> > > I could never figure out why there was social maturity in some places and not in others in basically the same place.
> >
> > Because people are people regardless. TOMatt always likes to "correct" me when I talk about adults having childish drama, and tell me that really, it's the children mimicking what they see the adults do every day.
> >
>
> Pretty much. Children aren't smart enough to do anything other than mimic what adults teach them. So-called "High school drama" is socialized into them by cultural institutions. Be it family life, or television, or the books they read. They're only acting out what they know real people (and made-up people) do. Part of it is that children are expected to act this way in school, and part of it is that children are "practicing" the construction of their own societies, and they model them after what they see their elders do.
>
> TOM


I think I've linked to this article before, but I'm gonna do it again because it's relevant to this thread and also it's a pretty good article. It's partly an explanation about why "nerds" are unpopular in school, why kids persecute each other, and partly a critique of American secondary education, or as I like to call it, "edu-ma-cashun". Here's a particularly relevant snippet from about halfway through the article:

"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."