rebels are too cool for school

That's not from memory, that's from some book you read or some other source it sounds like you picked up some years ago.  If you had read a different book or material, you might have said something different.  That's why it's so important to know where you got your information.  Myself I got my information from a book that has powerfully influenced my thinking, The Nurture Assumption by Judy Harris, though I admit that I haven't taken the time to look up where in the book it presents this information about young tribal messages.

Or you could do what we usually do which is go to the wiki.  It would take some mucking around because it's kind of a complex thing to look up, not a name, but a sentence, something like 'child rearing in hunter gatherer societies.'  There, I could copy and paste that right now, but like you, I am presently pressed for time.  I have two things on my agenda for today, and you know, as a retiree, that makes for a very packed day.

But having said all that, I agree essentially with what you said and i don't think it's much different from what I have been saying.  The important part of that is how kids have that adolescent period (12 to 20 sound like good bracketing years, though it could begin a little earlier or later and likewise end earlier or later.), where kids' society consists mostly of other kids and where cool reigns supreme.  One could observe it by just looking at the people around them, or go back to their own memories.

Except maybe Beagles can't.  He seems to be a guy who is immune from cool, who has to ask what it is and therefore can never understand what it is. You were in ROTC for Chrissake, I don't think anything, including the slide rule club, was uncooler than ROTC.  But you did seem to sense that something was going on, you certainly sensed that the girls liked the cool guys, or maybe it was that the girls who liked the cool guys were more, ahem, accessible than the other girls.  You have made some mention about your forays into the world of cool to get girls, but you haven't given many details about them and I gather that they weren't very successful.

But maybe i was worse because I spent way more time trying to be cool than you did, and I had no success whatsoever, I believe I had five dates, none of which were consummated by a kiss goodnight.

I did plug that phrase":'child rearing in hunter gatherer societies.'  into the google machine, but it was all like advice on how to raise babies, and the idea was generally to raise them like the hunter gatherers did, who they basically viewed as noble savages and had their own claims as to how the hunter gatherers did it, which they interpreted to enforce their own theories about raising kids. 

That's the trouble with the internet, you use it to find information but then you are greeted by a bunch of salesmen.  And the whole idea that our forebears did things in some natural way that we should emulate is so much crap.  They may have been noble (which I wouldn't bet the farm on), but they were also savages.

Okay I was going to go on about cool a little more here, but the hour is getting late, so I'm just going to make a little comment.  How about in most of our movies and our literature the guy we root for is the rebel and never the authority figure, and even when the hero is a cop, he is a rebel cop?  Because that's what's cool, a little bit of rebellion.