Why Nerds are Unpopular:
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 [in school].
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 [school] 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.
.
.
There are certainly great public school teachers. The energy and
imagination of my fourth grade teacher, Mr. Mihalko, made that year
something his students still talk about, thirty years later. But
teachers like him were individuals swimming upstream. They couldn't
fix the system.
.
.
In almost any group of people you'll find hierarchy. When groups of
adults form in the real world, it's generally for some common
purpose, and the leaders end up being those who are best at it. The
problem with most schools is, they have no purpose. But hierarchy
there must be. And so the kids make one out of nothing.
.
.
When there is some real external test of skill, it isn't painful to
be at the bottom of the hierarchy. A rookie on a football team
doesn't resent the skill of the veteran; he hopes to be like him one
day and is happy to have the chance to learn from him. The veteran
may in turn feel a sense of noblesse oblige. And most importantly,
their status depends on how well they do against opponents, not on
whether they can push the other down.
Court hierarchies are another thing entirely. This type of society
debases anyone who enters it. There is neither admiration at the
bottom, nor noblesse oblige at the top. It's kill or be killed.
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 the things they're supposed to be
learning.
This is the sort of society that gets created in American secondary
schools. And it happens because these schools have no real purpose
beyond keeping the kids all in one place for a certain number of
hours each day. What I didn't realize at the time, and in fact didn't
realize till very recently, is that the twin horrors of school life,
the cruelty and the boredom, both have the same cause.
"Love is at the same time the most generous and the most egotistical thing in nature; the most generous because it receives nothing and gives all -- pure mind being only able to give and not receive; the most egotistical, for that which he seeks in the subject, that which he enjoys in it, is himself and never anything else." - Friedrich von Schiller.
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