7 August

Why do I continue to talk about high school/adolescent culture? Again because it’s our culture. Those who don’t believe it, consider this. Humans in the West from the age when they can just walk and talk attend school for their entire childhood, and into their first years of adulthood. That’s the culture they grow up in, and enter adulthood with. Schools don’t just transmit knowledge; like every workplace, schools generate a culture. That’s what we learn from school, much more than ‘content’. For example ‘peer pressure’ reflects that at school kids take their cues from other children as to how to think and behave, rather than parents, other adults or relatives. That shift from basing your knowledge and behaviour on custom and tradition and existing social hierarchies, to basing it entirely on your interaction with ‘peers’, transformed Western culture profoundly. That’s Donald Trump in the middle, at high school.