I went to a high school that everybody always complained about. We always managed to get stacked against the other two high schools we shared our town with; one was public, like we were, and the other was a private Catholic school. It seemed to me that someone was always talking about how we were too poor, or not any good at sports, or didn’t have any smart people, or didn’t produce successful graduates. This unfortunate portrayal made the other schools look better in comparison. It bothered me then, and it still bothers me now, that people were walking around degrading the place that I went to school and was educated, especially when they compared us to the other high schools.
All of the negative comments about my school, and positive ones for that matter, made me vaguely aware of the quality of education that I was receiving, but I never really had any idea what other schools were actually like. I knew what classes and subjects were offered at my school and how difficult they were, so I just naïvely thought that all high schools were pretty much the same.
When I went to college, I was able to meet lots of people who had shockingly different high school experiences, and for the first time, I fully realized the mess that is our country’s education system. Through going to classes and talking to people, I discovered college kids who had gone to high schools that were better than mine, but the vast majority had gone to places that were far less than stellar.
This difference was fully evident when we started classes. One of my first classes as a freshman was composition, and in a short matter of time, I was completely blown away by the sheer number of students in that class who had never written an essay in MLA format. Some had never even written an essay at all.
The next year in genetics lab, we had to make cultures of virgin fruit flies, which I had done as a tenth grader in honors biology. While I thought it was a perfectly normal thing to learn in science class, only a few other people in my lab acknowledged that they had done this sort of an experiment before. Not only that, but most of the students in my class who already knew how to work with fruit flies had gone to my high school.
This all got me to thinking about all the different ways high schools across this country are run. No one ever learns the same thing with the same level of instruction, and no one even has the same extracurricular activities offered from one school to the next. I’ve met science majors who have never learned any chemistry before college. I’ve met very smart people who never had the opportunity to take an honors class because those level of classes just weren’t available. I’ve also met band people who don’t know marching fundamentals because there wasn’t a marching band program at their school.
Just thinking about all of this really made me take a step back and look at my high school education with gratitude. I realized that I was so fortunate to attend a school where I could take challenging, college level classes, be exposed to many different types of activities, including competitive marching band, and, in general, leave prepared for college. So no matter what anybody in town said about it, my high school did its job to a very high standard, and I will always be grateful for that.
