Nerds & popularity

A thought

Today's lunch I spent with a wonderful blog article Why Nerds are Unpopular. I doubt his thesis that teenagers' craziness is due to idleness--the teenagers I know are sleep-deprived (and their parents are tired of driving) from after-school activities. But most of my colleagues, having grown up smart in suburbia, will no doubt recognize themselves in this long piece.

...why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be popular.

If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at them. Being unpopular in school makes kids miserable, some of them so miserable that they commit suicide. Telling me that I didn't want to be popular would have seemed like telling someone dying of thirst in a desert that he didn't want a glass of water. Of course I wanted to be popular.

But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart.

...

We have a phrase to describe what happens when rankings have to be created without any meaningful criteria. We say that the situation degenerates into a popularity contest. And that's exactly what happens in most American schools. Since the group has no real purpose, there is no natural measure of performance for status to depend on. Instead of depending on some real test, one's rank ends up depending mostly on one's ability to increase one's rank. It's like the court of Louis XIV. There is no external opponent, so the kids become one another's opponents in an inexorable zero-sum competition.

Those who suffer most by this are the kids who would be the happiest if the school's purpose were really what it's claimed to be.