High School: Difference between revisions

[[File:2003877392881690582_rs2003877392881690582 rs.jpg|link=High School Musical|frame|<small>Just one of many [[Sarcasm Mode|highly accurate]] depictions.</small> ]]

''Such a serious thing.

''These pro-blems

''Maaaaaaa-tter."''|''[[Family Guy]]'', on ''[[One Tree Hill]]''}}

There's something about secondary education -- theeducation—the nature of teenagers, the nature of the adults that work with teenagers, parents' expectations that things will be just like when they were a kid -- thatkid—that lends itself to the accrual of strange national customs. Every major country has its own, but as far as 90% of the entries on this wiki are concerned, only three countries' systems actually count -- thecount—the US, the UK<ref> It should be worth mentioning that England and Scotland have different systems, rendering 'British' confusing for actual Brits.</ref> and Japan. (Sorry, [[German Education System|Germany]].) The Canadian system (at least the Anglophone one) is basically similar to the US, the Irish system broadly similar to the British one (though it starts a year later than the British do), and the (South) Korean one similar to Japan (sorry, Canada, Ireland, and Korea.) This entry is primarily about the American one.

The archetypical high school set consists of a single hallway lined with [[Stuffed Into a Locker|wide lockers]], and three doorways leading to a classroom, the principal's office, and a rest room. An interesting note is that in [[Real Life]], many high schools in the southern and western parts of the US are "open-air" -- meaning—meaning, classroom doors open to the outside, and there are no hallways at all. It's [[Egregious]] with the many high school-centric television shows set in California, a state which has almost exclusively open-air campuses. It should be noted that the big gothic-looking schools of film were designed for maximum heat in winter. In the Mediterranean climate where this is less of an issue, open air schools were built to keep classrooms cool, but once air conditioning became universal in schools in the 2000s, the trend went back towards one large building.

As the high school setting is crucial to the formula of the show, producers often find ways to [[NotComic AllowedBook to Grow UpTime|draw out the high school experience]]. Almost all shows start in freshman year. On ''[[Beverly Hills, 90210]]'', an extreme case, the producers actually had the students go to junior year twice. Finally, the cast is often made to attend a [[California University]] to keep the group together.

A word about school dress codes here -- fromhere—from the mid-90s to the early '00s, an entire trend towards stricter dress codes and uniforms in American public schools has developed, peaked, and largely died out with hardly [[No Dress Code|any notice from the creators of fiction]]. There are a number of reasons for this -- itthis—it started after the creators were out of school, the Real Life version of this trend was more common in elementary schools (and never even considered as an option by some 80% of them), varied clothing helps in characterization, the creators want their cast to look cool to teen viewers, the actors can't wear golf shirts and khakis without looking like [[Dawson Casting|computer salesmen]] -- the—the upshot is, if there's a strict dress code in a fictional American public school, chances are it's a [[Compressed Vice]] and probably also a [[Chekhov's Gun]]. Exception: a "no-hat" rule is probably ''more'' common than in [[Real Life]], as it's useful for justifying an absence of baseball caps which make lighting difficult in live action and are hard to render accurately through 360deg in animation.

Fiction tends to regard the [['''High School]]''' and its students as [[Serious Business|central to the workings of the Universe]]. Adult characters will always look back on their high school years as either the best or the worst of their lives, and will remember every detail of their time in high school as if it had just taken place the previous day. This is generally not [[Truth in Television]]; most adults (or at least those who were not abused) barely remember high school, considering it as a relatively unimportant prelude to their real, adult lives. Other times they may hold an idealized vision of high school due to the [[Nostalgia Filter]], blocking out all the stuff they ''hated'' about high school and only remember the stuff they liked. Despite this, high school is about the only experience that a majority of the adult audience is guaranteed to have in common, even if they failed to graduate.

A subtrope is [[Inner-City School]]. When the [['''High School]]''' days are overtly idealized, it becomes [[High School Rocks]].

* In ''[[Angel Beats!]]!'', the high school is eventually revealed {{spoiler|to literally be Purgatory, intended to purify the souls of dead high school students to let go of their regrets.}}

* ''[[Heathers]]'', a [[Black Comedy]] about doing in the [[Alpha Bitch|Alpha Bitches]]es, a [[Spiritual Successor|Spiritual Ancestor]] to ''[[Mean Girls]]''.

* ''[[Harry Potter]]'''s [[Wizarding School|Hogwarts]] is the magical equivalent of both [[Middle School]] and [[High School]].

* ''[[Saved by the Bell]]'' also had the archetypical one-hall layout, though was fortunate enough to have multiple classrooms. It also had unisex bathroom scenes, but less often. To further compound the claustrophobic nature of the set, there exists a [https://archive.today/20160616141749/http://www.x-entertainment.com/messages/486.html theory] that the entire ''Saved By The Bell'' universe is contained inside the school. Furthermore, Bayside High is an example of [[Television Geography]]: in ''Good Morning Miss Bliss'' (The original title of the series), it was Midwestern, moving to northern California for ''[[Saved by the Bell]]''. The selfsame school reappeared years later in ''[[That's So Raven]]'', by which time it had migrated to San Francisco.

** Buffy's high school had the obvious drawback of being built directly on top of a gateway to Hell, which tended to give typical school problems a supernatural and lethal twist (oh, and assuming you got out of the place alive, the Hellmouth still made the entire town a magnet for vampires, demons, etc). The school was written out (rather dramatically) in season three, and back in (with a new and different building) in season seven.

* In ''[[Gilmore Girls]]'', Chilton, being a private school, does not obey many of the standard public [[High School]] cliches. However, plot-driven class lengths are so powerful that the average class lasts about three and a half minutes.