[StarSlayer]

I happened to notice an advertisement for Glee recently on Pandora (horay for increased advertising ) plus seems Fox is bombarding the airwaves pretty heavily as well.  Anyway it seems to be depicted the cheer leading team as some powerful elite caste of the school system.  Now maybe my high school was a one off but in my experience in a post Title IX USA being a cheerleader is no big shakes.  Maybe back in the day when it was the closest thing girls could get to a proper sport but today?  With all the extracurcular activities afforded female students?  If any women's team at my high school had the right to be considered elite it probably would have been either the Field Hockey or Softball teams.  Heck I played football and our program was one of the consistently best in our league and it didn't imbue us with some sorta of special privileges over our peers. 

Now I'm not trying to take a pot shot at cheer leading itself, a good squad is does some pretty damn athletic stuff.  Just that in high school I never saw it as some prima donna ***** squad the way its generally depicted in television.  I guess the overarching argument is whether or not a lot of the TVTropes based on the highschool caste system are obsolete.  Are cheerleaders really queens of the campus and football players stuffing y'all in lockers?   Right now I'm wagering TV execs are a bit behind the times.

[Mongoose]

I never found most of the pop-culture high school stereotypes to be true in the school I attended, particularly the rampant cliques that always come up.  Part of that may have to do with the fact that I attended an archdiocesan Catholic high school with a population of somewhere around 900; I don't think we were really big enough to have significant student factions form.  The cheerleaders certainly weren't anyone special, nor was the football team, and I had people I considered friends across the whole spectrum of our class.  It really didn't mesh with the TVTropes picture of things at all.

(Oh, and for anyone who reads xkcd, I didn't understand that sentiment behind the strip about pep rallies, either.  I always loved those. )

[Colonol Dekker]

We never got the atypical cheerleader types over here in blighty. Just slaggettes........

[iamzack]

I went to a magnet school. It had a caste system, but not the one on tv.

It was less jocks, nerds, etc, and more Japanese Club folks, rich Jewish kids, base kids, and rejects who usually don't make it past junior year before dropping out, getting a GED, and moving on with their lives.

[McCall]

Gotta agree with Dekker. We have no luck on the hot cheerleader front here.

Except one time, when I was getting inteviewed for Leeds university. Some cheerleaders turned up in the cantine. When I told my interviewer, he asked me where to find them.

I got a place offer out of it. Hopefully he found himself his very own cheerleader and is living like The Heff somewhere.

[NGTM-1R]

I actually knew most of the cheer girls, because I knew the coach.

...they weren't much fun. About half of them had crippling body/mental issues. The other half were okay.

[colecampbell666]

I was surprised as a freshman last year, there was not a single clique at my school. For the most part, everyone gets along, although to be fair there aren't many visible minorities, 'cept for the ones who hack and cough THC residue all over. And most of them are pretty cool as well with not being dicks to everyone.

[Liberator]

Well, let's see around here there was the Shop Boys, but beyond them there were really any cliques.  There wasn't enough of us.  There was only 68 in my graduating class.  There weren't any prevalent cliques that I was aware of, 'course I wasn't in any and I have the sensitivity of a falling meteor so there may have been and I wouldn't have known any different.

[Flipside]

Our school didn't seem to divide like that, there were people who were pretty brainy, who fitted in because they wouldn't be walked over, whereas there were others who didn't fit in because they couldn't relate to the lower set kids. It never really seemed to me to be a question of the 'type' of person as such, just how much they isolated themselves from everyone else.

There was one kid who was huge on James Bond, even had a James Bond Bag, talked about Bond all the time, and got tortured mercilessly over it. He was quite a clever kid, and no-one minds if he likes James Bond, but like all things in life there's a limit. It's like the difference between someone who likes, for example, Call of Duty, and someone who won't shut up about it.

[Locutus of Borg]

The stereotype is only maintained by the fact that everyone believes that their school is the trend breaker.

[iamzack]

I'm of the opinion that there's a caste system in every school, but most of us don't notice because they're based on things we barely take note of.

[Kosh]

For the most part there was a clique of popular kids from elementry school all the way up to high school. At some other schools however, namely Columbine the clique system was well known and documented.

[iamzack]

I guess it does depend on the area. My school was very polarized. Entire classes were one or two castes.

[Dilmah G]

Mmm, I have a loose system at my school, you could probably split it into three categories allowing for a fair bit of overlap. It isn't so much "caste-like." However as far as broader groups go (General friends' groups etc), it's quite visible, however the majority of people do socialise with anyone and everyone (though sticking to their base group of friends, their caste if you will). It's just the minority that view themselves as superior to other people and are quite content with *****ing about everyone else that keep the system in place really. I don't really give a **** about our school's "System" though, I'm quite content with my friends across Top, middle, and lower classes.

There aren't a lot of specific cliques as far as I know, though we do have the bodyboarders, riders etc. The "cool" sport seems to change every year.

[Nuke]

when i was in high school, i was part of the columbine massacre fanclub, a group of people fond of trench coats and the color black and had a thing for violence and random murder. before that i hung with the kids who sat in the corner during gym class. and before that i was just one of the geeks. when i went to coledge or however its spelled i just hung with the neopagan chicks or nobody at all and kept my headphones on the rest of the time.

[McCall]

But you Americans do all have hot cheerleaders in every school and college right? Please don't take that away from me... I've already discovered that girls don't pillow fight in their underwear when we leave them alone. 

[iamzack]

I've had underwear pillow fights. But then my entire life is a cliche.

The cheerleaders at my high school were mostly ugly ghetto girls.

[redsniper]

But you Americans do all have hot cheerleaders in every school and college right?

Yes. Don't worry.

[iamzack]

I've never seen a hot cheerleader in real life except for this one girl who I had a HUGE crush on freshman year that was in my art class.

[Dark Hunter]

My high school had absolutely none of the stereotypes spoken of on TV. Cliques? Nonexistant. There were groups of people that hung out with each other, sure, but they mixed, and there was no defining element to each group. There were a couple of jerks, but the most they could do was get on your nerves a bit, nothing more. No one acted like they owned the place because it was pretty blatantly obvious that they didn't.

It was a pretty small school, though. Maybe that had something to do with it. Everyone knew everyone there.

But you Americans do all have hot cheerleaders in every school and college right? Please don't take that away from me... I've already discovered that girls don't pillow fight in their underwear when we leave them alone. 

Afraid not, actually. We weren't large enough to have cheerleaders. The closest we had was a student-run dance team, who sometimes performed at half-time.
And the college I go to now doesn't have sports. The gym and field aren't even equipped with bleachers. So no cheerleaders, obviously.