February 2003When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a mapof the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easyto do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the samepopularity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full offootball players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained thekids with mild cases of Down's Syndrome, what in the language ofthe time we called "retards."We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without lookingphysically different. We were not being especially candid to gradeourselves 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 undergroundnewspaper. 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 tellthe same story: there is a strong correlation between being smartand being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation betweenbeing a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make youunpopular.Why? To someone in school now, that may seem an odd question toask. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange toimagine that it could be any other way. But it could. Being smartdoesn't make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harmyou in the real world. Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problemso bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondaryschool, being smart is likely to make your life difficult. Why?The key to this mystery is to rephrase the question slightly. Whydon't smart kids make themselves popular? If they're so smart, whydon'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 smartkids are unpopular because the other kids envy them for being smart,and nothing they could do could make them popular. I wish. If theother kids in junior high school envied me, they did a great jobof concealing it. And in any case, if being smart were really anenviable quality, the girls would have broken ranks. The guys thatguys envy, girls like.In the schools I went to, being smart just didn't matter much. Kidsdidn't admire it or despise it. All other things being equal, theywould have preferred to be on the smart side of average rather than thedumb side, but intelligence counted far less than, say, physicalappearance, charisma, or athletic ability.So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why aresmart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is thatthey don't really want to be popular.If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed athim. Being unpopular in school makes kids miserable, some of themso miserable that they commit suicide. Telling me that I didn'twant to be popular would have seemed like telling someone dying ofthirst in a desert that he didn't want a glass of water. Of courseI wanted to be popular.But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wantedmore: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though thatcounted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to writewell, or to understand how to program computers. In general, tomake great things.At the time I never tried to separate my wants and weigh themagainst one another. If I had, I would have seen that being smartwas more important. If someone had offered me the chance to bethe most popular kid in school, but only at the price of being ofaverage intelligence (humor me here), I wouldn't have taken it.Much as they suffer from their unpopularity, I don't think manynerds would. To them the thought of average intelligence is unbearable.But most kids would take that deal. For half of them, it would bea step up. Even for someone in the eightieth percentile (assuming,as everyone seemed to then, that intelligence is a scalar), whowouldn't drop thirty points in exchange for being loved and admiredby everyone?And that, I think, is the root of the problem. Nerds serve twomasters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want evenmore to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do inyour spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of anAmerican secondary school.Alberti, arguably the archetype of the Renaissance Man, writes that"no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if youwant to excel in it."I wonder if anyone in the world works harderat anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALsand neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. Theyoccasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies. An Americanteenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days ayear.I don't mean to suggest they do this consciously. Some of them trulyare little Machiavellis, but what I really mean here is that teenagersare 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 theirdefinition of right, not just for clothes, but for almost everythingthey do, right down to the way they walk. And so every effort theymake to do things "right" is also, consciously or not, an effortto be more popular.Nerds don't realize this. They don't realize that it takes work tobe popular. In general, people outside some very demanding fielddon't realize the extent to which success depends on constant (thoughoften unconscious) effort. For example, most people seem to considerthe ability to draw as some kind of innate quality, like being tall.In fact, most people who "can draw" like drawing, and have spentmany hours doing it; that's why they're good at it. Likewise, popularisn't just something you are or you aren't, but something you makeyourself.The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other thingsto think about. Their attention is drawn to books or the naturalworld, not fashions and parties. They're like someone trying toplay soccer while balancing a glass of water on his head. Otherplayers who can focus their whole attention on the game beat themeffortlessly, and wonder why they seem so incapable.Even if nerds cared as much as other kids about popularity, beingpopular would be more work for them. The popular kids learned tobe popular, and to want to be popular, the same way the nerds learnedto be smart, and to want to be smart: from their parents. While thenerds were being trained to get the right answers, the popular kidswere 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 thecontext that makes them so. A nerd is someone who isn't sociallyadept enough. But "enough" depends on where you are. In a typicalAmerican school, standards for coolness are so high (or at least,so specific) that you don't have to be especially awkward to lookawkward by comparison.Few smart kids can spare the attention that popularity requires.Unless they also happen to be good-looking, natural athletes, orsiblings of popular kids, they'll tend to become nerds. And that'swhy smart people's lives are worst between, say, the ages of elevenand seventeen. Life at that age revolves far more around popularitythan before or after.Before that, kids' lives are dominated by their parents, not byother 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 theirfamily as a day job. They create a new world among themselves, andstanding in this world is what matters, not standing in their family.Indeed, being in trouble in their family can win them points in theworld they care about.The problem is, the world these kids create for themselves is atfirst a very crude one. If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-oldsto their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Likea lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably itwas not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out tous that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel andstupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemedentirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wishthey had just told us outright that we were savages and our worldwas stupid.Nerds would find their unpopularity more bearable if it merelycaused them to be ignored. Unfortunately, to be unpopular in schoolis to be actively persecuted.Why? Once again, anyone currently in school might think this astrange question to ask. How could things be any other way? Butthey could be. Adults don't normally persecute nerds. Why do teenagekids do it?Partly because teenagers are still half children, and manychildren are just intrinsically cruel. Some torture nerds for thesame reason they pull the legs off spiders. Before you develop aconscience, torture is amusing.Another reason kids persecute nerds is to make themselves feelbetter. When you tread water, you lift yourself up by pushing waterdown. Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their ownposition will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they thinkrank below. I've read that this is why poor whites in the UnitedStates are the group most hostile to blacks.But I think the main reason other kids persecute nerds is that it'spart of the mechanism of popularity. Popularity is only partiallyabout individual attractiveness. It's much more about alliances.To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things thatbring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings peoplecloser than a common enemy.Like a politician who wants to distract voters from bad times athome, you can create an enemy if there isn't a real one. By singlingout and persecuting a nerd, a group of kids from higher in thehierarchy create bonds between themselves. Attacking an outsidermakes them all insiders. This is why the worst cases of bullyinghappen with groups. Ask any nerd: you get much worse treatment froma group of kids than from any individual bully, however sadistic.If it's any consolation to the nerds, it's nothing personal. Thegroup of kids who band together to pick on you are doing the samething, and for the same reason, as a bunch of guys who get togetherto go hunting. They don't actually hate you. They just need somethingto chase.Because they're at the bottom of the scale, nerds are a safe targetfor the entire school. If I remember correctly, the most popularkids don't persecute nerds; they don't need to stoop to such things.Most of the persecution comes from kids lower down, the nervousmiddle classes.The trouble is, there are a lot of them. The distribution ofpopularity is not a pyramid, but tapers at the bottom like a pear.The least popular group is quite small. (I believe we were the onlyD table in our cafeteria map.) So there are more people who wantto 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 thatin high school she liked nerds, but was afraid to be seen talkingto them because the other girls would make fun of her. Unpopularityis a communicable disease; kids too nice to pick on nerds will stillostracize them in self-defense.It's no wonder, then, that smart kids tend to be unhappy in middleschool and high school. Their other interests leave them littleattention to spare for popularity, and since popularity resemblesa zero-sum game, this in turn makes them targets for the wholeschool. And the strange thing is, this nightmare scenario happenswithout any conscious malice, merely because of the shape of thesituation.For me the worst stretch was junior high, when kid culture was newand harsh, and the specialization that would later gradually separatethe smarter kids had barely begun. Nearly everyone I've talked toagrees: the nadir is somewhere between eleven and fourteen.In our school it was eighth grade, which was ages twelve and thirteenfor me. There was a brief sensation that year when one of ourteachers overheard a group of girls waiting for the school bus, andwas so shocked that the next day she devoted the whole class to aneloquent plea not to be so cruel to one another.It didn't have any noticeable effect. What struck me at the timewas that she was surprised. You mean she doesn't know the kind ofthings they say to one another? You mean this isn't normal?It's important to realize that, no, the adults don't know what thekids are doing to one another. They know, in the abstract, thatkids are monstrously cruel to one another, just as we know in theabstract that people get tortured in poorer countries. But, likeus, they don't like to dwell on this depressing fact, and they don'tsee evidence of specific abuses unless they go looking for it.Public school teachers are in much the same position as prisonwardens. Wardens' main concern is to keep the prisoners on thepremises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possibleprevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want tohave as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leavethem to create whatever social organization they want. From whatI'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 mostimportant thing was to stay on the premises. While there, theauthorities fed you, prevented overt violence, and made some effortto teach you something. But beyond that they didn't want to havetoo much to do with the kids. Like prison wardens, the teachersmostly left us to ourselves. And, like prisoners, the culture wecreated was barbaric.Why is the real world more hospitable to nerds? It might seem thatthe answer is simply that it's populated by adults, who are toomature 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 soundslike a continuation of high school, with all the same petty intrigues.I think the important thing about the real world is not that it'spopulated by adults, but that it's very large, and the things youdo have real effects. That's what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunchall lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in littlebubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect.Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have nofunction for their form to follow.When the things you do have real effects, it's no longer enoughjust to be pleasing. It starts to be important to get the rightanswers, and that's where nerds show to advantage. Bill Gates willof 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'smuch larger. In a large enough pool, even the smallest minoritiescan achieve a critical mass if they clump together. Out in the realworld, nerds collect in certain places and form their own societieswhere intelligence is the most important thing. Sometimes the currenteven starts to flow in the other direction: sometimes, particularlyin university math and science departments, nerds deliberatelyexaggerate their awkwardness in order to seem smarter. John Nashso admired Norbert Wiener that he adopted his habit of touching thewall as he walked down a corridor.As a thirteen-year-old kid, I didn't have much more experience ofthe world than what I saw immediately around me. The warped littleworld we lived in was, I thought, the world. The world seemed crueland boring, and I'm not sure which was worse.Because I didn't fit into this world, I thought that something mustbe wrong with me. I didn't realize that the reason we nerds didn'tfit in was that in some wayswe were a step ahead. We were already thinking aboutthe kind of things that matter in the real world, instead of spendingall our time playing an exacting but mostly pointless game like theothers.We were a bit like an adult would be if he were thrust back intomiddle school. He wouldn't know the right clothes to wear, the rightmusic to like, the right slang to use. He'd seem to the kids acomplete alien. The thing is, he'd know enough not to care whatthey thought. We had no such confidence.A lot of people seem to think it's good for smart kids to be throwntogether with "normal" kids at this stage of their lives. Perhaps.But in at least some cases the reason the nerds don't fit in reallyis that everyone else is crazy. I remember sitting in the audienceat a "pep rally" at my high school, watching as the cheerleadersthrew an effigy of an opposing player into the audience to be tornto pieces. I felt like an explorer witnessing some bizarre tribalritual.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 lookaround. I didn't really grasp it at the time, but the whole worldwe lived in was as fake as a Twinkie. Not just school, but theentire town. Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So nowonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giantnursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose ofbreeding children.Where I grew up, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, and nothingto do. This was no accident. Suburbs are deliberately designed toexclude the outside world, because it contains things that couldendanger children.And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within thisfake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. Infact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in oneplace for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. AndI 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 mostlyby the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizingmeaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who runafter an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thingin the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they'recalled misfits.Life in this twisted world is stressful for the kids. And not justfor the nerds. Like any war, it's damaging even to the winners.Adults can't avoid seeing that teenage kids are tormented. So whydon't they do something about it? Because they blame it on puberty.The reason kids are so unhappy, adults tell themselves, is thatmonstrous new chemicals, hormones, are now coursing through theirbloodstream and messing up everything. There's nothing wrong withthe system; it's just inevitable that kids will be miserable atthat age.This idea is so pervasive that even the kids believe it, whichprobably doesn't help. Someone who thinks his feet naturally hurtis not going to stop to consider the possibility that he is wearingthe wrong size shoes.I'm suspicious of this theory that thirteen-year-old kids areintrinsically messed up. If it's physiological, it should beuniversal. Are Mongol nomads all nihilists at thirteen? I've reada lot of history, and I have not seen a single referenceto this supposedly universal fact before the twentieth century.Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance seem to have been cheerfuland eager. They got in fights and played tricks on one another ofcourse (Michelangelo had his nose broken by a bully), but theyweren't crazy.As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed teenageris coeval with suburbia. I don't think this is a coincidence. Ithink teenagers are driven crazy by the life they're made to lead.Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagersnow are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of theidle everywhere.When I was in school, suicide was a constant topic among the smarterkids. No one I knew did it, but several planned to, andsome may have tried. Mostly this was just a pose. Like otherteenagers, 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 possiblyan 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 practicingfor. More often it was just an arbitrary series of hoops to jumpthrough, 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 amongthemselves that this was to be the route to college. The only wayto escape this empty life was to submit to it.Teenage kids used to have a more active role in society. Inpre-industrial times, they were all apprentices of one sort oranother, whether in shops or on farms or even on warships. Theyweren't left to create their own societies. They were junior membersof adult societies.Teenagers seem to have respected adults more then, becausethe adults were the visible experts in the skills they were tryingto learn. Now most kids have little idea what their parents do intheir distant offices, and see no connection (indeed, there isprecious little) between schoolwork and the work they'll do asadults.And if teenagers respected adults more, adults also had more usefor teenagers. After a couple years' training, an apprentice couldbe a real help. Even the newest apprentice could be made to carrymessages or sweep the workshop.Now adults have no immediate use for teenagers. They would be inthe way in an office. So they drop them off at school on their wayto 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 thisproblem 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 atthe 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 notfinish your training till 30.Teenagers now are useless, except as cheap labor in industries likefast food, which evolved to exploit precisely this fact. In almostany 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, andthe most efficient way to do this is to collect them together inone 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 practicallydo stop there. The stated purpose of schools is to educate the kids.But there is no external pressure to do this well. And so mostschools do such a bad job of teaching that the kids don't reallytake it seriously-- not even the smart kids. Much of the time wewere all, students and teachers both, just going through the motions.In my high school French class we were supposed to read Hugo's LesMiserables. I don't think any of us knew French well enough to makeour way through this enormous book. Like the rest of the class, I just skimmed the Cliff's Notes. When we were given a test on thebook, I noticed that the questions sounded odd. They were full of long words that our teacher wouldn't have used. Where had these questions come from? From the Cliff's Notes, it turned out. The teacher was using them too. We were all just pretending.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 swimmingupstream. 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 bestat 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.We have a phrase to describe what happens when rankings have to becreated without any meaningful criteria. We say that the situationdegenerates into a popularity contest. And that's exactly whathappens in most American schools.Instead of depending on some real test, one's rankdepends mostly on one's ability to increase one's rank. It'slike the court of Louis XIV. There is no external opponent, so thekids become one another's opponents.When there is some real external test of skill, it isn't painfulto be at the bottom of the hierarchy. A rookie on a football teamdoesn't resent the skill of the veteran; he hopes to be like himone day and is happy to have the chance to learn from him.The veteran may in turn feel a sense ofnoblesse oblige.And most importantly, their status depends on how well theydo against opponents, not on whether they can push the other down.Court hierarchies are another thing entirely. This type of societydebases anyone who enters it. There is neither admiration at the bottom, nor noblesse oblige at the top. It's kill or be killed.This is the sort of society that gets createdin Americansecondary schools. And it happens because these schools have noreal purpose beyond keeping the kids all in one place for a certainnumber of hours each day. What I didn't realize at the time, andin fact didn't realize till very recently, is that the twin horrorsof school life, the cruelty and the boredom, both have the same cause.The mediocrity of American public schools has worse consequencesthan just making kids unhappy for six years. It breeds a rebelliousnessthat actively drives kids away from the things they're supposed tobe learning.Like many nerds, probably, it was years after high school before Icould bring myself to read anything we'd been assigned then.And I lost more than books. I mistrusted words like "character" and "integrity" because they had been so debased by adults. As theywere used then, these words all seemed to mean the same thing:obedience. The kids who got praised for these qualities tended to be at best dull-witted prize bulls, and at worst facile schmoozers.If that was what character and integrity were, I wanted no part ofthem.The word I most misunderstood was "tact." As used by adults, itseemed to mean keeping your mouth shut.I assumed it was derived from the same root as"tacit" and "taciturn," and that it literally meant being quiet. Ivowed that I would never be tactful; they were never going to shutme up. In fact, it's derived from the same root as "tactile," andwhat it means is to have a deft touch. Tactful is the opposite ofclumsy. I don't think I learned this until college.Nerds aren't the only losers in the popularity rat race. Nerds areunpopular because they're distracted. There are other kids whodeliberately opt out because they're so disgusted with the whole process.Teenage kids, even rebels, don't like to be alone, so when kids optout of the system, they tend to do it as a group. At the schools Iwent to, the focus of rebellion was drug use, specifically marijuana.The kids in this tribe wore black concert t-shirts and were called"freaks."Freaks and nerds were allies, and there was a good deal of overlapbetween them. Freaks were on the whole smarter than other kids,though never studying (or at least never appearing to) was an important tribal value. I was more in the nerd camp, but I wasfriends with a lot of freaks.They used drugs, at least at first, for the social bonds theycreated. It was something to do together, and because the drugs were illegal, it was a shared badge of rebellion.I'm not claiming that bad schools are the whole reason kids getinto trouble with drugs. After a while, drugs have their own momentum.No doubt some of the freaks ultimately used drugs to escape from other problems-- trouble at home, for example. But, in my schoolat least, the reason most kids started using drugs was rebellion.Fourteen-year-olds didn't start smoking pot because they'd heardit would help them forget their problems. They started because theywanted to join a different tribe.Misrule breeds rebellion; this is not a new idea. And yet theauthorities still for the most part act as if drugs were themselvesthe cause of the problem.The real problem is the emptiness of school life. We won't seesolutions till adults realize that. The adults whomay realize it first are the ones who were themselves nerds in school. Do you want your kids to be as unhappy in eighth grade asyou were? I wouldn't. Well, then, is there anything we can do tofix things? Almost certainly. There is nothing inevitable about thecurrent system. It has come about mostly by default.Adults, though, are busy. Showing up for school plays is one thing.Taking on the educational bureaucracy is another. Perhaps a fewwill have the energy to try to change things. I suspect the hardest part is realizing that you can.Nerds still in school should not hold their breath. Maybe one daya heavily armed force of adults will show up in helicopters to rescue you, but they probably won't be coming this month. Any immediate improvement in nerds' lives is probably going to have tocome from the nerds themselves.Merely understanding the situation they're in should make it less painful. Nerds aren't losers. They're just playing a different game,and a game much closer to the one played in the real world. Adultsknow this. It's hard to find successful adults now who don't claimto have been nerds in high school.It's important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life.School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral.It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It'sonly temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even whileyou're still in it.If life seems awful to kids, it's neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor becauselife actually is awful (as you believe). It's because the adults,who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you tospend years cooped up together with nothing real to do. Any societyof that type is awful to live in.You don't haveto look any further to explain why teenage kids are unhappy.I've said some harsh things in this essay, but really the thesisis an optimistic one-- that several problems we take for grantedare in fact not insoluble after all. Teenage kids are not inherentlyunhappy monsters. That should be encouraging news to kids and adultsboth.Thanks to Sarah Harlin, Trevor Blackwell, Robert Morris,Eric Raymond, and Jackie Weicker for reading drafts of this essay,and Maria Daniels for scanning photos.
