When I was in high school, I was the senior class president of a graduating class of about 200 students where sometimes it seemed like every classmate was more talented than the next. A public high school in southern Ohio with a liberal art emphasis, it has won for decades awards for excellence and, every time I have looked, it has made Newsweek‘s annual list of the best American secondary schools. In my era, about 95% of the class went to some sort of university or college. When I showed up at Duke University three months after graduating, two high school classmates joined me in Durham, one a pre-med student who became a doctor and an author, and the other an aspiring ballet dancer and actress who eventually became an executive at a well-known American corporate powerhouse. Two of the three of us had also been accepted at Dartmouth. [Well-rounded] It changed my life in many ways–and I am thankful for it.
But it was still a high school: an American one with young, growing, changing and often frustratingly flawed humans in it