You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip

by Kelsey McKinney

In doing this, it incorrectly frames refraining from gossip as a personal virtue. The adults in Mean Girls want the same thing for their societies that the people in power at large seem to want for ours: for the people in charge to remain in charge and for peace to reign. A truly civic public, one that is engaged with the needs of its community members and whose members seek to help one another, necessarily requires gossip. “A civic public is neither an association among friends nor can it be limited to a… religious or ethnic group,” the educational theorist Thomas F. Green wrote in Voices: The Educational Formation of Conscience. Nor, he added, is the civic public akin to “religious-like associations” or “athletic clubs, whose members have achieved a rare sense of their mutuality and joint identity.” And nowhere is meant to be more of a perfect civic public than a public high school.