By Dylan Huber

What is school, really? Any dictionary worth its salt would answer confidently that a school is an academic institution meant to educate. The presence of academics is itself thoroughly inextricable from the term “school.” It is the school’s very reason for being.

In this regard, Granada Hills Charter (GHC) is well-established. It is widely considered a rigorous academic institution with a 94 percent graduation rate, and it is most certainly proud of that fact. And yet, this academic existence inevitably finds itself within a very odd dichotomy, for GHC is also defined by something else: unyielding sociability.

Indeed, one can very easily claim that participating in academics is itself a social activity, or that schools were made for sociability just as much as they were for academics. I do not find this to be the case. Teachers, for example, do not have the sort of relationship with students required for a social descriptor. Here, the academic clearly outweighs the social beyond any possibility that any social relationship could be intended.

Learning is an academic activity, not a social one; it does not require any true social interaction to take place. One can quite easily learn without reciprocating a word. Put simply, teachers go to school to teach, and students go to learn, it is inherently no more than that. Schools are definitively, clearly created for the purpose of academics. Their perceived social nature is simply something that arrives from an environment made up of humans.

Despite this inherent purpose, there is overwhelming evidence that sociability is still a crucial part of the school experience. Students converse throughout the day in a variety of ways. This is the simple result of being with other humans.

Structurally, though, the school remains as academic as ever. This is perhaps even more the case at GHC with increasingly shorter nutrition and lunch breaks.

The supposed purposes of school are completely at odds. The structural focus on academics inhibits the social parasite, and the culture of sociability seeps into rigid academics. Rarely, I observe, can the two peacefully coexist.

Things such as group assignments indeed seem to theoretically place the social urge and the academic expectation on equal footing. That does not always prove true, however.

There are two types of groups, those chosen by the students, and those chosen by the teacher. The former will prioritize the social urge, while the latter will prioritize the academic expectation. So even then, there is still a dichotomy between the social and the academic.

Whether GHC is more academic or social depends on the very moment that is being considered. At one minute, the school may be very academically inclined; at another, it is equivalent to a dinner party.

The two will ever pull away from each other, as the structure of the school continues to mandate academics above all else, while the unshakeable social desire found within most students ceaselessly fights back.

Let us imagine an average student. They arrive at the school, ready to socialize with their fellow students, yet that desire is quickly severed by necessary academic schoolwork. They have the chance to talk with others during lunch, yet the existential threat of academics never truly leaves the mind. They can talk with others during class, yet they may be reprimanded for the disruption of academics, or they may fall behind themselves.

Even, alternatively, if one goes to school for academic reasons, they will eventually find themselves, wittingly or not, in social conversations with other students.

Being with other people is conducive to a social environment, yet being in a school is conducive to an academic one.

To go to an academic environment for social reasons is a fool’s errand, and to go to a social environment for academic reasons is equally so. Since the school is constantly changing between the two, there is no further resolution.

Students will continue to arrive with dreams of socializing or goals of academics, and those dreams will continually be crushed, rewarded, destroyed, and granted, by both their own nature and the very structure of the place they are in. Of course, the school should survive. Though, I do at least wish to part one lasting word of wisdom.

A house divided cannot stand.