Evergreen High School: The American Campus Quietly Exporting Teenage Angst to the World

Evergreen High School Isn’t Just a Building—It’s a Global Metaphor We Keep Pretending Not to Notice
By Santiago Vargas, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker

Evergreen High sits 47 minutes south of Seattle, a modest cluster of brick and optimism wedged between a wetland the district keeps trying to pave and a Starbucks built, with admirable civic foresight, before the parking lot. From the outside it looks like any other American secondary school: pep rallies, vape detectors, and a marquee that alternates between “COLLEGE & CAREER READY” and “GOAT CHEESE FUNDRAISER—TICKETS $12.” Yet in the last decade this particular campus has become a sort of Rorschach test for anyone trying to read the entrails of late-stage civilization. Depending on your coordinates on the planet, Evergreen is either a cautionary tale, a punchline, or the next export product.

To the OECD statisticians in Paris, Evergreen is merely data point 14,732-C in their quarterly “School Climate & Polarization” spreadsheet. They note that since 2018 the school has suspended more students for off-campus social-media posts than for on-campus fights, a ratio that delights the Ministry of Education in Singapore (where remote-control discipline has been national policy since dial-up) and horrifies the Scandinavians, who still believe childhood exists. To the World Economic Forum interns in Geneva, Evergreen is a living case study in “stakeholder capitalism,” because the PTA now includes representatives from Amazon (cloud services), Comcast (bandwidth throttling), and a cryptocurrency startup that pays for the marching-band uniforms in Dogecoin. The interns call this “synergy.” Everyone else calls it “late capitalism wearing a lanyard.”

Zoom out further and Evergreen becomes a geopolitical litmus strip. When Chinese ed-tech executives visit on their Silicon Valley cultural safari, they photograph the 1:1 Chromebook program and whisper about “content delivery at scale.” When German education ministers swing by, they stroke their chins at the gender-neutral bathrooms and mutter “Gesellschaftliche Aufklärung,” which sounds approving but actually means “expensive distraction from apprenticeships.” Meanwhile, in Lagos, private-school chains are copy-pasting Evergreen’s curriculum—complete with climate-anxiety elective and AP TikTok Theory—into glass-box academies where the power goes out only twice a day. Globalization used to mean McDonald’s; now it means standardized teenage angst with locally sourced Wi-Fi.

And then there is the evergreen curriculum itself, a slick package of project-based learning and trauma-informed mindfulness that promises to churn out “global citizens” who can code, compost, and cry on cue. UNESCO lists the program as a “flagship inclusive model,” which is bureaucratese for “we have no idea if it works but it photographs well.” Critics in Delhi point out that Evergreen’s carbon-neutral greenhouse produces exactly twelve cherry tomatoes per academic year—roughly the same yield-per-student ratio as India’s elite IIT coaching centers, minus the suicide rate. Advocates counter that the tomatoes are organic, which in 2023 is less an agricultural claim than a moral posture, like wearing a mask on your Zoom avatar.

The pandemic, of course, accelerated everything. Overnight, Evergreen became a 24-hour content studio: students live-streamed chemistry labs from their kitchen sinks while teachers toggled between breakout rooms and nervous breakdowns. Finland sent observers to study the “remote resilience” metrics; Brazil simply pirated the lesson plans. By the time the world reopened, the school had more international virtual partnerships than the UN has acronyms. Evergreen now runs a “pen-pal” program with a refugee learning hub in northern Kenya, which sounds heartwarming until you realize the Kenyan kids’ homework is to watch American teenagers stress-optimize their college essays about “overcoming the trauma of a cancelled Coachella.”

Naturally, the alumni network has become a parody of itself. LinkedIn lists 247 “Evergreen Global Changemakers,” including one who advises the European Central Bank on “youth-centered monetary policy” (translation: a TikTok about inflation dance-challenged its way to 2.3 million views). Another alumnus sells NFTs of the school mascot—a defiant cedar tree flipping the bird—on the Solana blockchain. The proceeds, he insists, will fund a carbon-offset project in the Amazon, which is exactly what a cedar tree would say if it suddenly discovered irony.

So what does Evergreen High ultimately teach us, other than that teenagers are the same brand of anxious everywhere and that adults will monetize that anxiety in 38 languages? Perhaps that the future of education is no longer about nations but about branding: whoever packages existential dread with the slickest UX wins the century. Evergreen isn’t a school; it’s a franchise opportunity wearing a hoodie and quoting Kendrick Lamar. And the rest of the world, bless its collective denial, is already filling out the application.