My response to people's apparent desire for a school for internet nerds.

This afternoon, Hannah mentioned in passing how fantastic she thought it would be if there was a school full of just awesome people, and all the non-awesomes were sent away. Of course, she intended it quite innocently, but it started an extensive line of thought on my end about what such a school would, indeed, entail.
The very first, very obvious question one has to ask themselves is, who would be able to attend this school? Who is, in the minds of this school’s admissions board, ‘awesome?’ Would this school fall for the same, typical school issue of defining greatness on academics and testing scores alone? Hannah’s school seems to more be the student’s idea of awesome, a friendly, ‘cool,’ maybe slightly eccentric person who would frequent Tumblr and take slightly hipster photos of themselves. And this raises the other interesting question of, when did the word ‘awesome’ begin to take on this connotation (at least in this community, the community Hannah means when she speaks of a school of merely awesome people) of someone slightly nerdy, the kind of person who reads John Green books and Harry Potter and enjoys Nutella? The answer is, quite obviously to anyone OUTSIDE of this community, that this image is what the majority of the people in the group identify with. That is awesome because it’s what they are; that is awesome because it’s the social norm. In a community of students who all focus very hard academically, the person who is most adept at this is awesome; but, as is far more often the case, a community of students who do poorly academically and focus more on athletics will alienate an academically adept teen and socially reward the receiver of the most sports achievements as opposed to scholastic ones, despite the more obvious applicability of an intelligent student gaining approval in a place of learning. So, in point- people associate awesomeness with themselves, and the social norm of the group in question, and associate uncoolness with someone who is either obviously better at something than them, or very obviously worse, as it is often deemed ‘uncool’ to hang out with someone who doesn’t have many skills and is considered unpopular by the masses and those who are Awesome. Tumblr and Hannah’s definition of awesome reflect this, even through the anonymity of the internet- people on Tumblr who post pictures of themselves looking beautiful, who are artsy enough to create some art, who have a pretty face and a nice sense of humor and already plenty of friends- these people are more popular, are considered more unreachably godlike, than the people who can write thirty page papers on Awesomeness or who may be far more adept at computer skills, despite the fact that the whole area of interaction is through the computer. Obviously I am a poor person to speak to about awesomeness and cool because I clearly fall into the uncool category of the paper-writer.
Moving on, who is to judge this awesomeness? If ‘awesome’ is merely based off of one’s own ideals and abilities, then the Admissions Director of the School of Awesome would almost inevitably fall into the trap of placing anyone in the school who was similar to themselves, or who idealized them (because everyone likes people who like them). If there was no official admissions director, the school would be flooded with people who considered themselves awesome (because many people do, you know) and would lack some of the very most awesome people who consider themselves horribly uncool (because many of the best, most amazing people, in my opinion, are those who are honestly too humble to believe that of themselves- these people naturally gather a fair amount of background support but never really realize that their popularity is, in fact, popularity, and not pity or just normality. They are truly ignorant of their position). So, I believe the school would have to have an admissions director, merely because one of the main parts of the whole idea was that non-awesome people wouldn’t be allowed to attend. Would this be because they wouldn’t be admitted in the first place, and, if they were accidentally chosen for the school (like if a muggle were somehow let in to Hogwarts) they would be sent away by the school’s administration, or would they merely be chosen and sent away by the students themselves, like a larger, more inclusive version of a regular school’s ‘cool’ group, where those who did not fit in would actually be forced to leave the school?
On some level, all societies function on this basic idea- if you don’t fit in with everyone else, we don’t want you here. Schools try to prohibit this as much as possible, forcing students in and maintaining the balance between social classes as well as possible, and the students do it some themselves, too, allowing the formation of several different groups, where the nerds can be and the athletic people and the artsy ones, but there’s still a lot of alienation, where a certain student isn’t accepted in any of these ‘clicks,’ or goes to a school that’s small enough that there aren’t enough students to form the group that they would generally associate with.
On a wider level, most neighborhoods are like this- sitting up on the hill that overlooks Sunnyslope, where I live, I noticed how, for the most part, our entire little area is just one-level, white houses. The people there, living their own little individual unique lives, are still very much the same. Our neighborhood is lower middle class. Most of the people are Hispanic, and therefore share the same but slightly different households of large, Catholic families, with woman who cook and men who sit on the lawn and drink and children who watch noisy television and play basketball in the street. They are all very kind to us, but we do not fit in. We are not Catholic. We are not Hispanic. We are no lower middle class. There is only one child in our family, and the wife of our household works full time and does cooking only part of the time. We do not fit the social norm. We are not awesome. After living here for nearly sixteen years, we are the oldest family unit nearby, but we still do not fit as part of the community. When attending neighborhood events, we attract strange looks and no one starts conversation with us. We are not encouraged to leave, and only very rarely do we receive a gesture that is anything but polite, but if this was to be the only community my family participated in, if we had no other social endeavors, I am very certain that we would have left shortly after I was born.
I’m afraid that the school would attract people of all the same views and opinions, and start to stagnate. Without varying beliefs and thoughts, there is no growth; without rebellion, faulty systems are never improved. The internet and school systems that are forced to accept anyone allow for the debate that is required for thought on important issues; disagreement spawns interest and research into events outside your social bubble. As the attendee of a private school for the past nine years, I can honestly say that I have been very upset, on occasions, to be the only person at the school who is Democrat, who is not Catholic or Christian, who values environmental issues and animal rights. I have been alienated and bullied and hurt mentally and emotionally for my beliefs and my disagreement with the beliefs of other students. But I would not have traded in this experience for any other academic one, because I believe that facing this adversity has really helped me to establish what exactly it is that I believe, and this diversity from my own opinion in my school has helped me realize just how important it is. Of course, it would be an amazing relief to be at a school where I was accepted, and people shared my views and did not persecute me for them, but I wouldn’t learn anything from it. I wouldn’t learn what other views there are in the world, or how the struggles that others go through, or what differences there are between me and those coping with physical and mental stress I still can hardly fathom. Most importantly, however, I wouldn’t understand that even those who are different from me, who are better or worse than me at whatever individual respective talent is being described, can still be awesome.