Is this what the real world looks like?

This term, I’ve been doing a community engagement (Andover’s version of community service) called Bread and Roses Cooking. The first Wednesday of every term is when I head out with three other people who are part of the event and we make a salad for Bread and Roses. Bread and Roses serve meals to people who stop by in a hope to help those living in poverty. It continues to impress me how the organization has been sustained for so many years simply through donations from locals. Bread and Roses is able to provide a full three-course meal to every person who walks in through the door. My experience this term doing Bread and Roses Cooking has been very positive. My peers and I are usually very quiet when we’re cutting up the vegetables but on the road, we tend to have some great conversations. 

The teaching fellow who drives us to and from Bread and Roses went to Deerfield so he has a pretty similar account of high school to us. Something that I’ve noticed quite a bit through high school and even in middle school is the “social hierarchy”. There always seems to be the same couple of people who do similar things and act a similar way who are on the “top” of the social hierarchy. Moreso, I’ve found that the social structure which develops within classes almost never shift and that people usually fall into proportionally similar places between middle school to high school. 

Why is that? As a student, we never talk about social hierarchies though it’s tacitly understood by most. I’m curious, of course, there certainly are going to be social hierarchies after college when we’re in the workforce. In any field there will be those who dominate and who rise to popularity through external factors beyond their knowledge or work ethic in a particular field. I wonder how these échelons will be different than high school. Is it still going to be the male varsity athletes on top? I’ve felt like from middle school to high school I’ve almost fallen into the same échelon even though I’ve switched schools and I’m older.  Perhaps this is a natural and inevitable fallacy of an individuals persona, and merely the type of person we are influences how we’re perceived within a large group. 

I wonder how this plays out in the real world. I sometimes believe that Andover is an accurate representation, a simulation almost, of what it’s like to be in the real world. Even though it’s only high school, there are certainly times where I, as a woman, feel judged more harshly as a woman. There are also times where I, as a woman, do really like the certain stereotypes in the real world apply even on our campus. I think implicit biases are also a reality on this campus as they really are anywhere else in the world. When I told our teaching fellow about these points, he told us that there certainly will be social hierarchies in the workforce. They’re different than how they look in high school, though age plays a bigger role. He told me that often times people don’t care about it as much. Still, I have this innate feeling that Andover does embody in part a liberal version of what the social scene in adulthood may resemble. Maybe our teaching fellow is right: we just shouldn’t think too much about it.