Dear High School
On college, priorities, and a particular paper of yours
…And the people in the houses
All went to the university
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same
And there’s doctors and lawyers
And business executives
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same
And they all play on the golf course
And drink their martinis dry
And they all have pretty children
And the children go to school
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same
And the boys go into business
And marry and raise a family
In boxes made of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same…
- Malvina Reynolds, 1962
I look back on my senior year of high school and think how dominated it became by college. I remember those feelings of deep stress and cutting anxieties that I tried so hard to resist, and luckily did. And I remember the classmates who were all but overwhelmed by them. I would hear murmurs at the ends of lunch tables, spy wary glances they made towards other students’ laptops or sweatshirts. I’d see some seniors twitch restlessly in my calculus class’ wooden chairs, listen to them carefully prod at each other’s desires and plans. Their voices would reverberate across blackboards: “Stanford is sooooo hard to get into,” “my dad said Middlebury sucks,” “apparently Tufts is changing their application process.”
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When my classmates would ask me where I was looking, where I was applying, and what my “safeties” were, I’d struggle to say “mind your own business.” I wish I said that, though usually I’d just be vague in my replies. Then I’d look up and see bored, dull faces of classmates who sent fleeting glances elsewhere. They didn’t care, but at the same time, they cared so overwhelmingly much. They wanted a bolded name, a university to add to their list of calamity and apprehension, neatly organized as everything around them seemed to be lost in the search for a college. It often followed that such a search went without first seeking the self. Instead, anxiety fed anxiety, restlessness restlessness… and their legs twitched on and on.
I knew it wasn’t personal curiosity and it surely never felt like mutual support. In the halls and classrooms, from junior spring to senior summer, there was always this tacit fear — a genuine and widespread worry. Games would begin, head-to-head competition would be implied, and students found themselves making lists: “She’s applying to Chicago, Michigan, Penn, and Brown.” They’d arduously note which schools the “competition” was interested in, and pray to the college gods to please sway him away from Columbia. And it wasn’t just in their heads; someone made a google spreadsheet!
I had a chorus concert the night early decision applications were due to come back. It was cold and dark, Christmastime when the cold air stings but the insides of homes are so warm and smell so much like pine. In between Christmas songs I heard forebodings of college decisions and all my classmates’ pent up stresses. I heard talk of Georgetown and Vanderbilt and Harvard and Princeton, big names but little people, who was going to get in and who was not. The concert ended, and the singers and the orchestra members were treated to a fancy dinner. At a long table in the lunchroom, filled with murmuring classmates and the tenderloins of cows, I sat reserved, happy to have brought a little vegan dinner from home.
But then they started opening their emails and entering their application portals. Sad aws and jealous applause filled the air. My pasta started to feel airy, my chocolate mousse cake from Whole Foods started to falter, drying as I forked pieces up towards my mouth. Oh what a shame. I still think about that beautiful campanelle, its light tomato sauce and sautéed onions and peppers, the vegan Italian sausage too… I dream about that one rich cake slice in its own perfectly sized single-use plastic container — oh what if I was allowed to enjoy my meal in peace? I would wait to open my letter with my family until I got home much later. I left that dining room as soon as I could, frantically bagging up my plastic containers as some feasted on acceptance and others tasted rejection with grilled asparagus. I went home sickened.
It was in the classroom of the man whom I revere most at my school that I was first asked the question why. My history teacher asked a group of students why we were here. For a while we had no answer except the waving of the fan above us. With silence, our reply was the distant thuds and creaks of shoes on wooden floors gilded by carpet. This was my junior year of high school, before the application process had begun, yet one girl replied “college.” This brought weight upon the old schoolroom. We all knew how sad a reason it was… to be here — to wake up early in the morning, to drive here and then back — to wake up, to do homework and to take tests, go home and do more homework, to sleep — to wake up, to sit in class, to play sports, go home and sleep — to wake up and then do it all for four years of doing it again. To wake up, again. And then to find another reason. Some day would it inevitably be a job? A life? A family? A car or house? A retirement and then a death?
“Because we have to” eased the air. It calmed our spirits while we took in our emptiness. Later after some conversation, another said “work,” another: “to do something.” But really, none of our answers were good. My teacher knew it, and so did we.
It’s a privilege that we found ourselves asking why. We were capable of looking beyond, fortunate that the purpose of our lives was not confined to being able to pay rent, keeping ourselves off the street, or staying a-damned-live. The regimentation of our lives from posh private school to posh-iest high school had been our greatest gift. But it can also be a fault, if not realized properly. It can put us into “little boxes,” a burden which only the most fortunate can ever come to bear. It can peel away at our humility — to listen to, and care about, and feel with others who have not had our same opportunity. It can absorb our values and can corrupt us; it can lead us to value what is worthless, take what is not ours, and work for no one but ourselves.
I feel sorry for the seniors at my privileged, gifted, and illustrious school: my classmates, the ones that came before them, and the ones which will follow and find themselves confronted by how to go about the college process. I have pity for a problem of the first, first, first, first world: that, as students reared by our environments to succeed, excel, and achieve — many of us do not stop to question why.
Burroughs is a place echoing and whispering through the halls of stress, anxiety, and obsession. As an attempt to unshackle itself from both the preconceptions and reality of what school is like on the hill — at the college-looking campus on the edge of the city and at the end of the old rail lines, in the sunny, wealthy, flaxen suburbs — the school has moved towards cultivating a more friendly, welcoming environment: one where students would not agonize illness (not for the sake of their own bodily pain or discomfort, but for the terrifying fate of missing a day of school), one where homework wouldn’t consume the student’s hours after school, one where the blue strips of scantron wouldn’t represent all a student has done in school, and one where students can come together instead of sheltering, sad and alone.
My ideal of a school is like that. Students would view their classmates as help, and as peers from which they can learn something. The halls would flow with a stream of smiles and bright faces. Tests would be seen as personal challenges complete with private success and private failure. Grades would be one’s own. College would be a step, a path, not an ultimate ending which outgrows and out-proportions the six years of development we’ve had. My ideal is simple, and it’s spelled right out in the “Philosophy” statement of my high school, but I don’t see it realized. Perhaps one day in the very very distant future, but not today. Not before a simultaneous 700-person epiphany makes school and college, life and a song by Malvina Reynolds all make sense. Not until a two-page spread sent to families looks differently from this:
Names of colleges, bolded in dark, fully capitalized, sprawled in columns on an oversized sheet of thick paper. They are strong, institutional, permanent. You’ve seen some before, and will see some again next year. They give you grand ideas as you conjure them. They are bigger than people. They dwarf the individual. That is their design. And that is this page’s design. Under them, sometimes stacked upon each other are names of people — students. Normal, thin script. They aren’t prestigious, old, and permanent. They come and go, they pass. They’re made of skin, flimsy, non-brick skin. Next year you’ll see new names — different people, under old places.
That pillared page tells us what matters to Burroughs. It says what we prioritize, and thus who we are. We may claim to be stewards of self-expression, identity, and diversity, but really, we value one thing above all else. We throw away our title as a learning institution which brings students together, and instead display a notion of grandeur for all to see. At the end of six long and hard years at school, the student is boiled down, boxed into, and shoved below a college. They become subjects of their universities. Their names become far inferior to their colleges, just as it does when they gaze upon their high school upon a hill.
Why list students and their respective colleges in this way? And perhaps the bigger question is why list them at all? That’s exactly what I asked my school, and they had no real reply. I reminded them that there’s no degree from any in the world which fully validates someone’s ability to succeed in life; that there’s no college which acceptance therein displays a person’s ability to truly understand the needs of others; and that there has never been and never will be a diploma which can truly declare if someone is a good person. I proposed that names not be under colleges. I questioned if we could get rid of them entirely. I wanted my school to change that page, but they didn’t. I wonder if they ever asked themselves why. What an awful privilege and beautiful burden.
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