by David Brooks
The people in the executive suites believed that the school existed to fulfill some socially productive process of information transmission—usually involving science projects on poster boards. But in reality, of course, high school is a machine for social sorting. The purpose of high school is to give young people a sense of where they fit into the social structure.
In 1954 Muzafer Sherif conducted a famous social-science experiment. He gathered a homogeneous group of twenty-two schoolboys from Oklahoma and took them to a campground in Robbers Cave State Park. He divided the eleven-year-old boys into two groups, who gave themselves the names the Rattlers and the Eagles. After a week of separation, the research team arranged for a series of competitive games between the two groups. Trouble started immediately. The Rattlers put their flag on the backstop of “their” baseball field. The Eagles tore it down and burned it.
After a tug-of-war match, the Rattlers raided the Eagles’ cabins, trashed their property, and stole some clothing. The Eagles armed themselves with sticks and raided the Rattlers unit. When they returned, they prepared for the inevitable retaliation. They put stones in socks, so they could smash their enemies in the face.
The two groups developed opposite cultures. The Rattlers cursed, so the Eagles banned cursing. The Rattlers posed as toughs, so the Eagles organized prayer sessions. The experiment suggested what dozens of later experiments confirmed: People have a tendency to form groups, even on the basis of the most arbitrary characteristics imaginable, and when groups are adjacent, friction will arise.
In Harold’s high school, nobody put rocks in socks. There, life was dominated by a universal struggle for admiration. The students divided into the inevitable cliques, and each clique had its own invisible pattern of behavior. Gossip was used to spread information on how each person in a clique was supposed to behave and to cast social opprobrium on those who violated the rules. Gossip is the way groups establish social norms. The person spreading the gossip gains status and power by demonstrating his superior knowledge of the norms. The person listening receives valuable information on how not to behave in the future.
At first, Harold’s primary concern was being a good member of his clique. Social life absorbed his most intense energies. Fear of exclusion was his primary source of anxiety. Understanding the shifting rules of the clique was his most demanding cognitive challenge.
The students would burn out if forced to spend their entire day amidst the social intensity of the cafeteria and the hallway. Fortunately, the school authorities also schedule dormant periods, called classes, during which students can rest their minds and take a break from the pressures of social categorization. Students correctly understand, though adults appear not to, that socialization is the most intellectually demanding and morally important thing they will do in high school.
The Mayor
One day at lunchtime, Harold paused to look around the school cafeteria. High school would soon be over for him, and he wanted to absorb this scene. Around him he observed the primordial structures of high-school life. Individual students would come and go, but cafeteria geography was forever. From time immemorial, the school Royalty, the clique to which he now belonged, had sat at the table in the center of the room. The Honors kids sat by the window; the Drama Girls, by the door with the Pimpled Young Rockers hanging out hopefully nearby. The Faux Hippies tended to hang out by the trophy case; the Normals, along the tables by the bulletin boards, just to the right of a mix of fringier groups: the Hemp Brigades and the Pacific Thugs—the Asian-American kids who pretended not to do their homework.
Harold was Facebook friends with two or three people in each of these groups, for his gregariousness made him something of an ambassador from the nation of Jockdom to the rest of the school, and he spent large parts of his lunch period walking around the cafeteria exchanging greetings far and wide. As a freshman he’d hung out with whoever was proximate. Then sophomore and junior years he’d been tightly bound into his clique, but as a senior he’d found himself breaking out of it, both out of boredom with his same old friends and because he was growing secure enough in his identity to wander and enjoy people of all sorts.
You could practically see his posture change as he sauntered around the cafeteria, crossing from one cognitive neighborhood to another and falling into each clique’s argot and social rituals. He took on the mood of rushed anxiety when he was with the Honors kids, who were extracurricular sluts and always had somewhere else they had to be. He put his arms around the waist of the leader of the black student group and made the sort of racially charged joke that make all the adults go tense but which the students don’t seem to mind. The freshman jocks, who had to eat lunch on the floor near the lockers, were meek around him, and as a result he was gentle. The eyeliner girls, who cultivated a defensive wall of jaundiced disdain, actually looked cheerful for once.
“The real great man is the man who makes every man feel great,” the British writer G. K. Chesterton wrote. Harold spread a little drop of good cheer wherever he landed. There’d be a group of adolescents sitting around in a circle, their heads bowed, as they silently texted each other notes across the table, and suddenly Harold would appear from above and they’d all look up beaming. “Howdy, Mayor!” one of them would jocularly shout out before Harold moved on, for he had developed a reputation for this sort of lunchroom canvassing.
The Social Sense
Harold had an ability to scan a room and automatically pick up a hundred small social dynamics. We all have a certain manner of scanning a sea of faces. For example, most people’s gaze will linger on a redheaded person in any crowd because we’re naturally drawn to the unusual. Most people will assume people with big eyes and puffy cheeks are weaker and more submissive than they are. (Perhaps in compensation, baby-faced soldiers in World War II and the Korean War were much more likely to win awards for valor than soldiers with more rugged features.)
Harold could intuit which groups permitted drug use and which groups didn’t. He could tell which groups would tolerate country-music listening within its ranks and which groups would regard it as grounds for symbolic exclusion. He could tell, in each group, how many guys a girl could hook up with per year without being regarded as a skank. In some groups the number was three; in others, seven.
Most people automatically assume that the groups they don’t belong to are more homogenous than groups they do belong to. Harold could see groups from the inside. When Harold would sit down with, say, the Model UN kids, he could not only see himself with a bunch of brains, he could guess which one of them wanted to emigrate from the Geek quadrant and join the Honors/Athletes quadrant. He could sense who was the leader of any group, who was the jester, and who fulfilled the roles of peacemaker, daredevil, organizer, and self-effacing audience member.
He could pick out who had what role in any female troika. As the novelist Frank Portman has observed, the troika is the natural unit of high-school female friendship. Girl 1 is the hot one; Girl 2 is her sidekick; and Girl 3 is the less attractive one who is the object of the other two’s loving condescension. For a time, Girls 1 and 2 will help Girl 3 with makeup and clothes and try to set her up with one of their boyfriends’ less attractive friends. But eventually Girls 1 and 2 will let it be known how much hotter they are than Girl 3, and their ensuing bitterness toward her will become more and more obvious until they finally ostracize Girl 3 and replace her with a new Girl 3. The Girl 3s never quite have enough class-consciousness to collectivize and use their combined power to throw off the yoke of their oppression.
Harold had impressive social awareness. And yet as he sauntered down the hall and entered a classroom, a slight change came over him. Harold felt perfectly in control in the hallway. But somehow he couldn’t achieve such mastery in class, with the reading material. His social genius didn’t seem to lead to academic genius. And in fact, the parts of the brain we use for social cognition are different than the parts we use for thinking about objects, abstractions, and o
ther sorts of facts. People with Williams Syndrome have impressive social skills but are severely impaired when dealing with other tasks. Work by David Van Rooy suggests that no more than 5 percent of a person’s emotional perceptiveness can be explained by the sort of overall cognitive intelligence we track with an IQ score.
Sitting there in the classroom, waiting for the lecture to begin, Harold would lose the sense of command he possessed in the hallway. He looked over at the brains in the front of the room and decided he wasn’t one of them. He could get B+’s and say productive things in the classroom discussions, but his was rarely the answer that made the teachers glow. Somewhere along the line, Harold had concluded that he could do decently well in school, but he was not intelligent, though if you had asked him what being intelligent means, he wouldn’t have been able to give a precise answer.
Hot for Teacher
Harold settled into his seat in English class. Truth be told, Harold was sort of in love with his English teacher, which was embarrassing because she wasn’t his type.
Ms. Taylor had resented the jocks back in her own high school. She’d been more of the sensitive artist in her teenage years. She’d formed her adult identity in accordance with Tom Wolfe’s rule of the high-school opposite. This rule holds that in high school we all fall into social circles and become acutely aware of which personality types are our social allies and which are our social opposites. The adult personality—including political views—is forever defined in opposition to one’s natural enemies in high school.
Ms. Taylor was thus forever destined to be in the camp of artistic sensitivity and opposed to the camp of athletic assertiveness. She was in the aloof-observer camp and opposed to the camp of the mindlessly energetic. She was in the camp of the more-emotional-than-thou rather than in the camp of the more-popular-than-thou. This meant she was always exquisitely attuned to her superior emotions, and it also meant, unfortunately, that if she wasn’t having an engrossing emotional drama on any given day, she would try to make one up.
During young adulthood, she moved through her Alanis Morissette, Jewel, Sarah McLachlan phases. She marched and recycled and joined the boycotts of the virtuous. She could be counted upon to be moody at big events—proms, weddings, senior week at the beach—in a way that set her off from the carousing hordes of callow youth. She wrote embarrassingly sentimental notes in other people’s yearbooks and impressively found her way to Hermann Hesse and Carlos Castaneda even though no one else her age had ever heard of them. She was something of a prodigy when it came to being overwrought.
But she grew up. She smoked in college, which gave her something dispassionate and cynical to do. She also had her years in Teach for America. During that time she saw what being really screwed up was all about, and it made her less enamored of her own crises.
When Harold met her, she was in her late twenties and teaching English. She listened to Feist, Yael Naïm, and the Arcade Fire. She read Dave Eggers and Jonathan Franzen. She was addicted to hand sanitizer and Diet Coke. She wore her hair too long and too natural, to show she wasn’t on the job interview/law associate career track. She loved scarves and wrote letters longhand. She decorated her walls, even over her desk at home, with didactic maxims, most of them in the nature of Richard Livingstone’s observation, “One is apt to think of moral failure as due to weakness of character: more often it is due to an inadequate ideal.”
She could have grown into a normal person if she hadn’t been subjected to the high-school English curriculum. It is one thing to have to read, over the course of a few years of one’s life, A Separate Peace, The Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men, The Crucible, The Color Purple, The Scarlet Letter, and To Kill a Mockingbird. It is another thing to have to teach these books, period after period, day after day, year after year. One cannot emerge unscathed.
They wheedled their way into her mind. And before long she became a matchmaker. She decided it was her role in life to look deep into her students’ souls, diagnose their core longing, and then match that person with the piece of middlebrow literature that would uniquely change his life. She would stop her students in the hallway, and she would press a book into their hands, and with a trembling voice she would tell them, “You are not alone!”
It had never occurred to many of these kids that they were alone. But Ms. Taylor, perhaps overgeneralizing from her own life, assumed that behind every cheerleader, behind every band member, behind every merit scholar there was a life of quiet desperation.
And so she offered books as salvation. She saw books as a way to escape isolation and feel communion with Those Who Feel. “This book saved my life,” she would tell her students, one by one, in hushed whispers after class. She would invite them into the church of those who are redeemed by high-school reading lists. She would remind them that when times are dark, when the suffering is unbearable, there is still Holden Caulfield to walk this path with you.
And then she would kvell. Her eyes would well up. Her heart would be touched. Sometimes just looking at her in this saccharine state was enough to give an average adult diabetes. But there was one other fact about Ms. Taylor that was undeniable. She was a great teacher. Her emotional neediness was all directed to the task of reaching teenagers, and in that business subtlety and reticence have no place. All of the sentimental qualities that made her hard to take in adult company made her a superstar at school.
Her Method
Ms. Taylor was one of those teachers who understands that schools are structured on a false view of human beings. They are structured on the presupposition that students are empty crates to be filled with information.
She couldn’t forget the fact that other people are weirder and more complex than we can ever know. She taught adolescents, so the brains of her students were going through a period of tumult that is almost like a second infancy. With the onset of puberty, humans enter a period of ruthless synaptic pruning. As a result of this tumult, teenagers’ mental capacities don’t improve in a straight line. In some studies, fourteen-years-olds are less adept at recognizing other people’s emotions than nine-year-olds. It takes a few more years of growth and stability before they finally catch up with their former selves.
Then of course there are the hormone hurricanes. The pituitary glands in her female students are suddenly churning to life. Just as in early childhood, estrogen is flooding their brains. That deluge produces a sudden leap in both critical thinking skills and emotional sensitivity. Some teens are suddenly sensitive to light and dark. Their moods and perceptions change minute to minute, depending on hormonal surges.
In the first two weeks of a teenage girl’s menstrual cycle, for example, surging estrogen levels seem to make the brain hyper and alert. Then in the final weeks a wave of progesterone sedates brain activity. You can tell a teenage girl that her jeans are cut too low, Louann Brizendine writes, and one day she’ll ignore you. “But catch her on the wrong day of her cycle and what she hears is that you’re calling her a slut, or telling her she’s too fat to wear those jeans. Even if you didn’t say or intend this, it’s how her brain interprets your comment.”
As a result of hormonal surges, boys and girls begin to react differently to stress. Girls react more to relationship stress, and boys, with ten times more testosterone pumping around in their bodies, react to assaults on their status. Both have a tendency to freak out at the oddest moments. At other times, they can be astonishingly awkward. Ms. Taylor wondered why her students were generally incapable of smiling naturally in front of a camera. Plagued by self-consciousness, they put on these uncomfortable half-smiles that made them look like they’re going to the bathroom.
Her general presumption was that while she’s trying to teach English, every single boy in her class is secretly thinking about masturbation. Every single girl in her class is secretly feeling lonely and cut off.
Ms. Taylor would look out over a sea of faces in her classes. She’d have to remind herself that those placid and bored expressions are d
eceiving. There’s mayhem within. When she puts a piece of information in front of a student, that kid’s brain doesn’t just absorb it in some easily understandable fashion. As John Medina writes, the process is more “like a blender left running with the lid off. The information is literally sliced into discrete pieces as it enters the brain and splattered all over the insides of our mind.” “Don’t exaggerate the orderliness of their thoughts,” she’d tell herself. The best she could hope to do was to merge old patterns already there with new patterns from what she was trying to teach. As a young teacher, she ran across a book called Fish Is Fish. It’s about a fish who becomes friends with a frog. The fish asks the frog to describe the creatures that exist on land. The frog complies, but the fish can’t really grasp what he’s saying. For people, the fish imagines fish who walk on their tailfins. For birds, the fish imagines fish with wings. Cows are fish that have udders. Ms. Taylor’s students were like that. They had models, imposed by their experience, which caused them to create their own constructions of everything she said.
Don’t think the methods teenagers use to think today are the same methods they will use tomorrow. Some researchers used to believe that people had different learning styles—that some people are right brain and some are left brain; some are auditory and some are visual learners. There’s almost no credible evidence to support this view. Instead, we all flip back and forth between different methods, depending on context.
Of course, Ms. Taylor wanted to impart knowledge, the sort of stuff that shows up on tests. But within weeks, students forget 90 percent of the knowledge they learn in class anyway. The only point of being a teacher is to do more than impart facts; it’s to shape the way students perceive the world, to help a student absorb the rules of a discipline. The teachers who do that get remembered.