We do glorify high school, and I imagine that's because it's a fuzzy memory of a pre-1980 (possibly even earlier) US where high school was a reliable meal ticket, where a lot of good jobs not only didn't require much more, but would happily train on site, and where (depending on where you lived) prom was a serious coming-of-age celebration (you were probably going to marry who you went with, so it was essentially celebrating your engagement). If you were going to college, you were either a football star who got accepted on an athletic scholarship, or striving to be a doctor or a lawyer, and a lot of average people resented those two groups from what I can tell.
You can probably guess what happened after 1980 that changed all this. And it had nothing to do with sex, drugs, or faith in God like reactionaries would insist, though it does begin with R. :P
Anyway, I figure that a lot of people that grew up in the environment are nostalgic for it, and nostalgia can be a really destructive force if not handled properly.
I suspect it's the Dunning-Kruger effect in play, or something similar to it. Many people think they're decently smart, and really don't like being told they're stupid, inadequate, or even just wrong about something.
And then there's always plain old fear and jealousy. This has probably been magnifled by Hollywood, since Most Writers Are Male Nerds and I'm sure more than one them had a run-in with a mean jock or a hectoring average person at some point.
I sympathise with some of these points, but let's not get too self-congratulatory. If we're complaining about being othered, in essence, then it's worth averting comparable patterns to that behaviour. We can't ultimately be sure what the internal thought process of another person is, so trying to attribute sweeping generalisations to perceived or actual agitators is impossible -- at least without very good sources of data.
As usual, I learned the above a harder way than I had to.
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