College really opens your eyes to how lame high school was.

It doesn’t matter what clique you fit in – or if you were in one at all – high school wasn’t much fun for anyone, yet it is an obsession for teen films and clichés of pop culture. It shouldn’t make such a large impact in our lives, yet once we finally escape the incessant drama and step into a more real environment, it still influences some of us like a nagging nightmare. And like the cold sweat of a bad dream, there’s always a high school reunion to put graduates  into a frenzy.

A new television series aired, chronicling adults who meet after 20 years for their high school reunion. In it, there was a representative for most of the cliques of the education system: the jock, the popular girl, the spoiled brat, the pipsqueak, the lesbian, the bully and the drama queen. Originally for TV Land, it premiered on VH1 as well (I guess they are getting bored with all those predictable hook up shows and America’s Next Top Model, but I digress). Because it was a lazy snow day on Friday, I watched a little of it and realized that high school is not worthy of the gaga it receives.

High school students are some of the most malicious people I have ever seen. Education programs such as No Child Left Behind and the ACT indoctrinate students to strive only for a number, to stay somewhere in a status quo, or to think only in terms of multiple choice. For some reason unknown to me, traumatic events from hallowed halls can scar some people for life. Ever read Carrie? Those kids needed to get a life. Such cruelty of various degrees runs rampant in the claustrophobic atmosphere reported to be “the best years of our lives” and by evidence of reality shows and the horror genre, can haunt people to their deaths and beyond.

I can remember that my high school schedule was cram-packed with homework from nearly every class, numerous lunch and after-school meetings of various clubs, and ACT anxiety attacks. For 35 hours of the week, I was slave to the administration workload, as well as any more time I could spare to keep good grades. All the while, we were told college horror stories that could trump any campfire ghost. As naïve high school students, we were given a latent course study entitled College Phobia and Learned Psychosis (the title varies from student to student).

But once I arrived, after I flipped the tassel to the other side of my graduation cap, I realized how much better I and other high school survivors have it now. For 15-18 hours a week, we go to classes that, for the most part, we choose to attend; we learn much more in a semester than what we were force-fed for a school year, be it Algebra or British Literature. We are not standardized tested to death, or at least I don’t think so. In short, I realize that I was lied to by my former place of knowledge. Perhaps they felt that it would be for our own good to develop an anxiety for the years to come in later education, to expect mind-numbingly-hard classes, to battle unpassable professors who expect you to know their favorite episode of Gilligan’s Island for fear of failing grades. Some of those iconic figures of college do exist, but not by any means the way I was taught in College Phobia and Learned Psychosis. I guess I ended up failing that class after all, but I can live with it, because none of us earned credit from the course anyway.