High school highly overrated?

High school is often portrayed as being "the best time of a person's life". I beg to differ. High school is but a exceedingly small part of person's life. Does anyone feel like high school made out to be better than it actually is?

• Absolutely agree. I neither hated nor loved it. Just tried to maximize the opportunities it afforded and get on with things.

• I grew up with the John Hughes movie depiction of high school, which didn't exactly glorify high school but certainly made it a hell of a lot more interesting than it actually was. I never smoked pot and danced around the library during detention. I just remember being really bored most of the time, it was in Brooklyn and all we wanted to do was go into Manhattan and get into trouble. I got sent to the principle's office once for saying I thought religion was stupid in class.

• [quote] I got sent to the principle's office once for saying I thought religion was stupid in class. Shame. They'd have done better to give you more time in English.

  The%20Principal

• Very few people think of high school as the best time of their lives, and quite a lot think of it as the worst. I thought the cliche was that college is the best time of your life. I mean, you're partially out from under your parents' thumbs, and you get to drink.

• The principal is your P-A-L.

  Mary%20Richards

• I love r5

• I agree with R4. College was the best time of my life. High school had its ups and downs. My freshman year was fun. Sophomore year first half was ok, second half sucked. Junior year kind of sucked for the most part. My senior year I started to realize not to take it all so seriously and it was better than the prior two years. College was fun the whole time.

• I liked graduating from college, getting a job, my first apartment, and a car. I liked being on my own and felt truly free for the first time -- in those years, work only wanted your work, it didn't demand your whole soul. There are no pre-fabricated cultural expectations laid on those early years. No one then ever made films about how it is the best time of your life. It was free to be as it was, and it was a free and happy time for me.

• [quote]I grew up with the John Hughes movie depiction of high school, Weird. I was about to say the same thing. It didn't seem like culturally people thought of it as "the best time of their life." It seemed pretty much understood that it was something to suffer through until it was over, which is how I thought of it. At the very least, people understood it was ostensibly preparing you for college and adult life. And it was kind of tacitly understood, at least among my crowd, that those having a good time--the cheerleaders and football players etc--were at a high point, which was actually kind of SAD. The culture's youth and high school fetish came later imho, and has something to do with the culture of social media, helicopter parenting, and reality tv. It almost seems like every high school kid is now a golden quasi-celebrity, things like prom are a huge industry, and yeah, that time is supposed to be 'the best in your life.'

  glad%20to%20be%20an%20elder

• It's the best time of a STRAIGHT person's life. It only goes downhill for them after high school. Just take a look at your hetero classmates on Facebook. Fat, bald & pregnant...all of them. For gays, life doesn't begin until after H.S.

• High school was four years of hell for me. Students were physically and verbally abusive to me every day for years. I flipped when the teachers and principals joined in the game, and I tried to kill myself. Luckily my family helped me through that and I managed to graduate. Agree with R10. Not sure if it's gotten any better, but at least when I graduated over a decade ago, life didn't start for me until college.

• High School was often the worst time of many LGBTs persons life. College was the better.

• People who say high school was the best time of their life makes me sad. It's like they peaked at 17 and never accomplished anything since then. For myself, whatever present I am in is the best time of my life.

• Many of those "High School Cool" movies are made by the people who had as bad a time as we did, but still can't face the truth of this.

• [quote]High school is often portrayed as being "the best time of a person's life". I have NEVER heard that.

• I once heard that nobody decent had a good time in High School. With a few exceptions, it holds for me.

• When I was a freshman in high school, I couldn't understand why my mom used to tell me she would never want to go back to her high school years. By the middle of my junior year, I began to understand that statement more. By my senior year, I completely understood what she meant.

• When I went to a small private school I thought it would be better in a big public school. It was worse

• HS was just...boring. I grew up in NJ. We couldn't even drive until we were 17, the oldest age in the country. So most of us were still being chaperoned by our parents until senior year. Made it kind of hard to do anything particularly fun. And even then it was just chain restaurants, the movies, and people's houses.

• Yes always. Great fun, but not the end all and be all. It's what you go on from to better things.

  Edga

• [quote]When I went to a small private school I thought it would be better in a big public school. It was worse Same.

• I hated high school

• It was the time of my life when I was most unhappy. But that was at least as much the conditions at home with my family as it was at school.

• I went to both a private Catholic school and public school, so I got both experiences. The private school was smaller by about a third. Both had their issues. I felt like I had way more freedom at the public school. I had never skipped school in my life until I went to the public high school. Surprisingly, though, money and status seemed to matter more at the public school. It was very stratified along those lines. At the private school, different economic groups mixed a bit more.

• Some people think high school is supposed to be the best time of your life. Some people think college is supposed to be the best time of your life. It's really sad to think that people believe that; what are they going to do when high school or college is over? Wait to die? When the "best time of your life" is over, what's left? I knew a girl who was very popular all through high school, valedictorian and all that. She had her little clique of friends and they were oh so happy and had so much fun together. And then...it was OVER. Her friends went their separate ways for the most part; her charmed life had ended. Despite being valedictorian she only got an Associate degree from a community college and got a piddly job as a secretary. She was sharing an apartment with a friend from her beautiful school days; I went there and it was a bleak place, two not very happy women in a nondescript dwelling. She seemed postively lost. It was like her world had disappeared and she didn't know what to do. Later I heard she got married; she and her husband have no children. It always seemed to me that she always longed for those halcyon days of high school and after they were over everything went downhill from there.