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February 2003  
  
When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the
school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do, because kids
only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A
to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E
tables contained the kids with mild cases of Down's Syndrome, what in the
language of the time we called "retards."  
  
We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically
different. We were not being especially candid to grade ourselves as D. It
would have taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise. Everyone in the school
knew exactly how popular everyone else was, including us.  
  
My stock gradually rose during high school. Puberty finally arrived; I became
a decent soccer player; I started a scandalous underground newspaper. So I've
seen a good part of the popularity landscape.  
  
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?  
  
  
  
The key to this mystery is to rephrase the question slightly. Why don't smart
kids make themselves popular? If they're so smart, why don't they figure out
how popularity works and beat the system, just as they do for standardized
tests?  
  
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. And in any case, if
being smart were really an enviable quality, the girls would have broken
ranks. The guys that guys envy, girls like.  
  
In the schools I went to, being smart just didn't matter much. Kids didn't
admire it or despise it. All other things being equal, they would have
preferred to be on the smart side of average rather than the dumb side, but
intelligence counted far less than, say, physical appearance, charisma, or
athletic ability.  
  
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. 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. 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.  
  
At the time I never tried to separate my wants and weigh them against one
another. If I had, I would have seen that being smart was more important. If
someone had offered me the chance to be the most popular kid in school, but
only at the price of being of average intelligence (humor me here), I wouldn't
have taken it.  
  
Much as they suffer from their unpopularity, I don't think many nerds would.
To them the thought of average intelligence is unbearable. But most kids would
take that deal. For half of them, it would be a step up. Even for someone in
the eightieth percentile (assuming, as everyone seemed to then, that
intelligence is a scalar), who wouldn't drop 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, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And
popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely
competitive environment of an American secondary school.  
  
  
  
Alberti, arguably the archetype of the Renaissance Man, writes that "no art,
however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it."
I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school
kids work at popularity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem slackers
by comparison. They occasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies. An
American teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a
year.  
  
I don't mean to suggest they do this consciously. Some of them truly are
little Machiavellis, but what I really mean here is that teenagers are always
on duty as conformists.  
  
For example, teenage kids pay a great deal of attention to clothes. They don't
consciously dress to be popular. They dress to look good. But to who? To the
other kids. Other kids' opinions become their definition of right, not just
for clothes, but for almost everything they do, right down to the way they
walk. And so every effort they make to do things "right" is also, consciously
or not, an effort to be more popular.  
  
Nerds don't realize this. They don't realize that it takes work to be popular.
In general, people outside some 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 some kind of
innate quality, like being tall. In fact, most people who "can draw" like
drawing, and have spent many hours doing it; that's why they're good at it.
Likewise, popular isn't just something you are or you aren't, but something
you make yourself.  
  
The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think
about. Their attention is drawn to books or the natural world, not fashions
and parties. They're like someone trying to play soccer while balancing a
glass of water on his head. Other players who can focus their whole attention
on the game beat them effortlessly, and wonder why they seem so incapable.  
  
Even if nerds cared as much as other kids about popularity, being popular
would be more work for them. The popular kids learned to be popular, and to
want to be popular, the same way the nerds learned to be smart, and to want to
be smart: from their parents. While the nerds were being trained to get the
right answers, the popular kids were being trained to please.  
  
  
  
So far I've been finessing the relationship between smart and nerd, using them
as if they were interchangeable. In fact it's only the context that makes them
so. A nerd is someone who isn't socially adept enough. But "enough" depends on
where you are. In a typical American school, standards for 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 spare the attention that popularity requires. Unless they
also happen to be good-looking, natural athletes, or siblings of popular kids,
they'll tend to become nerds. And that's why smart people's lives are worst
between, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen. Life at that age revolves far
more around popularity than before or after.  
  
Before that, kids' lives are dominated by their parents, not by other kids.
Kids do care what their peers think in elementary school, but this isn't their
whole life, as it later becomes.  
  
Around the age of eleven, though, kids seem to start treating their family as
a day job. They create a new world among themselves, and standing in this
world is what matters, not standing in their family. Indeed, being in trouble
in their family can win them points in the world they care about.  
  
The problem is, the world these kids create for themselves is at first a very
crude one. If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what
you get is _Lord of the Flies._ Like a lot of American kids, I read this book
in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to
point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel
and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely
believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish they had just told us
outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.  
  
  
  
Nerds would find their unpopularity more bearable if it merely caused them to
be ignored. Unfortunately, to be unpopular in school is to be actively
persecuted.  
  
Why? Once again, anyone currently in school might think this a strange
question to ask. How could things be any other way? But they could be. Adults
don't normally persecute nerds. Why do teenage kids do it?  
  
Partly because teenagers are still half children, and many children are just
intrinsically cruel. Some torture nerds for the same reason they pull the legs
off spiders. Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.  
  
Another reason kids persecute nerds is to make themselves feel better. When
you tread water, you lift yourself up by pushing water down. Likewise, in any
social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it
by maltreating those they think rank below. I've read that this is why poor
whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks.  
  
But I think the main reason other kids persecute nerds is that it's part of
the mechanism of popularity. Popularity is only partially about individual
attractiveness. It's much more about alliances. To become more popular, you
need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular
people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy.  
  
Like a politician who wants to distract voters from bad times at home, you can
create an enemy if there isn't a real one. By singling out and persecuting a
nerd, a group of kids from higher in the hierarchy create bonds between
themselves. Attacking an outsider makes them all insiders. This is why the
worst cases of bullying happen with groups. Ask any nerd: you get much worse
treatment from a group of kids than from any individual bully, however
sadistic.  
  
If it's any consolation to the nerds, it's nothing personal. The group of kids
who band together to pick on you are doing the same thing, and for the same
reason, as a bunch of guys who get together to go hunting. They don't actually
hate you. They just need something to chase.  
  
Because they're at the bottom of the scale, nerds are a safe target for the
entire school. If I remember correctly, the most popular kids don't persecute
nerds; they don't need to stoop to such things. Most of the persecution comes
from kids lower down, the nervous middle classes.  
  
The trouble is, there are a lot of them. The distribution of popularity is not
a pyramid, but tapers at the bottom like a pear. The least popular group is
quite small. (I believe we were the only D table in our cafeteria map.) So
there are more people who want to pick on nerds than there are nerds.  
  
As well as gaining points by distancing oneself from unpopular kids, one loses
points by being close to them. A woman I know says that in high school she
liked nerds, but was afraid to be seen talking to them because the other girls
would make fun of her. Unpopularity is a communicable disease; kids too nice
to pick on nerds will still ostracize them in self-defense.  
  
It's no wonder, then, that smart kids tend to be unhappy in middle school and
high school. Their other interests leave them little attention to spare for
popularity, and since popularity resembles a zero-sum game, this in turn makes
them targets for the whole school. And the strange thing is, this nightmare
scenario happens without any conscious malice, merely because of the shape of
the situation.  
  
  
  
For me the worst stretch was junior high, when kid culture was new and harsh,
and the specialization that would later gradually separate the smarter kids
had barely begun. Nearly everyone I've talked to agrees: the nadir is
somewhere between eleven and fourteen.  
  
In our school it was eighth grade, which was ages twelve and thirteen for me.
There was a brief sensation that year when one of our teachers overheard a
group of girls waiting for the school bus, and was so shocked that the next
day she devoted the whole class to an eloquent plea not to be so cruel to one
another.  
  
It didn't have any noticeable effect. What struck me at the time was that she
was surprised. You mean she doesn't know the kind of things they say to one
another? You mean this isn't normal?  
  
It's important to realize that, no, the adults don't know what the kids are
doing to one another. They know, in the abstract, that kids are monstrously
cruel to one another, just as we know in the abstract that people get tortured
in poorer countries. But, like us, they don't like to dwell on this depressing
fact, and they don't see evidence of specific abuses unless they go looking
for it.  
  
Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens.
Wardens' main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. They also need
to keep them fed, and as far as possible prevent them from killing one
another. Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as
possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want.
From what I've read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage,
and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.  
  
In outline, it was the same at the schools I went to. The most important thing
was to stay on the premises. While there, the authorities fed you, prevented
overt violence, and made some effort to teach you something. But beyond that
they didn't want to have too much to do with the kids. Like prison wardens,
the 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 it's populated by adults, who are too mature to pick on one
another. But I don't think this is true. Adults in prison certainly pick on
one another. And so, apparently, do society wives; in some parts of Manhattan,
life for women sounds like a continuation of high school, with all the same
petty intrigues.  
  
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.  
  
When the things you do have real effects, it's no longer enough just to be
pleasing. It starts to be important to get the right answers, and that's where
nerds show to advantage. Bill Gates will of course come to mind. Though
notoriously lacking in social skills, he gets the right answers, at least as
measured in revenue.  
  
The other thing that's different about the real world is that it's much
larger. In a large enough pool, even the smallest minorities can achieve a
critical mass if they clump together. Out in the real world, nerds collect in
certain places and form their own societies where intelligence is the most
important thing. Sometimes the current even starts to flow in the other
direction: sometimes, particularly in university math and science departments,
nerds deliberately exaggerate their awkwardness in order to seem smarter. John
Nash so admired Norbert Wiener that he adopted his habit of touching the wall
as he walked down a corridor.  
  
  
  
As a thirteen-year-old kid, I didn't have much more experience of the world
than 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 didn't fit into this world, I thought that something must be wrong
with me. I didn't realize that the reason we nerds didn't fit in was that in
some ways we were a step ahead. We were already thinking about the kind of
things that matter in the real world, instead of spending all our time playing
an exacting but mostly pointless game like the others.  
  
We were a bit like an adult would be if he were thrust back into middle
school. He wouldn't know the right clothes to wear, the right music to like,
the right slang to use. He'd seem to the kids a complete alien. The thing is,
he'd know enough not to care what they thought. We had no such confidence.  
  
A lot of people seem to think it's good for smart kids to be thrown together
with "normal" kids at this stage of their lives. Perhaps. But in at least some
cases the reason the nerds don't fit in really is that everyone else is crazy.
I remember sitting in the audience at a "pep rally" at my high school,
watching as the cheerleaders threw an effigy of an opposing player into the
audience to be torn to pieces. I felt like an explorer witnessing some bizarre
tribal ritual.  
  
  
  
If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice, the main
thing I'd tell him would be to stick his head up and look around. I didn't
really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a
Twinkie. Not just school, but the entire town. Why do people move to suburbia?
To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a
giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of
breeding children.  
  
Where I grew up, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, and nothing to do.
This was no accident. Suburbs are deliberately designed to exclude the outside
world, because it contains things that could endanger children.  
  
And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world.
Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary
purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so
adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized
industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.  
  
What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they
aren't told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids
are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled
by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the
most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail,
they're called misfits.  
  
  
  
Life in this twisted world is stressful for the kids. And not just for the
nerds. Like any war, it's damaging even to the winners.  
  
Adults can't avoid seeing that teenage kids are tormented. So why don't they
do something about it? Because they blame it on puberty. The reason kids are
so unhappy, adults tell themselves, is that monstrous new chemicals,
_hormones_ , are now coursing through their bloodstream and messing up
everything. There's nothing wrong with the system; it's just inevitable that
kids will be miserable at that age.  
  
This idea is so pervasive that even the kids believe it, which probably
doesn't help. Someone who thinks his feet naturally hurt is not going to stop
to consider the possibility that he is wearing the wrong size shoes.  
  
I'm suspicious of this theory that thirteen-year-old kids are intrinsically
messed up. If it's physiological, it should be universal. Are Mongol nomads
all nihilists at thirteen? I've read a lot of history, and I have not seen a
single reference to this supposedly universal fact before the twentieth
century. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance seem to have been cheerful and
eager. They got in fights and played tricks on one another of course
(Michelangelo had his nose broken by a bully), but they weren't crazy.  
  
As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed teenager is coeval
with suburbia. I don't think this is a coincidence. I think teenagers are
driven crazy by the life they're made to lead. Teenage apprentices in the
Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their
craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere.  
  
  
  
When I was in school, suicide was a constant topic among the smarter kids. No
one I knew did it, but several planned to, and some may have tried. Mostly
this was just a pose. Like other teenagers, we loved the dramatic, and suicide
seemed very dramatic. But partly it was because our lives were at times
genuinely miserable.  
  
Bullying was only part of the problem. Another problem, and possibly an even
worse one, was that we never had anything real to work on. Humans like to
work; in most of the world, your work is your identity. And all the work we
did was pointless, or seemed so at the time.  
  
At best it was practice for real work we might do far in the future, so far
that we didn't even know at the time what we were practicing for. More often
it was just an arbitrary series of hoops to jump through, words without
content designed mainly for testability. (The three main causes of the Civil
War were.... Test: List the three main causes of the Civil War.)  
  
And there was no way to opt out. The adults had agreed among themselves that
this was to be the route to college. The only way to escape this empty life
was to submit to it.  
  
  
  
Teenage kids used to have a more active role in society. In pre-industrial
times, they were all apprentices of one sort or another, whether in shops or
on farms or even on warships. They weren't left to create their own societies.
They were junior members of adult societies.  
  
Teenagers seem to have respected adults more then, because the adults were the
visible experts in the skills they were trying to learn. Now most kids have
little idea what their parents do in their distant offices, and see no
connection (indeed, there is precious little) between schoolwork and the work
they'll do as adults.  
  
And if teenagers respected adults more, adults also had more use for
teenagers. After a couple years' training, an apprentice could be a real help.
Even the newest apprentice could be made to carry messages or sweep the
workshop.  
  
Now adults have no immediate use for teenagers. They would be in the way in an
office. So they drop them off at school on their way to work, much as they
might drop the dog off at a kennel if they were going away for the weekend.  
  
What happened? We're up against a hard one here. The cause of this problem is
the same as the cause of so many present ills: specialization. As jobs become
more specialized, we have to train longer for them. Kids in pre-industrial
times started working at about 14 at the latest; kids on farms, where most
people lived, began far earlier. Now kids who go to college don't start
working full-time till 21 or 22. With some degrees, like MDs and PhDs, you may
not finish your training till 30.  
  
Teenagers now are useless, except as cheap labor in industries like fast food,
which evolved to exploit precisely this fact. In almost any other kind of
work, they'd be a net loss. But they're also too young to be left
unsupervised. Someone has to watch over them, and the most efficient way to do
this is to collect them together in one place. Then a few adults can watch all
of them.  
  
If you stop there, what you're describing is literally a prison, albeit a
part-time one. The problem is, many schools practically do stop there. The
stated purpose of schools is to educate the kids. But there is no external
pressure to do this well. And so most schools do such a bad job of teaching
that the kids don't really take it seriously-- not even the smart kids. Much
of the time we were all, students and teachers both, just going through the
motions.  
  
In my high school French class we were supposed to read Hugo's _Les
Miserables._ I don't think any of us knew French well enough to make our way
through this enormous book. Like the rest of the class, I just skimmed the
Cliff's