The social lessons people learn from their high school experience vary wildly. I have read many accounts of people who had bad experiences like this when they were in high school, and also many accounts of people who didn't have experiences like this. When I think about how the people I know have described their high school experiences, I can also think of a wide range of things. It's certainly not what my high school social experience was like - there were things I disliked about it, but mostly related to highly-idiosyncratic details of my personality. Describing it as a brutal rite of passage with some kind of global social hierarchy involving who got to sit at which lunch table rings very false to me.