tl;dr I went from a mixed race/culture/language school to a monolingual/mono-culture school in South Africa. Two very different experiences.
I'm a European-African. Grew up in a homeland; the traditional Setswana territory in the northern part of South Africa. It was meant to be a home-land, independently governed from the National Party.
Throughout my childhood schools were very mixed, as many South Africans who didn't want to live under apartheid, moved to the homelands instead. This meant all colors and creeds. An example; a long time friend from pre-school was coloured. In a South African context colored refers to having mixed race parents or simply being of mixed race. Being a colored wasn't illegal of course but a white man marrying and having a baby with a Zulu woman was; so they fled to this homeland. I believe that they had actually fled arrest by the South African police, as both my friend and his father refused to ever tell us what the exact narrative was there. About anything else they were completely open.
We never experienced cliques as portrayed in the movies. The atmosphere in school was always very open. Bullies or whatever, pick on outsiders. Outsiders, strangers or just anyone you feel uncomfortable with is a potential "danger"; femmy kids, the nerds or geeks; at the very least The Outsider is an easy target. There were just too many different kinds of people for anyone to ever be labeled The Outsider.
Do you pick on the Chinese kids because they listened to corny electro pop? Do you pick on that group of tiny Muslim dudes because, well, they were tiny?(I walked over one accidentally one day. Came around a corner, felt my hip hit something and the next thing I know this tiny guy is sitting on the ground with a nose bleed.) Do you pick on the Indian kids because their dads aren't shy about under the counter cash deals in their family owned stores? Do you pick on the other white kids because someone might think you racist to pick on non-whites? Do you pick on one of the two Xhosa kids in the school? The gay kids, the mix group of computer nerds... who exactly is an appropriate target?
Who to pick on? Who to form a clique with?
You see? The problem was variety. The other problem was that when you messed with someone there, inevitably were other people, from other friend-groups, who would come and kick your mouth in; an African tradition. Mess with the goose and you mess with the gander. I was always an enthusiastic supporter of communal justice; if you fuck with the tribe the tribe fucks you up.
It was harmonious chaos and a kind of ecstasy.
At the end of the day we all just kind of mixed. My friend-group was about 5 strong by default; three white, one colored dude and an Afrikaans speaking Indian guy. Sometimes guys from other groups would show up and spend a week or so hanging around with us during break times. Sometimes girls. Sometimes one or two of us would disappear to other groups for a while. I was infrequently cheating on my friends with two other groups.
Another long time friend, we called him The Englishman; his grandparents are British and there weren't many of him in the school. He always saw the place as the ass end of the world and couldn't wait to "Get among white people.". Remember here, that "white people culture" was something we did only when our parents got home; I barely spoke Afrikaans outside of home. In reality we had no idea what culture meant outside of the symbols that people hung on their walls; to us it meant that our parents spiced their foods differently. Indian homes are always the most colorful and decorative, cheerful and spiritually decorated with Hindu symbols; as a kid, I'd often imagine having grown up with this one Indian guy's family. His mother always made separate food for me, without all the spicing; this European stomach can NOT do HOT.
But we learned soon enough. And as adults we cannot help but frequently note how glad we are that we had had that exposure in our young years. We see racism, politics, business and all manner of corrupt bullshit going on in this country and after a couple of beers we want to sentence every asshole in the world to experience our childhoods; how can you harm other people?
Apartheid was long gone and the country had seen more than a decade's worth of democracy before I was finally introduced to "my culture". With only two years of school to go we moved to a different town. During the apartheid years the town had been a central point of indoctrination for the Afrikaner population; Church on every corner, bible in every classroom etc. To sum it up, I went from a multi-cultural school to a school where the hard-line, conservative Afrikaners sent their children to get a "proper education"; what you and I would call "teaching your kid to be a Jesus loving racist".
When we had gone looking at schools, I had only seen buildings and shrugged, telling my dad "This is a school. That other place was a school. Let's pick one and get on with it."
It's only when everyone spoke the same language, listened to the same music, heard the same religious and cultural message that I saw cliques. The rugby players (see jocks) didn't speak to the computer geeks unless it was to "bring one down" for being too smart or whatever. I grew up with computers and watched anime and played games but I also cycled, played tennis, cricket and did athletics. I did public speaking and poetry competitions, my parents had always said "Participate." and I had said ok, there was nothing else on the calender.
I wasn't unpopular in the new school, but that was because I had taken advice from my dad. He told me "You wear glasses, you look strange, it's a new school, someone's going to mess with you. You beat him!" So a guy hassled me, I beat him bloody. What made me nauseous was that I'd suddenly gained some kind of "don't mess with the new kid" reputation and this brought one or two spineless hangers on who would have loved for me to be their friend. Respect through violence was a new, disgusting and annoying concept; what this practically translated to was that I ended up protecting a piece of shit who had a compulsion to call other people's sisters sluts, claiming to have slept with them. Every time someone wanted to beat his ass I'd step in and say "I'm not going to allow you to hit him. Do it when I'm not around.". I knew someone was out to get him when he got extra-clingy. It's only in hindsight that I realize I could have just told him to fuck off. This kind of shit does not sit well with me. If you're a man and you have something bad to say about someone else then you have worked for your ass beating. That's your shit, you own it.
The first year in that school was a haze of baffled disillusionment. I couldn't believe that people could be that shuttered and also be living inside South African borders. In the old school no one had cared that the gay kids were gay, everyone was covered under the mob justice understanding. In the new school there were people who had been attending school together since they were five years old and still hadn't spoken a word to each other. Baffling.
In my second year I was in trouble all the time. The school was/is still in the nasty apartheid habit of forcing religion on the pupils. The one Afrikaans Muslim girl in the school was not allowed to attend assemblies because of the prayers, the pastors, the helpful police inspectors who came to lie to us about drugs and STDs, the oh-so liberal lady pastor who taught us that women were, as Pierce in Community phrased it, sex cooks. I had been particularly offended when the one gay kid had disappeared from school for three weeks because his parents had sent him to one of those Pray The Gay Away things. Fuck, I wanted to burn that place to the fuckin' ground.
I remember a pastor holding up Metallica's Master of Puppets album up and telling a thousand school kids, with a straight face and a literal tone that Metallica were Satan worshipers who practiced black magic, hidden messages and all that bloody toss. That afternoon my father received yet another call about my inappropriate behavior. My dad would assure them that my religious and cultural troubles would be addressed with all seriousness at home. And then good old dad would high-five me for the same reasons that he had moved his kids away from apartheid South Africa.
It was only then, after two deeply troubling years, that I'd understood why movies portray school like that. Hollywood almost seems to want to celebrate what they understand as teen culture while completely missing the idea that something has to be completely fucking whack for kids to be so divided, so segregated.
So apart.
I feel very lucky.