stuff?
Yeah I was gonna say, I don’t know if any country produces more high school themed media than Japan.
Wut
The women with plaid skirts and blazers, I assume is the reference
Baby Boomers are the reason why high school became so culturally relevant.
You had a large cohort of students coming of age together at a time when the country was wealthy enough where you had a class of people who had gone through puberty but wasn’t being given the full roles and responsibilities of being adults. This new separate age group between kids and adults was relatively novel.
You also started seeing a major change in cultural forces like music and cinema which catered to this set of consumers. This catering became very important as companies realized this was when adults formed a lot of their tastes and preferences. Cultural output started focusing on this age group as tastemakers.
Also, going forward, music tastes get stuck in high school years.
One of my dementia care protips to new psych workers is that (since music is actually clinically proven to be calming), you can look at the age on their wristband and try whatever was popular when they were 15-25.
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Countless coming of age experiences happen around that time
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A massive peer group, with all the dynamics that entails. For most, it’s the last time they will regularly interact with that many peers ever.
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Because life in the U.S. is all shit after high school.
My life improved markedly after I left high school. For a while, anyway, I loved university.
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We don’t…
Corporations market to that demographic, because their brains aren’t fully developed yet and you get in there before they know better.
For media like TV/movies, it’s partly the same thing, but also lowest common denominator. All the target demos can identify with a story based in highschool because they’ve all lived it.
That’s why in John Wick he avenged his dog, a 12 year old boy understands that waaaaay more than losing a child. So even tho that would make the movie make way more sense, he goes all Liam Niessens over a pet.
In an ultra capitalist society, everything else always take a backseat to marketing, including the plots.
Some Americans “peak” in high school. They were popular and/or good at something like sports. After they moved on to university or their first job, they found out the larger world isn’t impressed with their high school accomplishments.
