Essay on Schools, Nerds, and the Social Pathologies of Students

Something of an object lesson on how the internet works, this. I started off reading the Volokh Conspiracy, in which Eugene questions the foundations of statutory rape laws. Find updates here, here, here, and here. The second "here" includes a link to Glenn Reynolds' Fox piece on our disfunctional schools and the resulting student pathologies. Over at Reynold's Instapundit, he has this post. In it, he included links to this essay, by Paul Graham on how school induced pathologies are a problem for nerds. There is also a link to Kimberly Swygert's site, Number 2 Pencil.

I have seen four theories. The envy theory, the puberty theory, the distopian theory, the distraction theory, and the awareness theory. The envy theory and the puberty theory are popular out there somewhere, but these reviewers here are not fond of them. I think they have some truth to them, but are very limited in their explanatory ability. Providing more explanation are the distraction and the awareness theories. The distraction theory, which is argued by Graham, is that bright kids have other interests that distract them from putting forth the effort to be popular. The awareness theory, which I heard argued at a presentation for parents of gifted children, is that bright kids are aware of things not known to average kids, and are thus thought to be weird, boring, or otherwise odd. There is a lot of similarity between the distraction and awareness theories, except that the distraction theory suggests that bright kids could be popular if they wanted to prioritize popularity over their other pursuits, while the awareness theory would require not only priority, but concealing their awareness as well. Both argue different things, so I distinguish between them. Both are limited to explaining why people who achieve success as adults were so often not popular in high school, but does little to explain the sex, drugs, or violence that are the more serious problems in the school.

The final theory is the distopian. Glenn Reynolds is mostly arguing the distopian theory, although it is also lurking right behind the curtain in Paul Graham's essay. The distopian theory argues that schools are environments that select for disfunctional behaviors. Reynolds cites the way society infantilizes adolescents, the way marketers exploit their leisure, and the peer socialization. Graham takes issue with the pointlessness of the time spent in school, from which flows an artificial society based on popularity. He points to analogs like prison and the idle rich. Graham writes, "Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere."

Its the distopian theory that carries the most weight the longest distance. It may or may not rise to the level of dominancem let's see what the critics of it can muster, but it can't be counted out.