\n<\/p>\n
The original 2004 movie \u201cMean Girls<\/a>\u201d contained something unusual, both then and now: a main character who was home-schooled. But not that<\/em> kind of home-schooled.<\/p>\n \u201cI know what you\u2019re thinking,\u201d Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) tells us in voice-over. \u201cHome-schooled kids are freaks.\u201d The movie cuts to a tiny bespectacled girl spelling \u201cxylocarp\u201d at the National Spelling Bee. \u201cOr that we\u2019re weirdly religious or something,\u201d Cady continues. A family of boys in suspenders appears; behind them are sandbags displaying paper targets with human outlines. \u201cAnd on the third day,\u201d one of the boys drawls, \u201cGod created the Remington bolt-action rifle, so that man could fight the dinosaurs. And the homosexuals.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAmen,\u201d his brothers chime in.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n It was a funny bit no matter who you were back in 2004, dependent on Bush-era perceptions of home-schoolers as, well, weirdly religious, survivalist freaks who insisted that God made the world in six days around 6,000 years ago. Like everything in \u201cMean Girls\u201d \u2014 and, indeed, Tina Fey\u2019s entire body of work \u2014 it was an exaggerated caricature based on a kernel of truth. Home-schooling in the 1990s, at least in the United States, was largely insular, and mostly the purview of conservative evangelical Christians with views that could appear extreme even to others in the same pew.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n I was a junior in college when \u201cMean Girls\u201d first hit theaters, and the joke tickled me because I\u2019d spent the last few years trying to figure out hierarchies myself: I\u2019d been home-schooled, just like Cady.<\/p>\n Well, not just like Cady. I left my private school after the fifth grade to be home-schooled, and a number of the communities my family dipped into along the way were similar to the gun-toting, dinosaur-loving kids from the movie. (The first time I really felt like my youth<\/a> was represented onscreen was last year\u2019s documentary series \u201cShiny Happy People<\/a>.\u201d) I went to seminars where we were taught that dinosaurs did roam the earth at the same time as humans, that the fossil record was designed by God to mess with scientists, and a whole lot of other things.<\/p>\n Yet I was lucky. I knew home-schoolers who had found themselves left behind academically or, worse, abused and neglected by parents. But others, like me, had a largely positive experience. My family was never as extreme as the caricatures, and I received a good education that served me well when I finally started taking SATs and applying to colleges.<\/p>\n But as many home-school alumni of my generation will tell you, if you grow up to spend your life in more mainstream society, there\u2019s always some bit of you that feels different, a whole lot like Cady. A song comes on at a party or a ballgame, and everyone sings along, and you have no idea what this song is. You see long button-down denim skirts come back into fashion and know, in your heart of hearts, that you absolutely cannot bring yourself to ever put one on again. (Search \u201chome-school chic\u201d on social media to find out why.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n And most important, everything you know about American high school comes from Hollywood. High school movies educated me on what my peers were going through, movies like \u201c10 Things I Hate About You<\/a>\u201d and \u201cClueless<\/a>\u201d and \u201cNever Been Kissed<\/a>\u201d and \u201cBring It On<\/a>.\u201d Later I\u2019d branch out to the films of John Hughes or TV shows like \u201cFreaks and Geeks.\u201d From them I learned some valuable lessons. Cafeterias and gyms are dangerous places. Teachers and parents are mostly irrelevant cringefests. Dances form the apex, or nadir, of your year. And everyone is forced to sort themselves into cliques to survive.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The moral of every high school movie is basically the same: don\u2019t judge a person by her appearance, and don\u2019t be a stuck-up snob or something terrible might happen to you. \u201cMean Girls\u201d was the valedictorian of the genre: funny, quippy, infinitely quotable, larger than life and yet authentic to it. When I later became a college professor, the only movie I could guarantee students a generation younger than me had seen was \u201cMean Girls.\u201d It had that kind of staying power.<\/p>\n In its newest iteration \u2014 a 2024 movie adaptation of the \u201cMean Girls\u201d Broadway musical, in turn based on the 2004 movie \u2014 \u201cMean Girls\u201d has not changed a whole lot. There are songs now and videos shot in portrait mode. There are more queer kids and more kids who aren\u2019t white and Damian now drives his grandma\u2019s mobility scooter instead of a car. But Tina Fey<\/a> is still teaching math (and writing the screenplay), Tim Meadows is still the principal, the feminism is still a tad wobbly, and fetch is still not happening.<\/p>\n