Hmmmmm - I don't remember highschool like that at all, thrall. Perhaps it says more about me than about the place. I went to a moderately exclusive place - a private school. My parents made huge sacrifices to send me there (as I now recognize, though at the time I was likely oblivious to most of it).

Perhaps because there was that initial selection for attendance, a lot of the groups that could have existed elsewhere just weren't an option. For starters - there was a school uniform - you wore it - no excuses allowed. You were placed in a class with people of roughly similar intellect and ability - again - that initial selection of actually going to the school meant there weren't huge differences in ability. There were jocks and non-jocks, I suppose, but even there the differences were slight - the jocks played on the school team - and if you were good enough at the game to be there - you played for the school team - end of story. If you weren't on the school team, you were on your house league team - no exceptions unless you were physically incapable of playing the particular sport.

Drama society? Yes - there was one - and you either took part in the major play (as an actor or as a stage-hand/prop/lighting person) or you didn't - but most people were involved in some way - mainly because in the autumn each class put on a dramatic presentation as a requirement - we had a thing called "speech class" drama was part of that.

If the place sounds rigid and regimented - it wasn't really - it was highly disciplined - mental discipline primarily - you were expected and encouraged to do the very best you could. Failure was failure to be your best. It was a small school too - the student body was under 400 when I attended - and that makes a huge difference too. Classes were under 20 students, and the teachers were all more highly educated than in the public school system - most of them had, or were working on doctorates in their chosen fields and taught highschool because they wanted to be there. That made a huge difference too - you might not like a particular teacher - but by golly, you couldn't help respecting him (all the teachers were male, as was the student body).

Sure, people hung around with people they knew best - but it tended to be on class lines - not social class - but class-room - you spent so much time with the people in your class you tended to hang with them - to 10B (for example) would be a clique I guess - because the only way to be a 10B'r was to be assigned to that classroom. We didn't move between periods either - the teachers did.

Oddly enough - the one thing that didn't follow me out of highschool were any lasting friendships - I haven't kept track of a single person from my time there - nor have I ever been back since I graduated - except for the fifth anniversary of my graduation year - and we were all strangers - we recognized each other - but I don't think any of us had much in common with each other by then. University was a different matter - I have friends from my first year who I still correspond with - not often - we've drifted apart a little over the decades, but we do still keep in touch.

Hmmmmm - reading back through this I guess had I been in a more traditional highschool setting - I'd likely have fallen in the brain/nerd/loner group.