We all have that one family member who illustrates high school as "the best time of your life." "Oh, you're going to just love it!" they exasperate, followed by annotations from their teenage years. If this was anything like your high school experience, that's wonderful. However, for people such as myself, high school played out a little differently. High school was hard. It was a time where the tough realities of life hit seemingly all at once. Where new issues such as body image, difficult decisions about your future, mental illnesses, and family problems arose. In high school, or at least in my experience of it, you start to lose your naive outlook toward tough situations that impale society, and you are faced with dealing with them.
I am lucky enough to say that I grew up in a beautiful area of southern California called Palos Verdes. Surrounded by the sea, great schools, and very wealthy communities, Palos Verdes truly was its own "city upon a hill." It was its own bubble, and though I am so thankful to have been raised in that city, I was rarely exposed to much of reality beyond the lavish houses and green golf courses. This much is true with many children – they grow up in their own bubble, focused on friends, crushes, and popularity. And then high school hits, and something changes. That bubble is popped and it can be very challenging to navigate the cluster of affairs both society and your personal life present itself.
As childhood dissipated away, so did my naive mindset. The severity of my parents' divorce, my ongoing struggle managing my type one diabetes, and realization that society wasn't as perfect as that bubble set it out to be sunk in. I am not the only one, either. Thousands of kids embarking high schools struggle with similar issues upon entering these four years, and in dealing with them, they are told to go talk to a counselor if he or she needs to.
I didn't want to talk. I was tired of talking and venting and crying, only to repeat the process the next time I went to see the counselor. I wanted to learn. Why? Why is it that some kids go to school hungry, while their classmate pulls out a 40-dollar plate of sushi? Yes, I know the statistics. Almost half of marriages end in divorce, one in three women will develop body image issues, numbers, numbers, numbers. Why? What's happening within our social construct that create these statistics? Learning the why behind these numbers would have helped me establish an understanding of how to cope with them.
Then I entered my first sociology class in college. "The family in society" was the basic introduction to the study of sociology, and as I sat starry-eyed in every lecture, questions I had been asking myself since my high school years were answered, and my understanding of the confusion I had faced in those years seemed to all work itself out. Now a declared sociology major, I wish I had had access to this material in high school.
Subjects such as psychology are starting to make their way into high schools. However, while I find the subject intriguing and extremely important, I feel that learning about the functioning of society is an important foundation to have before delving into subjects focusing on such heavy matter geared toward the individual. In discovering society, one can more easily discover themselves.
In a world where opinions on social issues flood every social media site, should we really leave students to learn about social issues via Twitter? Students need to be properly informed on social issues through education. Sociology needs to be introduced into the school's curriculum so that students can understand this new and daunting chapter of discovery.
