It's not every day that Instapundit send me suggested links. Oh, ok, he sent it to other edubloggers too, and he linked to it as well. But I still feel special.
Anyway, the link is an fascinating essay from last year about "Why Nerds are Unpopular." It's a long essay, and hard to quote from since it's all very good. But here are some key grafs:
I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.
Why? To someone in school now, that may seem an odd question to ask. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange to imagine that it could be any other way. But it could. Being smart doesn't make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harm you in the real world. Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondary school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult. Why?
A good question to ask.
One argument says that this would be impossible, that the smart kids are unpopular because the other kids envy them for being smart, and nothing they could do could make them popular. I wish. If the other kids in junior high school envied me, they did a great job of concealing it...
So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, 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 him. Being unpopular in school makes kids miserable, some of them so miserable that they commit suicide...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. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things.
I think that's a solid theory. Nerds, as the author puts it, don't realize that being popular in high school is a job, and they don't put the work into that other kids might. They don't really want to, in fact, because they have interests other than trying to make themselves beautiful, or athletic, or beloved by all. This would certainly explain the success of nerds after high school, where "popularity" can depend on an entirely different set of personality characteristics.
Or, it could be because real life isn't as similar to prison as schools are:
I think the important thing about the real world is not that it's populated by adults, but that it's very large, and the things you do have real effects. That's what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow.
This is something that, I think, homeschooling parents instinctively realize, and educrats would like us to forget. It's laughable that the main charge hurled at homeschooling parents is that their kids will be "undersocialized," when, for a lot of kids, "socialization" at school involves either abuse for being unpopular or the ever-present drug scene. Homeschooled kids are more likely to be living in the real world than kids in schools, and less likely to suffer any abuse for not worshiping at the temple of "popularity."
This topic doesn't just make me think about homeschoolers, though. I think of the abuse that smart black kids, who are supposedly "acting white," receive in government schools, especially if they criticize the low standards all around them. I think about the harassment that Goth kids, who may not only be smart but too "different," get from others, especially every time a school shooting happens. It's not just about being a nerd anymore. At some schools, being unpopular and/or too smart can literally be hazardous to one's health. And that's a crying shame.
Update: Chris O'Donnell has some kind things to say about my post, including the tactful reminder that he linked to this same essay 10 months ago. Hey, around here, posts are accurate, insightful, or timely - pick any two.
Posted by kswygert at July 1, 2004 06:54 PM