A high-school essay taught me about life beyond X-Factor America

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/22/x-factor-america-high-school-essays

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The college application essay is a rite of passage in the US, an audition piece in which the student applicant must demonstrate that, as well as being able to string a sentence together, he or she can write a story exemplifying determination, passion or commitment to a cause, or – danger! – illustrate an area of personal development.

After 10 years of The X Factor and America’s Got Talent on TV, these 650-word backstories can be so bent to fulfil the dare-to-dream narrative that guidelines warn students to “remember that you are introducing yourself to a college – not a roommate, a psychiatrist or True Confessions magazine”.

Related: Dreamers no longer face legal barriers to college, but cost burdens are just as bad | Amanda Bennett and Carlos Gutierrez

A couple of weeks ago, I volunteered to help a group of high school kids with their essays. As we settled down in the library, I told my group that, thanks to movies like Mean Girls, many Brits find the notion of American high school frankly terrifying. “That’s the suburbs,” they shrugged. “It’s not really like that here.”

It wasn’t. The school, in a low-income neighbourhood, had a police presence at the entrance and everyone going in had to put their bags through an x-ray machine. I don’t know what kids at the private schools write about, but most of these students had been through experiences that threw them up against very adult political realities, the only upside to which was not having to look far for material for their college essays.

One boy wrote about the day his father, an undocumented immigrant, was pulled over for a minor traffic violation and promptly deported. Another pupil wrote about coming to the US from Central America a year earlier, leaving her mother behind and learning her perfect English from scratch. With skill and charm she wrote that being an introvert was harder than being an immigrant.

You could still see the influence of the entertainment industry: no matter how sophisticated the essay, there was a gravitational pull towards ending on a positive note. The students also felt pressurised to identify a single guiding “passion”, which at 16 years old can be demoralising. But their curiosity was intense and wide-ranging. It was also sobering. The students all asked if there were immigrant kids in Britain and, if so, what the government “did” to them. There was nothing academic about this enquiry.

All Trumped out

“At least you don’t have Donald Trump,” said one boy gloomily, referring to Trump’s message to “send back” undocumented Mexicans in the US. The joke of Trump’s candidacy has worn thin at this point. Writing in the New Yorker this week, David Remnick makes a chilling comparison between Trump and Charles Lindbergh, the American aviator turned fascist agitator of the 1940s: “Trump is willing to say anything – anything racist, anything false, anything “funny” – to terrify voters, or rile them, or amuse them, depending on the moment.”

Talking to the high school kids it was apparent that while Trump’s buffoonery has at times been entertaining to some, to the actual targets of his anti-Mexican rants he has never been anything but a threat.

Dystopian snapshot

The right in the US hates big government, even though these days big government is secondary in reach to the tech industry. I was poised this week to cancel Dropbox and take advantage of Amazon Prime’s unlimited free photo storage. At the last minute I hesitated. Amazon already knows what I read, watch and what my children eat (the company also owns diapers.com, one of the biggest US purveyors of baby supplies). Its rivals may be no less mercenary, but their tentacles aren’t as long and handing over the baby photos felt like the first step on the road to a dystopian future – one where we were so busy being entertained, we willingly gave away the keys to our lives. I declined their kind  offer and kept things as they were.