Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

Fictional High School Breaks Out in Song

With news that the new television drama Glee has been picked up for FOX’s fall season, I have the oddities of high school on my mind. Glee follows a motley group of kids who are the core membership of the McKinley High School glee club, and their club director, Spanish teacher Will Schuester. There are many elements to the show’s plot, but here’s what strikes me: Glee kids are losers. Popular kids (that is, football players, cheerleaders, and the like) mock them constantly – every moment of the schoolday they’re laid open to harassment, teasing, and humiliation. Glee is lame, but if glee becomes cool (as all six kids and their director fervently hope), so will they.

But in some schools, there are no jocks, no cheerleaders, and more or less no richie-rich kids. At Edward R. Murrow, a public high school in New York City, the A-list kids are the members of the championship chess team. Sportswriter Michael Weinreb followed the team throughout the 2005-2006 school year, relating stories of chess club meetings, competitions, and cash games played in public parks; of rivalries and friendships; of talent and obsession with the game; and of the charismatic teacher who coaches the team. The Kings of New York is about the game of chess as much as it is about the Murrow team, and in the end it's a fascinating portrait of both.

The tension between popular kids and losers is at the very heart of the literature of adolescence. Nearly everyone who loves books or movies can cite a few that focus on the struggle for identity, on the horrible things kids do to each other to draw social lines, and the pressure everyone’s under. One of my personal favorites is The Outsiders, by S. E. Hinton*. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, there are greasers, and there are socs – two groups widely separated by economic status, neighborhood, and general outlook on life. Violence between them is common, usually with the clean-cut socs as the initial aggressors, and it's a series of soc/greaser fights that forms the structural framework of the story. But in many ways, it's really about friendship and loyalty, and about understanding the different wisdom and strengths that different people have.

With all of its social pressure, high school is not for everyone. But how are you supposed to build a life after your teens if you don't have an education? You will find answers in the classic guide to unschooling, The Teenage Liberation Handbook. Former middle school teacher Grace Llewellyn provides guidance for kids who want to quit school but keep learning, every step of the way from investigating non-school options to talking to parents to getting into college without a high school diploma. This isn't a guide for homeschoolers, it's a guide for teens who want to set their own educational goals and reach them on their own terms. Llewellyn went on to write another book, Real Lives: Eleven Teenagers Who Don't Go to School Tell Their Own Stories, which should provide would-be unschoolers with more inspiration.

* Library-related trivia: a film version of The Outsiders was released in 1983, after Jo Ellen Misakian (a librarian at Lone Star School in Sanger, CA) wrote to Francis Ford Coppola to ask him to make it into a movie. She attached a petition signed by her eighth-grade students, who loved the book, and had hit on the idea that as a film, more people could enjoy the powerful story. And of course, the library has The Outsiders DVD as well as the book, for all of you who prefer watching to reading – or who just like to try both!