Frank Kogan

Cis, I was hoping you'd take part in this conversation. I'm sure it varied from school to school, but my guess is where the term is "skater" then there are fewer intellectuals in the group, where it's "freaks" or "punks" there are more intellectuals in the group (also more middle-class kids, though that doesn't meant that only the middle-class kids were intellectual). Anyway, this should take a whole other thread. But here's a brief model: Where a high school's social structure is stable, there are two main popular groups - names will vary from place to place and time to time, but let's call them "Preps" and "Hoods." There are other groups and subgroups, and most people are neither Prep nor Hood but in-between, as are the smaller groups, and everyone is leaning one way or another. The major social difference between the two groups is that the Preps are involved in school extracurricular activities for a good deal of their social lives, while the Hoods won't touch the extracurricular stuff with a 10-foot pole, and they're more likely to smoke and take after school jobs and do other "real-life" nonschool-based things. But both groups are essentially "conservative" in that neither challenges the social structure, which is Prep vs. Hood. But there's a wild card, whom we can call the "artsy-fartsies" or the "beatniks" or the "freaks." And when they're sufficiently strong in numbers they challenge the legitimacy of the Hoods as the main refusal group and the Preps as the main source of respectability and legitimacy, 'cause the Freaks won't totally turn their back on the school's social life but rather might challenge the way the school's run and challenge the Prep's social status straightup, claiming they've got an alternative mode of status and intellect etc. etc. (whereas Hoods had been content to play dumb). And basically what happens is that the Preps and the Hoods start to take on Freak characteristics. Which means that the whole system might restabilize with fewer true Freaks (but more Prep types willing to call themselves Freaks), but the whole culture has become more bohemianized. (And the name shifts tend to follow this bohemianizing, so you end up with Burnouts and Stoners and skaters where previously you'd had Hoods and Greasers.) I have a feeling that Skater is a borderline name, can lean either towards Freak or towards Hood. [In some times and places Jock will be the word instead of Prep and will be only tangentially related to whether someone participates in sports. Ditto for whether Skaters actually skate. About two-thirds of the Preps will have parents who are middle-class and one-third who are working-class; Hoods will reverse this; and the Freaks will tend towards middle-class, too.]

I got a lot of these ideas from reading Penelope Eckert's Jocks and Burnouts. She was dealing with suburban schools in the '80s, the Detroit suburbs, and where race is a huge factor I'm sure things get more complicated. Anyway, how good is the model I've just given? I don't know. In my high school the Freaks were so powerful that the social map kept changing every year.