High School Success

The following essay first appeared as an article in Alvaro de Vicente’s Substack publication, Men in the Making. For more articles like this one, you can visit his page here. Subscribe to the publication to stay up-to-date on Alvaro’s writing.

This essay is part of a series entitled “Life Prep.”

In the past two essays in the series on High School as Life Prep, we considered the topic from a 30,000-foot view. We looked at the purpose and meaning of life, developing a life plan, and the danger of the “perfect life fallacy.” In this essay and the several that follow it, we turn our attention to the more immediate reality of the high school years themselves.

What Does Success in High School Look Like?

For many years, the basic vision of high school success has been college placement. The best high schools prepare the best students, in the first place, to gain admittance to top colleges and then to thrive once there. Granted, certain vocational schools, or vocational tracks at larger schools, do not have this as an explicit goal. Nevertheless, the general movement toward universal higher education illustrates that, culturally, we assume the highest measure of high school success involves a college education.

According to this vision, success means doing what it takes to get into a good college: fill your resume with extracurricular clubs (not too many, of course, lest it look fake); play varsity-level sports (perhaps to earn a scholarship or to compete at the next level); and, it goes without saying, earn high grades in a demanding course load, capped off with top scores on a standardized test.

These are all good goals. But they need to be placed in a wider context.

Prep School 

In the first place, I would argue that preparation for college is better understood as a natural result of a good high school education, not the purpose of it.

At The Heights, we talk about the education we offer as college prep, professional prep, marriage and fatherhood prep, and, most importantly, heaven prep. We are a prep school, but we are not only a college prep school.

Having these goals in mind is good for the school, but likely not that helpful for a rising freshman himself. They are too distant and abstract to offer clear direction.

Breaking Down High School Goals

What is a good way for a fourteen-year-old boy to think about high school success? In a very general sense, the student’s goal is to grow personally, to mature as much as possible while in high school. Still, this is too obvious and vague to be actionable.

One way I have found helpful to make this more concrete is to divide growth into four areas:

1. Physical
2. Intellectual
3. Moral
4. Spiritual

The rising freshman should have clear goals in these areas: what does growth look like in each of them by the time he graduates?

With this in mind, he can then take the next step and further break down his goals into annual, semester, monthly, and even weekly goals. To be clear, I am not suggesting a freshman will be able to devise such goals immediately. For one thing, the semester, monthly, and weekly goals will take shape as he goes, so to speak. And he may have to amend his four-year goals as he gains greater clarity—hopefully for the better—over time. I will go into each of these areas with suggested goals in future articles.

But first, need to make a fundamental point: for his personal growth plan to be effective, the boy needs a personal coach. The personal coach offers two necessary services to the boy: he helps—not assigns—but helps the boy decide on well-defined, actionable, realistic goals; and he keeps him accountable.

Finding Co-Conspirators 

At The Heights, we pair every boy with a mentor, who serves as this personal coach, working with the parents to help the boy grow in these four areas. If your son’s school does not have such a program, your son will need to find a coach elsewhere—perhaps yourself. That said, it also helps for a high school boy to have another adult in his life who can serve as a mentor, since most boys develop a strong sense of independence during these years—itself a good thing—that can sometimes manifest as rebellion against mom and dad. Experience has proven that, as a parent, it is very helpful to ally with a co-conspirator in your son’s formation. This may be a godparent, a youth group director, an uncle, a friend of the family—the important thing being that it is someone you trust and someone the boy is open to learning from.