AUSTRALIAN EYES ON AMERICA
There are certain things I expected to leave behind when I finished school.
Homework. Exams. Being told what to wear. The occasional teacher who seemed personally offended by my existence.
What I didn’t expect was to move to America decades later and discover that, for some people, school never really ends.
Not the actual education, mind you. The identity.
I’ve lived in the United States for eight years now, and one thing I’ve noticed is how often schools find their way into everyday conversations.
Where did you go to high school? Which college did you attend? Who do you support?
That last question can be particularly dangerous in Tennessee. Give the wrong answer and you may find yourself in a conversation about football that lasts considerably longer than you intended.
At first, I thought this was simply another American cultural quirk.
But the longer I’ve lived here, the more I’ve come to appreciate that the question of where someone went to school can be about considerably more than education.
Sometimes it’s about finding a connection.
Sometimes it’s about belonging.
Maybe it’s about a football team that hasn’t won anything significant in years, but whose supporters remain convinced that next season will be different.
And sometimes, whether we like it or not, it’s about social status.
The Question That Sounds Simple but Isn’t
Imagine meeting someone at a party.
You exchange names, establish that neither of you is particularly interested in discussing the weather, and then comes the question
“Where did you go to school?”
For an Australian, the answer might be a straightforward piece of biographical information.
For an American, depending on where you live and who’s asking, it can open an entire conversation.
The person might recognise the school. They might know someone who attended it. They might have played against its football team or discovered that your cousin married their old chemistry teacher.
Suddenly, two strangers have something in common.
One particularly interesting example is St. Louis, Missouri, where asking someone which high school they attended has long been recognised as a local conversational tradition.
A 2007 feature in St. Louis Magazine explored how the question can reveal shared acquaintances, neighbourhood connections and aspects of someone’s background.
Imagine that.
You could be 52 years old, have a mortgage, two children, a career and a perfectly respectable collection of lawn maintenance equipment.
Yet someone still wants to know where you were sitting during Year 10 biology.
To be fair, I can understand the appeal.
I’ve moved between countries and lived in enough different places to appreciate how valuable a familiar connection can be.
When someone discovers that you grew up near the same place, knew the same people or experienced something similar, the conversation immediately changes.
You stop being two strangers.
You have a shared starting point.
But there’s another side to the question, and it’s worth acknowledging.
Sometimes Your School Says Something About Your Background
Not every question about education is innocent curiosity.
The name of a school can sometimes suggest where someone grew up, the financial circumstances of their family or the social circles they moved in.
That doesn’t mean everyone asking is making those judgments.
It means the information can carry social meaning beyond the classroom.
In St. Louis, for example, discussions about the famous high school question have included both interpretations: people who see it as a way of finding mutual friends and people who believe it can be used to establish social standing.
The distinction matters.
Asking where someone went to school because you’re hoping to discover a mutual acquaintance is one thing.
Deciding what sort of person they must be because of the answer is quite another.
I find this especially interesting because schools can become shorthand for entire communities.
A school name might tell a local person roughly which neighbourhood someone came from. It might suggest a particular sporting rivalry, a religious tradition or a family connection stretching back generations.
Of course, none of that tells you whether the person standing in front of you is actually worth knowing.
For that, you’re probably going to have to talk to them.
An outrageous concept, I know.
Then There’s College. That’s an Entirely Different Level.
One of the things that surprised me about American university culture was how visible it remains outside the university itself.
People wear college shirts to the supermarket.
They put university stickers on their cars.
They decorate their homes in school colours.
They follow the sporting achievements of students who were probably born long after they graduated.
Some even travel considerable distances to return to campus for homecoming celebrations.
Now, Australian universities have alumni associations, sporting clubs and plenty of graduates who remain proud of their institutions.
But the scale and visibility of American college identity, particularly around major sporting programs, feels quite different from what I grew up with.
You don’t need to have attended the University of Tennessee to notice its presence around Nashville.
Orange merchandise is everywhere.
In parts of the South, college football isn’t simply something you watch.
It’s something you inherit.
Your parents supported a particular university. Their parents supported it. Now you’re expected to continue the tradition.
You might attend an entirely different institution.
You might never attend university at all.
Doesn’t matter.
Apparently, your football allegiance was settled before you were old enough to hold a spoon.
And it’s important to recognise that the relationship between universities and their supporters isn’t limited to graduates.
College teams can represent an entire state or region. For some supporters, the institution is part of their community identity rather than their personal educational history.
That makes the question of which college someone supports quite different from asking which college they attended.
One is about education.
The other might be about family, geography and several generations of sporting disappointment.
Why School Sports Matter So Much
If you want to understand the continuing importance of schools in American communities, sport is a useful place to start.
High school football in particular can bring together people who otherwise have little reason to gather in the same place.
Parents, grandparents, former students, local business owners and neighbours turn up to support the same team.
For some towns, Friday night football is a major community event.
A September 2026 Associated Press report explored how high school football continues to provide a sense of unity, tradition and opportunity in communities such as Aliquippa, Pennsylvania.
That community role helps explain why people can remain attached to their old school long after graduating.
The school wasn’t just somewhere they attended classes.
It was where they played sport, made friends, performed on stage, attended community events and developed relationships that might last for decades.
The sporting connection is widespread, although certainly not universal.
A Pew Research Center survey conducted in February 2022 found that 48% of American adults reported participating in organised competitive sports during high school, college or both.
That doesn’t mean every former student remains interested in school sport.
But it does demonstrate how many Americans have personal experience of the sporting side of education.
And I can see why those memories endure.
When a school is also a community gathering place, leaving the classroom doesn’t necessarily mean leaving the community behind.
Watching My Own Children Grow Up in the American School System
This is where the subject becomes a little more personal for me.
I’m an Australian raising two daughters in Tennessee.
Their experience of school is already different from mine.
I’m watching them grow up with traditions, terminology and expectations that weren’t necessarily part of my own childhood.
Things like school spirit, mascots and the importance attached to particular school events are part of the world they’re learning to navigate.
As a parent, I find myself paying attention to things I wouldn’t have given much thought to before.
Which school will they attend?
What opportunities will it offer?
Will they find good friends?
Will they feel comfortable there?
Will it encourage their interests and help them discover what they’re capable of?
Those questions aren’t uniquely American, of course.
Parents everywhere worry about their children’s education.
But living here has made me more conscious of the role a school can play in shaping a child’s wider social world.
For my girls, school isn’t simply a building where they learn maths and English.
It’s part of where they’re growing up.
It’s where friendships develop, confidence can grow and memories are made.
As a father, I hope those memories will be good ones.
I also hope that, years from now, when someone asks them where they went to school, they’ll remember more than the name on the building.
The Part of American School Culture I Understand Better Now
When I first arrived in America, I sometimes found the continuing attachment to schools a little strange.
I couldn’t quite understand why a grown adult would be so emotionally invested in an institution they left 30 years ago.
Particularly when the attachment involved shouting at a television because a 19-year-old missed a field goal.
But after eight years here, I’ve started to see the bigger picture.
A school can provide something that becomes increasingly valuable as we get older.
Continuity.
People move away. Careers change. Families grow. Neighbourhoods transform.
The place where you spent your teenage years might be one of the few connections that remains.You can return for a reunion and encounter people who remember a version of you that your current friends have never met.
You can watch a football game and feel connected to the town where you grew up.
You can meet someone on the other side of the country, discover they attended the same university, and immediately have something to talk about.
None of that requires believing your school was better than anyone else’s.
It’s simply the comfort of belonging to something familiar.
Of course, not everyone has happy memories of school.
For some people, graduation was a welcome escape, and they have absolutely no desire to return.
That’s worth remembering whenever we romanticise school spirit.
A place that represents belonging for one person might represent exclusion for another.
The value isn’t necessarily in the institution itself.
It’s in the relationships and experiences people associate with it.
Maybe the Question Isn’t Really About School at All
I’ve come to think that asking someone where they went to school is often another version of a much more familiar question.
Where are you from?
Not necessarily geographically.
Where did your story begin?
What sort of community shaped you?
Do we have anything in common?
Americans have plenty of ways of answering those questions, and schools are just one of them.
For some, it’s a university.
For others, it’s a hometown, a church, a sporting club or the neighbourhood where they grew up.
I still find it amusing that a person can spend four years at university and then devote the next 40 to wearing its merchandise.
But I understand it a little better now.
Perhaps that’s one of the things I’ve learned from living between two cultures.
Sometimes the things that initially seem strange aren’t particularly strange at all.
They’re simply familiar human needs expressed in unfamiliar ways.
The desire to belong.
The pleasure of finding a shared connection.
The comfort of knowing that somewhere, even decades later, there’s a place that still feels a little bit like
home.
Although if someone asks me where I went to high school, they’re going to need a few minutes.
Mine was in Australia.
That tends to complicate the conversation.
Enjoy seeing America through Australian eyes?
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