A Formative Experience

Yesterday I looked my high school up on Wikipedia for the very first time. I don’t think I learned much that I didn’t already believe (other than that Sacagewea’s son graduated from my high school). I did learn that the son of a family friend who was a few years ahead of me was now a professor of business ethics at Harvard.

We are all the products of the sum of our experiences plus our genetics plus a bit of chance and innate temperament. Attending my high school was certainly a formative experience for me. I attended on full scholarship—my dad would have accepted nothing else. He was skeptical about my siblings’ or my attending anything but a public high school. Both he and my mom had graduated from public high schools, after all. All of my siblings attended the local public high school and they received good high school educations.

My high school is routinely rated one of the top 20 high schools in the country. Most of the others are well-known eastern prep schools. Entrance was based on competitive examination. Going from eighth grade to my high school was a bit like attending a good, small college immediately. Most of my high school teachers had post-graduate degrees, generally doctorates. Some had more than one. My junior and senior year English teacher had doctorates in theology and comparative literature. My Russian teacher for four years had doctorates in Russian and Italian. By the time I graduated I had the equivalent of two years’ worth of college English, two years’ worth of college Russian, two years’ worth of college Latin, a year’s worth of college math.

I was actually disappointed when I went to college. Not only was the highly-ranked college I attended tremendously easier and less rigorous than my high school but I missed the high quality of my peers. It’s not that my college peers weren’t smart. It was more that not all of them were exceptional.