this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2025
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You'd probably hear more about material conditions like poverty, an unstable home, or lack of accommodations at school, so they'd never do it.
But having a time slot dedicated to one person who made it to the top is an early part of capitalist myth making. They want a justification of the status quo, not its condemnation.
the kids with the "lowest" grades were generally not present, unless we're talking about "lowest grade but still actually graduating" which was probably similar. the struggling households put pressure on teenagers to work and provide household income, and that makes the 6-8 hours of schooling wasted time. all the "truant" kids I knew had jobs.
but what used to really drive me nuts as a kid is that the valedictorian was always a safe selection. there was always an "out" for the high achieving student who didn't want the title so it could be passed off to a career-oriented striver... the one who would deliver a message administration liked and not make waves or use the platform to make a statement.
looking back it was a very instructive lesson in how institutional power is deployed to steer people into acting in support of it.
Being real how many teenagers are able to articulate this? The idea that material reality has a measurable effect on people isn't even accepted in most of the USA. The lie of "work hard for good results, people deserve their place in the hierarchy" still has most adults fooled.
Also for the record me and my friends were cool communists who read theory when we were 16 (unironically, genuinely, not a joke). Just gotta flex on everyone who took until adulthood to become cool
It's also safe to assume that the vast majority of teenagers would rather die than get up in front of their entire school to give a speech for the explicit reason that they're the worst student there.
Yeah for sure, also one of the most brilliant people I've ever known, consistently at the top of their class, was a queer person from a poor single parent family, and a lot of the people who underperformed in class were from wealthy farming families. So even if someone with terrible grades had to speak, they probably wouldn't bring up material conditions