[Tom-L24148]

Columbine High School sounds pretty typical of American secondary institutions: A clear pecking order, with the jocks and cheerleaders at the top, and then a descending order that everyone there knows, including the teachers and administrators. As in any barnyard, any chicken can peck at any other lower on the pecking order. In a high school, nobody wants to challenge this order - including the faculty - because they will suffer the same fate as the scorned kids. And, yes, even if teachers disagree, they end up complicit because they don't do or say anything that's going to make their own lives miserable. For them, high school is not just a four-year sentence. A few years ago, Carl Berstein (then of the Washington Post) was invited to give the commencement speech at the surburban Maryland high school from which he had been graduated. His speech greatly distressed the faculty, because he said that his own career demonstrated that you could be a failure in high school and still be a success in life. In fact, as I recall, he argued that being a high school success had absolutely no correlation with succeeding in the rest of your life. Most of the students stood and cheered (not, I'm sure, the jocks and cheerleaders). Finally, somebody told them that the all-American high school was not the mold that determined the rest of their lives.

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Name : Tom-L24148, Gender : M, Sexual Orientation : Gay, Race : White/Caucasian, Age : 55, City : Washington, State : DC Country : United States, Education level : Over 4 Years of College, 

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