REFLECTIONS ON HIGH SCHOOL

This past weekend was my 20th high school reunion. A few months ago as we were planning our summer I knew I wanted to visit my mom in KC so it worked out for me to attend.

Now generally there are two strong polar reactions to memories of high school: either nostaglia for the glory days or shudders of revulsion at the thought of those painful experiences. I am some where in the middle. Mostly I went to my reunion because I wanted to catch up with the handful of friends who made high school fun and memorable for me.

Yet, I can't help being both a little philosophical and also a little catty at the same time, as I reflect on what has happened in the intervening years to people I knew in high school. I wish I was mature enough after 20 years to have outgrown even an inkling of wanting to say, nanny-nanny-boo-boo. But I have to be honest, there was a little of that.

It was a little gratifying to see that some of the jocks and heart throbs had very little hair left on their heads. To see that yes, cheerleaders have become fat, too. And, the people who were stupid but popular, guess what, are working in factories and retail.

Now let me set my high school experience a little in context so you don't think too ill of me: I was a poor but brainy kid. And when I say poor I mean poor - not middle class wish we could afford more stuff. I lived in public housing, bugs and all. There was not enough money to afford a vacuum or a clothes dryer so we swept the rugs with a broom and dried our clothes in the basement. There were many months we didn't have enough money to make it through, so grocery shopping was a challenge - at times you had to buy potatoes, peanut butter and mac and cheese because that was what could feed a family for a week until the next payday. We had a rattle trap old car, ratty out of style clothes and back to school shopping was very limited. I rarely went to school dances or other events because I knew that $20 at a football game or $50 spent on a new dress would only make my mom to go deeper in debt. Now, we were never so poor that we went hungry or had to visit a food pantry, but my teenage years were certainly not your normal middle class existence either.

All this placed me definitely outside the bounds of the cool, popular kids. Fortunately, a serious faith in my early teenage years and academics were the things that saved me from the enslaving inferiority complex so common among the masses of "uncool" kids in HS.

On the academic side, I was on the honor roll every quarter, graduated in the top ten in my class of 350+, and was involved in many school clubs and activities including debate and theater. I was also a committed Christian and did not party like other kids. So while I was not part of the madding crowd, I usually didn't mind being left out, because I had a different set of values. Fortunately I also had some good friends, many of them good Christian kids, who didn't mind that my family had no money.

This gets to the more philosophical, less catty part of my reflection. In a sense my story is a microcosm of the debate in our society about creating opportunities for upward mobility among the poor. Looking at my former classmates, education has been the great equalizer. With a few notable exceptions, the kids who went on to college and received college and professional degrees are much better off financially than those that did not. This is no big surprise but still bears stating.

The other component to upward mobility that is much harder to manufacture from a public policy perspective is an intangible thing that I call conviction and ambition, for lack of a better set of words. I always believed I was meant to achieve something better than the poverty I experienced as a teenager. I knew I would go to college, get a good job, make a decent living, and eventually own a home – in essence the American dream was there for me to take advantage of. Yet, there were other kids from the same housing project I lived in who you knew were going to live exactly at the same socio-economic level as their parent(s), either because that was all they believed they could do or there was no one pushing them to do more and be better.

The other surprising piece is that some of the popular rich kids from high school are probably not doing as well as their parents. The age when most people could make a decent living with just a high school degree died quietly somewhere during my teenage years and left some really unprepared for the world in its current form. It is a little like revenge of the nerds – the quiet studious types who went on to get computer science degrees, law degrees and business degress have seen a lot of financial success, while those beautiful people who did not care about studying are more likely struggling. And this reality is only going to be exacerbated in my own children’s generation. (Read Tom Friedman’s book The World is Flat to understand why.)

In any case, at my reunion I was able to see some of my old friends, hear some funny stories and remember the good times. And that should do me for the next five or ten years or so…