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Excerpted
from
The
Social
Animal
by
David
Brooks
Copyright
©
2011
by
David
Brooks.
Excerpted
by
permission
of
Random
House,
a
division
of
Random
House,
Inc.
All
rights
reserved.
No
part
of
this
excerpt
may
be
reproduced
or
reprinted
without
permission
in
writing
from
the
publisher.
chapter 6
LEARNING
P
opular, good-looking, and athletic children are the
subjects of relentless abuse. While still young and impressionable, they are force-fed a diet of ugly duckling fables to which they cannot possi-bly relate. They are compelled to endure endless Disney movies thattell them that true beauty lies inside. In high school, the most interest-ing teachers favor the brainy students who are rendered ambitious by social resentments and who have time on Saturday nights to sit at homeand develop adult-pleasing interests in Miles Davis or Lou Reed. Aftergraduation the popular and good-looking have few role models save forlocal weathermen and game-show hosts, while the nerds can emulateany number of modern moguls, from Bill Gates to Sergey Brin. For asit is written, the last shall be first and the geek shall inherit the Earth.And yet Harold, forever cheerful, carried the burden of his adoles-cent looks and popularity lightly. He’d had his growth spurt early, andhad been a playground sports star through junior high. The other kidshad caught up with him in size and surpassed him in ability, but he stillplayed with a confidence that inspired deference and respect. Together,he and his thin-waisted, square-shouldered friends were notable fortheir ability to produce noise. Sound radiated out of their pores. They greeted one another explosively across the high-school hallways. If there was a water bottle at hand, they’d play an exuberant game of catchwith it in the cafeteria, and everybody else had to flinch as the bottle
went whizzing past. They swapped blowjob jokes with the pretty girls,which turned some male teachers into titillated spectators and reducedthe sophomores into puddles of voyeuristic awe. They took deliciouspride in the knowledge, never expressed but universally understood,that they were the kings of the school.Harold’s relationships with his friends involved maximum body con-tact and minimum eye contact. They were forever wrestling, shoving,and otherwise engaging in little prowess competitions. Sometimes itseemed entire friendships in that group were built around comic uses of the word “scrotum,” and they were just as foul-mouthed with their fe-male buddies. Harold went out with a string of cute girlssuccessively,as it turned out, from Egypt, Iran, Italy, and an old WASP family from England. Sometimes it seemed he was using Will and Ariel Durant’s
Civilizations
series as a dating manual.And yet he was well liked by adults. With his friends he was all “Yo!Douche bag!” but in parental and polite adult company he used a lan-guage and set of mannerisms based on the pretense that he’d nevergone through puberty. Unlike many teenagers, he could be sensitiveand polysyllabic, and at times he seemed sincerely moved by the globalwarming–awareness pep rallies that were so beloved by teachers andguidance counselors.Harold’s high school was structured like a brain. There was an exec-utive functionin this case, the principal and the rest of the administra-torswho operated under the illusion that they ran the school. Butdown below, amidst the lockers and in the hallways, the real work of theorganism took placethe exchange of notes, saliva, crushes, rejections,friendships, feuds, and gossip. There were about
1
,
000
students andtherefore roughly
1
,
000
1
,
000
relationships, the real substance of high-school life.The people in the executive suites believed that the school existed tofulfill some socially productive process of information transmission usually involving science projects on poster boards. But in reality, of course, high school is a machine for social sorting. The purpose of highschool is to give young people a sense of where they fit into the socialstructure.
LEARNING
73
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