Comments | justben: School Cliques

justben

School Cliques

Oct 06, 2006 14:08

There wasn't much on the radio on the way in to work this morning, so I defaulted to Boortz. His rants this morning included one on school cliques and the pervasive importance of popularity and social groups in school environments. I've been out of school for a good long while, but I chat occasionally with some folks more recently out of that ( Read more... )

education, society

Comments 15

mr_z October 6 2006, 15:52:07 UTC

It's an attractive hypothesis, but I don't know that it holds up. Fortunately, it is testable. You could look at private schools that do have high expectations of their students and get real data to compare. I get the feeling cliques are present there as well. Popularity though might be influenced by different factors though.

Grammar mea culpa mr_z October 6 2006, 15:53:31 UTC

Even though I said "though" every couple words in that last sentence though.

oneandonlymatt October 6 2006, 18:18:01 UTC

It seems to me that the behaviors that exhibit themselves in cliques are the same ones that lead to prejudice, racism, and the like. I've seen some interesting anthropological studies that suggest our tendency to be suspicious of (and sometimes do harm to) those who are not like us is an ancient survival mechanism that hasn't quite evolved out of us. The theory is that in prehistoric times, if you saw people who didn't look like you or act like you coming over the hill, chances are they were there to club you over the head and possibly eat you. Those who were suspicious of "others" lived to breed offspring who shared those characteristics. That is not to say that we need to be slaves to these often-destructive behaviors. One of the main functions of society is to suppress natural but potentially harmful urges, so (to sum up my rambling) I probably agree with your premise that the situation as it relates to school cliques could be made better by social engineering in the form of changes to the way we approach education. I'm not ( ... )

riff_77 October 6 2006, 18:27:11 UTC

the issue with socially engineering cliques is how, how do you change the cliques once they are formed, the issue lies with what they have been taugh from early childhood. the frist social groups that they are exposed too lead to how they will behave when confronted with new cliques.

zhelana October 6 2006, 19:31:44 UTC

Not to get entirely off topic, but how on earth did you dress and participate in both marching band and football??

oneandonlymatt October 6 2006, 20:07:37 UTC

I didn't march at my own games, just parades during football season. I've heard of people who actually changed at halftime, marched, and changed back to play the 2nd half, but I was far too terrible of a football player to deal with that kind of disruption!

riff_77 October 6 2006, 18:21:34 UTC

cliques are a fundemental part of life.
cliques from a sociology standpoint are what help young people form their personalities and how they will function in the world when they grow older, (hey i never said that they were great at helping humans advance) they create a social path for people to follow. cliques are not just for kids in highschool but also with adults too, every single person is part of a clique for pretty much their life. cliques also create leaders and followers, and a natural social hierarchy . while social order later on in life some what changes because of money and those that we choose to hang out with, but even among those that we pick to hang out with ( picking out who we hang out with = clique) a social order arises and mini cliques form within the main clique.

And an on topic reply... zhelana October 6 2006, 19:35:24 UTC

I went to a private school that did have fairly high standards set for people, and the cliques there were worse than they were for my sister at public school.

Related (and stolen from my friend Brian who stole it from wiki...):

"A granfalloon, in the fictional religion of Bokononism (invented by Kurt Vonnegut in his 1963 novel Cat's Cradle), is defined as a "false karass". That is, it is a group of people who outwardly choose or claim to have a shared identity or purpose, but whose mutual association is actually meaningless in terms of fulfilling God's design ( ... )

radiantbaby October 6 2006, 20:21:58 UTC

I certainly had a much tougher time when I was at my Catholic school than when I went to public school (not to say that the latter wasn't bad as well, but comparitively speaking, the Catholic school was worse). One thing that I noticed in my Catholic school was that a lot of the unpopular kids tended to be the newer kids. There was this sort of tight-knit community standard there were most of my classmates had gone to school together their whole lives (I arrived there in 3rd grade), their parents were close friends who often also went to school together as well, on down the line ( ... )