School Development and Real Life

This may just be unique to my experience, but there seems to be a lot of similarities between school society and the overall society. Thus I have to concede all this to be conjecture/theory/case study.

Capitalism:

It seems to me that capitalism and GPA are fairly similar. There is GPA inflation and deflation, the idea of meritocracy (we solely own our mental faculties, the means of production per say), the free-market of rankings, and the ability to leverage "capital" (academic prowess/mental faculties) to do better, i.e. having better student-teacher relations presents a feasible bias. There is also government regulation to ensure fairness, e.g. anti-cheating and counter inflation. There is a difference though, and that is in market growth. There is intrinsically a maximum grade one can obtain, whereas there is infinite value able to be made in a market.

Social Life:

At my school the top 10 people in my class are pretty social people. For instance, at least 40% of the top ten are in a romantic relationship. In addition, the friendliness and casual treatment of ranks. Practically the entire top 20 are friends with one another. I know this to be a phenomenon local to just my class as the class above and below me are extremely cutthroat - the class above us didn't know who rank 2 was for a while (other than that person), a person who skipped a class to graduate as valedictorian, and a person who's rank 2 that is trying very, very hard to overtake rank 1. But even in this class there is informality. One of the homecoming king nominees was our rank one lol, and they're probably going to be nominated for prom king. In addition, one of my class' top 10 was hoco princess. But returning to my class, a lot of the top 10 also have a social life - as in they meet with friends on a regular basis outside of school. Then, there is also the goofing around in class that a lot of the top 10 do.

Now, I've observed a few people outside of this but close to the top 10, and they are much less social but seem to work even harder than people in the top 10. Perhaps an explanation for this is that they observe the fun times with class and the academic success and believe them to be linked. Thus they work hard to try and enter the "social ring". Of course, this "social envy" is not all the reasons for their hard work - ambition is a big one - but it could play a role, humans are social animals after all.

This is reminiscent of the heartland theory from AP Human where there is a commodity (the social group of the top ten) that the rest of the world (the people not in the top 10 but are close) believes that entering/obtaining will give world domination (academic success/social life).