#barely famous but the ego the administration tried to instill in us says otherwise 😆

[emersonfreepress]

As an adult, I look back at my private school past and realize it was a fucking weird system I had grown up in.

Your whole world is your classroom: unlike American school where you move from one class to another, you have only one classroom with a fixed group of people. You grow up with that fixed group. You interact with your other grademates but never with the same level of comfort as you do with your classmates. Oh, and your classrooms become such sacred spaces you can't enter other classrooms without feeling intense discomfort

Your interactions with upper- and underclassmen are almost non-existent. The way my school was designed, each grade had its own floor with teachers patrolling during recess to make sure no one went to the floor they are not supposed to.

If you are a 1st grader, you can't go to 2nd grade floor, and if you are a 2nd grader, you cannot be allowed around 1st graders. Not without an escort and even if you have a legit reason to go, you better get over it fast and go back to your designated space quickly.

At the common spaces like gardens and playgrounds, there would be at least two teachers out to make sure different-aged kids don't get mixed.

I think the goal was to make sure no bullying from older students happened. However, it also made our Big-Little School Programme (meant for middle schoolers to educate elementary schoolers on middle school life) very short-lived because both parties were very uncomfortable around each other and absolutely unwilling to talk.

And because you grew up with that fixed group of people, it becomes a very upsetting event when you are forced to mix up in middle school as preparation for high school. My grade was unfortunately the test group for that method, and we experienced a huge spike up in bullying during middle school because we were all miserable and feeling unsafe around these people we both knew and didn't know. If I remember correctly, it continued until my whole grade graduated.

If you were a private school kid, you are very likely to remain as one until university. But the good news is that you will still get to see your old schoolmates, because they all tend to aim for the same type of high school!

Literally the only reason I didn't recognize a good chunk of my high school grademates while my previous schoolmates did was because I wasn't upper class so I never ran in the same (outside of school) social classes as they did growing up. My mother knew other kids' mothers but her working-class sensibilities didn't mesh well with them so she was rather distant.

Dating is... oh boy. You would be hardpressed to find two kids who grew up going to the same school before high school date. Seriously. Any time I saw one of my classmates date, it would always be with someone they didn't go to the same school with, or someone older or younger than them. Never an old schoolmate, and never a classmate either.

For us, romance did not happen until high school when most of us went to different schools and met other people, and that's besides the cultural differences between us and Americans.

So, yeah. Private school culture, especially if you are rich, is kinda weird and very isolating.

This is fascinating! Wow, thank you so much for this, anon. took me a long minute to get around to reading it all, but I love hearing this perspective. I have thoughts since some of this is so alien and some is so familiar to me!

The Catholic school that I attended for one year of middle school was a bit like that—small enough that each grade was a single class. So all the students had like toddler class photos together and had all been to each other’s (giant) houses and seen each other grown up etc etc. It’s one of only a few social environments I’ve been in where I truly felt there was this permanent, inflexible outsider status stamped onto me. Also it’s just awkward being the new kid with super close classes like that? I was a zombie the whole school year, I couldn’t afford the stuff they did outside of school and barely knew what the heck they were talking about in casual conversation (so I relate to your mom’s distance tbh). I have seen that exact thing you’re talking about from the perspective of the new kid 😅 including that chasm between grades! There were only a handful of exceptions and probably just because some upperclassmen had younger siblings. That’s interesting that they were so strict about different grades fraternizing though… I’ve never heard of that being so strictly enforced in grade school lol

The poor social adjustment and uptick in bullying makes a lot of sense in that situation… My own school system was public and frequently overcrowded—you always met new people, not just every grade but almost every few weeks once you got to middle school. A number of elementary schools get funneled into two middle schools, and then those get funneled into a freshman-only off-campus site of the only high school in town. It was a huge joke in my friend group that we had no idea who half of the people in our graduating class were. Funny because it was true 😂

And the dating! In a school so big, people always end up dating people in their social circles/cliques. Maybe jocks from different social groups date. Maybe classmates with chemistry date. But mostly it’s people having crushes on the cutest whoever in or around the people they already talk to daily. I’ve always found the tropes of fawning over The Most Popular Kid to be so alien and like... made up! Like strictly a movie and TV thing 😆 Even if everyone knew your name we just weren't doing a whole rat race/social hierarchy thing. It was too big a school for that to make sense. No idea what it's like now with shit like clout and TikTok and whatever else the youths bully each other over these days 😅 I imagine it's changed... which makes me sad since that was like the only toxic thing we lacked at that school 😆