A clique by any other name

Social segregation continues into high school, although popular kids may not admit it

April 13, 2010

NU Magazine – April 2010

The four of you walk to school every morning. You eat lunch together, talk together, and spend almost every waking moment surrounded by each other.

You have an “unbreakable bond,” one that can never be replicated. But you’re really not alone; there are 15 other groups just like yours. The only difference? The people within them.

Infamous lower school cliques make children feel loved and excluded, hated and revered. Luckily, that “unbreakable bond” usually dissipates before high school begins. Maturity sets in, so they say, and those definitive barriers that had previously prevented people from becoming friends lessen.

But is that true? In high school, do cliques disappear or persist under the radar?

Yes and no. In high school, as we mature, that feeling of segregation among younger children fades, resulting in a decrease of cliques. But that fading is not always foolproof.

If certain children belonged to a popular clique in middle school, then most likely they will argue that there are no cliques in high school. Assuming they stayed “popular,” they’d see no reason to acknowledge that they belonged to an exclusive group. Such kids are so ignorant of their surroundings they blind themselves to the truth.

Members of unpopular cliques, meanwhile, who felt the group segregation more strongly than their popular peers, may see this in a different light.

In extreme and yet still fairly common ones, these teens recall the verbal abuse they endured when they were younger, leaving them scarred. Kids who feel cliques exist may in fact harbor suppressed feelings of jealousy and anger toward kids who hurt them in the past. To them, there is still a distinction between those who are popular and those who are not, and while cliques may have blurred, the distinctions remain.

Do cliques persist in high school? From all I have seen, it seems probably yes. While some schools may not have distinct cliques, on the whole the distinction between popular and unpopular continues.

While cliques do disappear over time, the damage done by them has lasting effects throughout the high school years. The next time you see a kid in the hall whom you may not have spoken to before, or you even bullied, or you were once bullied by, try to make a change.

And to those who don’t believe in cliques, stop denying their existence and pointlessly bickering about it, and do something about it! Say hi to someone you never spoke to, and apologize to kids you knowingly wronged. For others, it is time to relinquish your pent-up anger.

You never know what impact your words and actions will hold and, who knows — maybe you can be the one to end cliques in your school.

Renee Klahr, 16, attends Rae Kushner Yeshiva High School and is a member of Nu’s teen board.