Why nerds are unpopular

When we were in high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to their popularity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of the same popularity. We classified from A to E. Tables A were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the kids with mild cases of Down 's syndrome, which in the language of the time we call "retarded ".

We sat at a table D, as low as you could get without looking physically different. Us were not being honest about everything to grade ourselves as D. had taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise. Everyone at school knew exactly how popular it all others, including ourselves.

My population increased gradually during high school. Puberty finally arrived, I became a football player decent, I started a scandalous underground newspaper. Therefore, "I have seen a good part of the landscape popularity.

I know many people who were nerds at school, and all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an inverse correlation between the strongest being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.

Why? For someone in school now, which may seem a strange question to ask. The simple fact is so overwhelming which may seem strange to imagine that could be otherwise. But it could. t be smart doesn 'make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor is harmful to health the real world. Nor, as far as I can tell, the problem is so severe in most other countries. However, in a typical local high school, be smart is likely to make his life difficult. Why?

The key to this mystery is to rephrase the question a bit. Why do not smart kids t 'be popular? If you 're so smart, why don ' t figure out how popularity works and beat the system, as they do for standardized tests?

One argument says that this is impossible, that smart kids are unpopular because the other kids envy them for being smart, and nothing they could do make them popular. Desire. If the other kids in high school envied me, did a great job of hiding it. And in any case, if being smart were really an enviable quality, the girls have broken ranks. The guys that guys envy, girls like.

In the schools I attended, being smart just did not care t 'A lot. t Children Do not admire or despise him. All things being equal, he would have preferred to be on the smart side of average rather than the side stupid, but intelligence counted far less than, say, physical appearance, charisma, or athletic ability.

So if intelligence itself not a factor in popularity, why do children always smart so unpopular? The answer, I think, is that don 't really want to be popular.

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

But I really do not t 'is not enough. There was something else he wanted more: to be smart. It is not just do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or do not understand how to program computers. In general, to do great things.

At the time I never tried to separate my wants and weigh them against each other. If he had, would have seen that being smart was more important. If someone had offered me the chance to be the most popular guy in school, but only at the price of being of average intelligence (humor me here), I t 'have been taken.

As much as I suffer from their unpopularity, I don 't think many nerds. For them the thought of average intelligence is unbearable. But most children would face. Through them, it would be a step forward. Even for someone in percentile eighty (assuming, as everyone seemed then, that intelligence is a scalar), which drop Wouldn t 'thirty points in exchange for being loved and admired by everyone?

And that, I think, is the root of the problem. Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, no doubt, but want more to be smart. And popularity is nothing you can do in your time free, not in the fierce competitive environment of a local high school.

Alberti, arguably the archetypal Renaissance man, writes that "no art, though whichever is less, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it. "I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at something that children American school work in his popularity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem vague in comparison. Sometimes they go on vacation, and some even have hobbies. An American teenager, can work on being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year.

I don 't mean to suggest they do it consciously. Some of them are really traitors bit, but I really want to say here is that teens are always on duty as conformists.

For example, Teens pay much attention to clothes. They don 't aware of dress to be popular. They dress to look good. But for whom? For the other children. Other children opinions 'turn in their definition of law, not only for clothes, but for almost everything they do, even gait. And so all efforts made to do things "" right also, consciously or not, an effort to be more popular.

Nerds don 't realize this. They don 't realize it takes work to be popular. In general, people were very demanding field don 't realize the extent to which Success depends on constant (though often unconscious) effort. For example, most people seem to consider the ability to draw as a kind of innate quality, as being high. In fact, most people that "can get 'as drawing, and have spent many hours do, that s ' why ' re right. Similarly, is not popular not just something you or you aren 't, but something you do.

The main reason nerds are unpopular is that have other things to think about. Your attention is drawn to the books or the natural world, fashion and parties. They returned 'like a man trying to play football while balancing a glass of water over his head. Other players who can focus all their attention on the game beat them effortlessly, and wonder why it seems so incapable.

While nerds care as much as other kids about popularity, being popular would be more work for them. The popular kids learned to be popular, and want to be popular, in the same way the nerds learned to be smart, and wanting to be smart: from their parents. While the nerds were being trained to get answers correct, the popular kids were being trained to please.

So now I 've been tuning the relationship between smart and nerd, using as interchangeable. In fact, it 's only the context that makes them so. A nerd is someone who isn t enough social skills '. But "enough "Depends on where you are. In a typical American school, standards of coolness are so high (or at least, so specific) that you don 't have to be especially awkward to look awkward by comparison.

Few smart kids can do without the attention that popularity requires. Unless which also happen to be good-looking, natural athletes, or siblings of popular kids, you 'll tend to become nerds. And that 's why smart people 's life are the worst between, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen. Life at that age revolves around much more popularity than before or after.

Before that, the lives of children 'are dominated by their parents, not by other children. The children I care what their peers think primary school, but the t Is not it all his life, as he later becomes.

About eleven, however, children seem to start treat your family as a day job. Create a new world among themselves, and standing in this world is what matters is not standing in your family. In fact, being in trouble in his family can earn points in the world that they care about.

The problem is that the world these kids create for themselves is at first a very crude one. If you leave a group of eleven age their own resources, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like many American children, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to bring to us that they were savages, and we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I do not t not get the additional message. I wish she had just told us outright that we were wild and our world was stupid.

Nerds would find their unpopularity more bearable if it merely caused them to be ignored. Unfortunately, being unpopular in school is actively pursued.

Why? Once again, anyone currently in school might think this question a strange question. How this can be done differently? But it could be. Adults don 't normally persecute nerds. Why do teens?

Partly because adolescents are still half children, and many children are inherently cruel. Some torture nerds for the same reason to pull the legs of spiders. Before developing a conscience, torture is fun.

Another reason to pursue the nerds children is to feel better. As you move through the water, get up, pushing water down. Similarly, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to highlight for mistreating those who think they are below. I 've read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks.

But I that the main reason for the other kids persecute nerds is that party 's mechanism of popularity. Popularity is only partially about individual attractiveness. It 's much about partnerships. To be more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you closer to other popular people, and nothing brings people together within a common enemy.

Like a politician who wants to distract voters from bad times at home, you can create an enemy if it did not ta 'real. By singling to pursue and a nerd, a group of children high in the hierarchy create bonds between themselves. Attacking an outsider makes them initiated. Therefore the worst harassment happens with groups. Ask any nerd: you get treated much worse than a group of children than any bully, however sadistic.

If 's consolation to the nerds, it's nothing personal s '. The group of children that bind to collect is doing the same thing, and for the same reason, as a group of boys getting together to go hunting. They don 't really hate you. Just have something to pursue.

Because re 'at the bottom of the scale, nerds are a safe target for the whole school. If I remember correctly, the most popular kids persecute nerds t don ', but no need to "stoop to such things. Most of the persecution comes from kids lower down, central nervous classes.

The problem is that there are plenty of them. The distribution Popularity is not a pyramid, but tapers at the bottom of a pear. The least popular group is very small. (I think we were the only D table in our map of the cafeteria.) So more people want to mess with the nerds who are nerds.

In addition to earning points for distance himself from unpopular kids, one loses points for being near them. A woman I know says that in high school she liked nerds, but was afraid of being seen talking to them because the other girls made fun of her. Unpopularity is a communicable disease, children too good to mess with the nerds were still isolated in self-defense.

It 's no wonder, then, intelligent children tend to be unhappy in middle school and high school. His other interests leave them little attention to the popularity of parts, and given the popularity resembles a zero-sum game, this in turn makes them targets for the whole school. And the strange thing is that this nightmare scenario happens without any conscious malice, by simply because the shape of the situation.

For me it was the worst stretch of high school, when the culture was new and tough guy, and specialization bit later a little more intelligent children had just begun to separate. Almost everyone sees me 'talked to agrees: the lowest point is somewhere place between eleven and fourteen.

In our school was eighth grade, which was between twelve and thirteen for me. There was a brief sensation of that year that a of our teachers overheard a group of girls waiting for the bus, and was so surprised that the next day the class was devoted to an eloquent plea not to be so cruel to one another.

I Do not 't have any noticeable effect. What surprised me at the time that she was surprised. You mean she don 't know the kind of things they say to each other? Does this mean t Is not that normal?

It 's important to realize that no, adults don 't know what kids are doing to each other. They know that, in the abstract, that kids are monstrously cruel to each other, as know in the abstract that people are tortured in poorer countries. But, as we don 't like to stress this depressing fact, and that Don 't see evidence of specific abuses unless they go looking.

Public school teachers are in much the same position prison guards. The main concern of Rangers 'is to keep prisoners in the facility. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible to avoid killing one another. Beyond that, they want as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so let them create the social organization you want. From what I read I ', the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and not fun to be at the bottom of it.

In outline, which was the same schools I went to. The most important thing was to stay on campus. Once there, authorities fed, prevented overt violence, and made some efforts to teach you something. But beyond that they didn 't want to have a lot to do with children. As prison guards, teachers mostly left us to ourselves. And, like prisoners, the culture we created was barbaric.

Why is the real world more hospitable to nerds? It might seem that the answer is simply that 's populated by adults, who are too mature to pick on each other. But I don 't think this is true. Adults in jail after collecting from each other. And so, apparently, not the wives of society in some parts of Manhattan, the lives of women seems a continuation high school, with all the same petty intrigues.

I think the important thing about the real world is not that 's populated by adults, but that s what 'too big, and things that have real effects. That s "what school, prison, and ladies-who-all lack of lunch. The people of all the worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Of course, these societies degenerate into savagery. Them have no function for the way forward.

When things that have real effects, It 's no longer enough to be enjoyable. Begins to be important for correct answers, and that s 'where nerds give a favorable impression. Bill Gates, of course, come to mind. Although notoriously lacking in social skills, are put the correct answers, at least as measured in revenue.

The other thing that 's different about the real world is that ' s much bigger. In a large enough pool, even the smallest minorities can achieve a critical mass if they are grouped. In the real world, nerds collect in certain where and how their own societies where intelligence is most important. Sometimes today, but begins to flow in the opposite direction: sometimes, especially in mathematics and university science departments, nerds deliberately exaggerate their awkwardness to look smarter. John Nash so admired Norbert Wiener that adopted the habit of playing the wall as he walked down a hallway.

As a boy of thirteen, I don 't have much more experience of the world that what I saw immediately around me. The warped little world we lived in was, I thought, the world. The world seemed cruel and boring, and I m 'not sure which was worse.

Because I do not t fit 'to this world, I thought something must be wrong with me. I didn 'realized that the reason that nerds Do not t ' fit was that somehow we were a step ahead. We were thinking about the kinds of things that matter in the real world, instead of spending all our time playing a demanding but mostly pointless game like the others.

We were a bit like an adult would be if he were thrust back in middle school. He did not t 'know the right to wear the clothes, the right music to like, the right to use the jargon. The d 'like children a complete stranger. The thing is, he 'd not know enough attention to what they thought. We had so much confidence.

A lot of people seem to think that 's good for smart kids to be released along with "normal " Children at this stage of their lives. Maybe. But at least in some cases nerds why don t fit 'en reality is that everyone is crazy. I remember sitting in the audience on a "" pep rally "at my high school, watching the cheerleaders launched an effigy of an opposing player in the audience break into pieces. I felt like an explorer witnessing a strange tribal ritual.

If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice, the main thing I d 'said he would stick his head up and look around. I didn 'grasp all this at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a Twinkie. Not only school, but all the people. Why people move to the suburbs? For have children! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of raising children.

Where I grew up, as if there was nowhere to go and nothing to do. This was not an accident. Suburbs are deliberately designed to exclude the outside world, because it contains things that could endanger children.

As for schools, they were just holding pens within this false world. Officially, the purpose of schools is to teach children. In fact, its main goal is to keep children locked in a room for a large part of day for adults can do things. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.

What bothers me is that children are kept in prisons, but (a) that aren 't say it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Children are sent to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an elongated brown ball as if it were the most natural thing in the world. And if they resist this surreal cocktail, they 're called misfits.

Life in this twisted world is stressful for children. And not just for nerds. Like any war, 's harmful even to the winners.

Adults can 't ignore the fact that adolescent boys are tormented. Why don 't do anything about it? Because blame puberty. The reason children are so unhappy, adults say, is that monstrous new chemicals, hormones, are now running through his blood and spoil everything. No nothing wrong s 'with the system, but it ' s only inevitable that children are miserable at that age.

This idea is so pervasive that even children I believe, which probably help doesn t '. Someone who thinks that his foot hurt, of course will not stop to consider that he is using shoes size.

I 'm suspicious of this theory that thirteen years of age, children are intrinsically disordered. If 's physiological, it must be universal. Mongolian nomads are all nihilists at thirteen? I 've read a lot of history, and have not seen a single reference to this supposedly universal fact before the twentieth century. young apprentices in the Renaissance appear to have been cheerful and enthusiastic. They got into fights and cheated each other, of course, (Michelangelo had his nose broken by a thug), but there were t 'crazy.

As far as I can tell, the concept of hormone-crazed teen is coeval with suburbia. I don 't think this is a coincidence. I think teenagers are driven crazy by the life you 're made to lead. apprentices adolescents in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. His madness is the madness of the idle everywhere.

When I was in school, suicide was a constant theme among the smartest children. No one knew what he did, but planned several, and some may have tried. In general, this was just a pose. Like other teenagers, we loved the dramatic, and suicide seemed very dramatic. But partly it is because our lives were sometimes really miserable.

Bullying was only part of the problem. Another problem, and possibly worse, is that never have we had anything real to work. Humans like to work in most of the world, their work is their identity. And all the work we did was pointless, or seemed at the time.

In the was best practice for the real work could do much in the future, so far that we did 't even know at the time what they were practicing for. More often it was just an arbitrary number of hoops to jump through the words without content designed mainly for testability. (The three main causes Civil War is War .... Test: List the three main causes of the Civil War.)

And there was no way of exclusion. Adults had agreed among themselves that this would be the path to college. The only way to escape this empty life you may have.

teenage boys used to have a more active role in society. In pre-industrial times, which were all apprentices of one sort or another, either in shops or on farms or even on warships. There were t 'left create their own societies. They were junior members of adult society.

Teenagers seem to respect adults more then, because adults were visible in the technical experts who were trying to learn. Now most children have little idea of what their parents in their distant offices, and do not see no connection (in fact, very little) between school and work you 'll do as adults.

And if younger adults respected adults also used more for teenagers. After a couple of years of training ', an apprentice could be very helpful. Even the newest apprentice could be done to carry messages or sweep the workshop.

Now adults have no immediate use for teenagers. They would be on the road in an office. So left at school on his way to work, however much they may drop the dog in a kennel if they were weekend.

What happened? We 're against a hard here. The cause of this problem is the same as the cause of many present ills: specialization. As jobs increasingly specialized, we more time to train for them. Children in pre-industrial era began working at about 14 at the latest, children on farms, where most people lived, began far earlier. Now kids who go to university don t start 'full-time work until 21 or 22. With some degrees, like physicians and doctors, unable to complete his training until 30.

Teenagers now are useless, except as cheap labor in industries like fast food that was developed specifically to take advantage of this fact. In almost any other work, 'd be a net loss. But it 're also too young to be unsupervised. Someone has to watch over them and the most effective way to do this is to collect in one place. Then, some adults can see all of them.

If you stop there, what you 're describing is literally a prison, although a part-time. The problem is that many schools practically stop there. The stated purpose of school is to educate children. But there is no external pressure to do this right. And most schools do a bad job of teaching the children don 't really take it seriously - not even the smart kids. Much of the time we were all students teachers and therefore goes only through the motions.

In my high school French class was supposed to read Hugo 's Miserables. I don 't think any of us knew French well enough to make our way through this huge book. Like the rest of the class, Notes only skimmed the Cliff 's. When we were given a test in the book, I realized that the questions sounded odd. They were full of long words our t Wouldn teacher has used. Where had these questions come? S Notes From the Cliff ', was. The teacher was using them too. We were all pretending.

It is true that there are great public school teachers. The energy and imagination of my fourth grade teacher, Mr. Mihalko, did something that his students still talk about years, thirty years later. But teachers like him were individuals swimming upstream. They could not t 'resolve the problem.

In almost any group of people you 'll find hierarchy. When groups of adults are formed in the real world 's generally for a common purpose, and the leaders end up being the best are there. The problem with most schools is, they have no purpose. But there must be hierarchy. And for kids to make one of the blue.

We have a phrase to describe what happens when rankings have to be created without any kind of meaningful criteria. We say that the situation degenerates into a popularity contest. And that 's exactly what happens in schools most Americans. Instead of relying on a real test, a s 'classification depends primarily on one ' s to increase the capacity of one 's range. It 's as the court of Louis XIV. There is no external adversary, for children to become an opponent other 's.

When there is some real external test its powers, it is not t 'painful to be in the bottom of the hierarchy. A novice in a t football team doesn 'resent the skill of the veteran; waiting to be like him one day and is happy to have the opportunity to learn from him. The veteran may in turn have a sense of noblesse oblige. And most importantly, its location depends on how well they do against opponents, not if you can push the other down.

Court hierarchies are another thing entirely. This type of society debases any person who enters. There is no bottom in admiration, nor noblesse oblige at the top. It 's kill or be killed.

This is the kind of society that was created American high schools. And it happens because these schools have no real purpose beyond keeping the kids in one place for a particular number of hours each day. What I do not t 'account at the time, and t done Did not realize until very recently, is that the twin horrors of school life, the cruelty and boredom, both have the same cause.

The mediocrity of American public schools has worse consequences than just making kids unhappy for six years. It breeds a rebelliousness that actively drives kids away from things that "learning is supposed to.

Like many nerds, probably be years after high school before I dared to read everything that 'd been assigned below. And I'm more than books. I distrusted words like " character" and " integrity" because they had been so debased by adults. As used then, all these words seemed to mean the same thing: obedience. Children who were praised for these qualities tend to be blunt the best prize bulls, and at worst schmoozers easy. If that was what they were character and integrity, I did not know anything about them.

The most misunderstood word was "touch. " For the purposes of adults, apparently in the sense of keeping your mouth shut. I figured that derives from the same root as " tacit" and "silent " and literally meant being quiet. He promised to be discreet I never, never going to shut up. In fact, it 's derived from the same root as "touch "And what it means is to have a deft touch. With tact is the opposite of clumsy. I don 't think I learned this until college.

Aren Nerds 'T the only loser in the popularity rat race. Nerds are popular because they 're distracted. There are other children who deliberately, because choose 're so disgusted with the whole process.

teenage boys, including rebels, don 't like being alone, so when children opt out of the system, tend to do as a group. In the schools I attended, the focus of rebellion was drug use, specifically marijuana. The children in this tribe wore black shirts and concert Called "monsters ".

Freaks and nerds were allies, and had a good amount of overlap between them. Freaks were generally more intelligent than other children, though never studying (or at least does not appear) was an important tribal value. I was more in the field of nerd, but I was friends with a bunch of monsters.

They used drugs, at least initially, of social bonds they created. It was something to do together, and because drugs are illegal, was a common badge of rebellion.

I do not m 'claiming that bad schools are the reason kids get into trouble with drugs. After a while, the drugs have their own momentum. No doubt some of the monsters will ultimately use drugs to escape problems - problems at home, for example. But in my school at least, the reason most children began using drugs was rebellion. Fourteen years of age, does not start t to smoke marijuana, and that 'd heard that would help them forget their problems. They started because they wanted to join a different tribe.

Misrule breeds rebellion which is not a new idea. And yet the authorities still for the most part act as if the drugs themselves were the cause of the problem.

The real problem is vacuum of school life. We won t 'see the solutions to realize as adults. Adults who can tell you first are the ones who were nerds in school. Want your kids to be as unhappy in eighth grade and have you been? I was not going t. 'Well, then, is there anything we can do to fix things? Almost certainly. There is nothing inevitable in the current system. The time has come mostly by default.

Adults, however, are occupied. Checklist for school plays is one thing. Since the educational bureaucracy is another. Perhaps a few have the energy to try to change things. I suspect that the most difficult realize that you can.

Nerds still in school should not hold your breath. Maybe one day a heavily armed force of adults will be shown in Rescue helicopters, but it probably won t 'come this month. Any immediate improvement in nerds lives 'is probably going to have to come from the nerds themselves.

The mere understanding of the situation in which 're in the should make it less painful. Nerds losers t aren '. They returned 're Playing a different game and a game much closer to the one played in the real world. Adults know this. It 's difficult to find successful adults now Don 't say they were nerds in high school.

It 's important for nerds to realize, too, that the school is not life. The school is a strange, artificial, half sterile and wild. It 's all-encompassing, such as life, but it is t ' the real thing. It 's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond, even to 're still in it.

If life seems horrible to children, s 'no because hormones are turning everyone into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life is really horrible (as you believe). It 's because the adults, they no longer have any economic use to you, have left to spend years locked up with nothing real to do. Every society is such horrible live, don 't have to look further to explain why teenage boys are not happy.

I 've said some harsh things in this essay, but really the thesis is an optimist - that several problems we assume, in fact, not insoluble, after all. Teenage boys are not inherently unhappy monsters. This should be news encouraging for both children and adults.

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