from The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth

Alexandra Robbins

Reporter and lecturer Alexandra Robbins is a graduate of Yale University and the author of Pledged (2004), which describes the secretive world of college sororities, and The Overachievers (2006), which documents the overwhelming academic pressures that today’s high school students face. For The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth (2011), Robbins followed seven high school students from private, public, suburban, and inner city schools from all over the country for a year, all of whom, she says in the introduction, have “more in common than they know.”

KEY CONTEXT In the prologue to her book, Robbins writes:

Early 2011. Bullying in school has recently driven several teenagers to suicide. Exclusion and clique warfare are so rampant that the media declares bullying an epidemic and rallies for the public to view the tragedies as a national wake-up call.

Throngs of students who are not outright bullied are disheartened because it is getting increasingly more difficult to become an “insider,” to fit into a group, to be accepted as “normal.” Students feel trapped, despairing that in today’s educational landscape, they either have to conform to the popular crowd’s arbitrary standards — forcing them to hide their true selves — or face dismissive treatment that batters relentlessly at their souls.

Schools struggle to come up with solutions. Even the most beloved parents are met with disbelief when they insist, “This too shall pass.” Adults tell students that it gets better, that the world changes after school, that being “different” will pay off sometime after graduation.

But no one explains to them why.

Enter quirk theory.

In the excerpt that follows, you will read about the social and biological pressures to conform that students face and the difficulty students have in maintaining their individuality in the larger environment of high school. Throughout the book, Robbins profiles several students, following and interviewing them throughout a school year. This section focuses on Whitney, called the “popular bitch,” who tries to have friendships outside the popular clique, of which she is a member.

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Introduction

CAFETERIA FRINGE: People who are not part of or who are excluded from a school’s or society’s in crowd.

In the decade I’ve spent examining various microcosms of life in U.S. schools — from the multitude of students pressured to succeed in school and sports to the twentysomething products of this educational Rube Goldberg machine — a disturbing pattern has emerged. Young people are trying frantically to force themselves into an unbending mold of expectations, convinced that they live in a two-tiered system in which they are either a resounding success or they have already failed. And the more they try to squeeze themselves into that shrinking, allegedly normative space, the faster the walls close in.

The students outside these walls are the kids who typically are not considered part of the in crowd, the ones who are excluded, blatantly or subtly, from the premier table in the lunchroom. I refer to them as “cafeteria fringe.” Whether alone or in groups, these geeks, loners, punks, floaters, nerds, freaks, dorks, gamers, bandies, art kids, theater geeks, choir kids, Goths, weirdos, indies, scenes, emos, skaters, and various types of racial and other minorities are often relegated to subordinate social status simply because they are, or seem to be, even the slightest bit different.

Students alone did not create these boundaries. The No Child Left Behind law, a disproportionate emphasis on SATs, APs, and other standardized tests, and a suffocating homogenization of the U.S. education system have all contributed to a rabidly conformist atmosphere that stifles unique people, ideas, and expression. The methods that schools and government officials claimed would improve America’s “progress” are the same methods that hold back the students who are most likely to further that progress.

In precisely the years that we should be embracing differences among students, urging them to pursue their divergent interests at full throttle, we’re instead forcing them into a skyline of sameness, muffling their voices, grounding their dreams. The result? As a Midwestern senior told me for my book The Overachievers, high schoolers view life as “a conveyor belt,” making monotonous scheduled stops at high school, college, graduate school, and a series of jobs until death. Middle schools in North America have been called “the Bermuda triangle of education.” Only 22 percent of U.S. youth socialize with people of another race. U.S. students have some of the highest rates of emotional problems and the most negative views of peer culture among countries surveyed by the World Health Organization. [. . .]

QUIRK THEORY: Many of the differences that cause a student to be excluded in school are the same traits or real-world skills that others will value, love, respect, or find compelling about that person in adulthood and outside of the school setting.

5 Quirk theory suggests that popularity in school is not a key to success and satisfaction in adulthood. Conventional notions of popularity are wrong. What if popularity is not the same thing as social success? What if students who are considered outsiders aren’t really socially inadequate at all? Being an outsider doesn’t necessarily indicate any sort of social failing. We do not view a tuba player as musically challenged if he cannot play the violin. He’s just a different kind of musician. A sprinter is still considered an athlete even if she can’t play basketball. She’s a different kind of athlete. Rather than view the cafeteria fringe as less socially successful than the popular crowd, we could simply accept that they are a different kind of social.

. . .

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To investigate the cause and consequence of the gut-wrenching social landscape that characterizes too many schools, I followed seven “main characters” — real people — for a year and interviewed hundreds of other students, teachers, and counselors individually and in groups. I talked with students from public schools, private schools, technical schools, schools for the arts, boarding schools, college prep academies, inner city schools, small rural schools, and suburban schools. They have more in common than they know. [. . .]

Whitney, New York | The Popular Bitch

Before leaving home for her last first day of high school, Whitney glanced at herself in all of her mirrors for the seventeenth time: the large mirror above her dresser, the small one by her TV for scrutinizing hair and makeup, and the full-length one behind her door. She had spent two hours getting ready this morning. Her white-blonde hair, highlighted from a summer of lifeguarding, cascaded to her shoulders in meticulously crafted, loose, bouncy curls behind a funky knit headband that she wore so she’d have an excuse to brag that members of a famous rock group had complimented her on it. Several bracelets dangled from her wrist, still tan from cheerleading camp the week before. Her makeup was flawless, accentuated by a smattering of glitter above her eyes; it looked good now, but she knew she would check her makeup again in the school bathroom three or four times that day, hunting for imperfections and correcting them with her Sephora-only arsenal.

People told Whitney all the time that she was pretty, as in beauty pageant pretty or talk show host pretty. Whitney thought this was because of her smile. In her opinion, her straight white teeth slightly made up for her body, which dissatisfied her when she compared it to her friends’. When they went to the local diner together, the girls did not eat; they only sat and watched the guys stuff their faces. If the girls were really hungry, the most they would order in front of the group was lemon water.

Whitney checked her makeup again in the kitchen mirror, forced herself to guzzle a Slim-Fast shake to jump-start her metabolism, grabbed her Coach purse, lacrosse bag, and book bag, and ran out the door, pausing briefly at the mirror in the foyer. She drove too quickly into the school parking lot, unapologetically cutting off people on her way, and parked her SUV crookedly, taking up two spots, but leaving it there anyway because she could. She met up with Giselle, her best friend until recently. Giselle, who had been the schoolwide Homecoming Queen as a sophomore, had become popular through cheerleading and by dating a popular senior — when she was in the eighth grade. “Well, this is it!” Giselle said, and they stepped into the building.

10 Riverland Academy, located in a small town in upstate New York, catered to a mostly white, Christian community. Its four hundred students crowded into the gym, standing in small groups or lining the bleachers. Amidst the chaos, the girls easily spotted their group, which other students called the “preps” or the “populars,” in the center of the gym. Bianca, the queen bee, thin and tan, stood with Kendra, a senior; Peyton, a junior; and Madison, Bianca’s best friend. Chelsea, the only brunette standing among the populars, had worked her way up from “being a loser,” according to Whitney, by “sucking up to Bianca like crazy and giving her information about people.” The preps tolerated Chelsea, but didn’t include her as a stalwart member of the group. This meant they didn’t allow her in their Homecoming limo, but they did invite her to take pictures with them.

A few of the prep boys orbited the girls: Chip and Spencer, hot high-society seniors; Bobby, a chubby, boisterous football star; and Seth, an overachieving junior. The preps were each on two or more sports teams, partied with college students, and in Whitney’s words, “just own[ed] the school.”

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The girls appraised the surrounding students and whispered to each other, standing as they typically did, one hand on a hip, one knee bent, in what the cheerleading coach referred to as “the hooker’s pose.” [. . .]

The group caught up briefly before resuming the assessment of the students swarming around them. “Oh my God. Who is that?!” Peyton sniffed, nodding her head toward a band girl.

“That’s Shay,” Chelsea answered.

15 “Dude, I didn’t even recognize her,” Peyton said. “Did she gain like fifteen pounds over the summer?! Why did her hair get so big and frizzy?” This led to a discussion about how there were too many skanks and trailer trash kids at Riverland.

The preps took stock of the new freshmen, as they did at the beginning of every year, to decide who was going to be cool and to whom they were going to be mean. They automatically deemed one girl cool because her older sister was dating a prep. The freshman cheerleaders were acceptable. If freshman girls didn’t already have something going for them when they got to Riverland — an older boyfriend, a popular sibling, a varsity sport, money, or a parent with connections — they were out of luck. “If we don’t know them already by some other affiliation,” Whitney said, “they aren’t worth getting to know” — and they were automatically labeled skanks. [. . .]

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Students gathered together in the bleachers, group by group. The “badasses,” allegedly bullies who liked to destroy property, were tossing basketballs in the air. The FFAs, or members of the Future Farmers of America club — the preps called them hicks and rednecks — sat at the end of the bleachers. The wannabes, dressed like their role models but discernible by their whiff of uncertainty, stood at a far corner of the room. Those were the kids who fed the preps’ egos. Whitney would walk down the hall like royalty, while the wannabes would gush, “Whitney, you look so pretty today!” or “Whitney, you did such a good job cheering last night!” If a prep girl showed up at school with a shaved head, Whitney was sure the wannabes would visit the salon that night to do the same. It was the fact that they tried so hard that doomed them.

Whitney looked at the punks, who wore tight pants and band shirts. They could scream every word of the music they listened to. They were unafraid to strike up conversations with other groups, but they usually clashed with the preps. As Whitney saw it, the cliques were just too different. Whitney was certain that the punk girls thought the populars were loud and snobby. Besides, she mused, odds were that she and her friends probably had been mean to the punk girls before.

The popular guys referred to the punks as “weird” and “useless.” They called Dirk, the punks’ alpha male, a scumbag within his earshot. Whitney was as friendly with Dirk as her group allowed, which meant in hallways their communication was limited to awkward eye contact and brief exchanges. She was attracted to Dirk, a funny and talented drummer, but she didn’t tell anyone, because a popular cheerleader dating a punk would cause “crazy scandalous controversy” and further escalate the tension between the groups. She was having enough trouble with the preps as it was.

20 After the welcome-back hug, the preps hardly acknowledged Whitney, though she stood next to them. The group brought up inside jokes and memories from the summer that didn’t include her. Whitney recognized this weapon because she had used it before. The preps enjoyed purposely making someone feel bad for not being at an event. If you weren’t at a party one weekend, the group wouldn’t stop talking about it in front of you until the next party.

Whitney loved the power and perks of popularity. When the teachers began handing out senior schedules at the back of the gym, Whitney’s group pushed to the front of the line en masse, as students parted without protest. The teachers didn’t bat an eye at the line cut, instead complimenting the girls on their hair and their tans. We haven’t been in school for more than ten minutes and already our egos have grown, Whitney thought. Her group got away with everything. For example, students who were late to class four times automatically received detention. Not Giselle. She regularly escaped detention because of cheerleading practice, and no one dared complain. [. . .]

Schedules in hand, the preps left the gym before they were dismissed, and strutted toward “their” hallway. Other students walked by the Prep Hall quickly, so as not to attract attention in the area where the preps heckled the “weird kids.” By the end of junior year, one such student was so fed up with the preps’ rude comments that when they made fun of him for drawing a robot, he lashed out: “You’re going to be sorry when I come to school with a gun and kill all of you.” The preps didn’t say another word to him.

“Ugh,” Bianca shouted. “I hate when stupid freshmen don’t know how to walk in the hall! You walk on the right side of the hallway! Goddamn!”

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As the halls filled up, crowds parted for the preps. Some students said hello, but Whitney and her friends gave them the “what’s-up-but-I-won’t-really-acknowledge-you” head nod.

25 When Whitney walked into advertising class with Peyton, she spotted Dirk. “Hey, Whitney!” he yelled across the room.

“I’m not sitting with Dirk,” Peyton whispered to Whitney. “I don’t see why you like those people. They scare me.”

Whitney shrugged and grinned at Dirk as she sat next to him anyway.

At lunch, the preps cut to the front of the line, as usual, and sat at “their” lunch table in the center of the cafeteria. Whitney hadn’t waited in the lunch line since she was a freshman. In the past, when students told the preps to stop cutting, Whitney’s group either ignored them or shot nasty glares. When the protestors walked off, the preps would follow them and make loud comments, such as, “Wow, fat-asses need their food quickly, don’t they?! I mean, do you really think they need that much food? They look like they could do without lunch once in a while . . . ” Nobody complained anymore. Because they favored the preps, the teachers in the room looked the other way.

Before cheer practice that afternoon, Whitney and Giselle claimed their gym lockers. It hardly mattered that they always took the lockers in the back corner of the last row. When the prep cheerleaders changed their clothes, the younger athletes waited until the preps were dressed and gone before going to their own lockers. Once, an underclassman tried to squeeze by and accidentally stepped on Whitney’s Ugg boot. “Jesus Christ! Seriously?!” Whitney yelled. The girl looked mortified, blurted out a meek “I’m sorry!,” and ran away.

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30 As much as she loved being popular, Whitney wished other students understood that it wasn’t so easy. Preps were stereotyped like everyone else, she said. “A prep talks like a Valley Girl, thinks she’s better than everyone, is obsessed with looks, sleeps around, is usually a cheerleader, doesn’t eat, parties all the time, and gets away with murder. Basically, emos want us dead.”

Whitney insisted that the prep description didn’t fit the “real” Whitney. “I’m not snobby,” she said. “I have to be this way because it’s what my friends do. If I wasn’t like this, I wouldn’t have any friends.” She loathed the immediate judgments students made about her. She was a cheerleader; therefore she was a slut. She was a class officer; therefore she was stuck up. She wore expensive clothes; therefore she was spoiled. She said “like” too often; therefore she was flaky. She was a prep; therefore she was a bitch.

The funny thing was that if Whitney could have chosen any group at school to belong to, she wouldn’t have chosen the clique that intimidated other students with cruelty. She would have chosen to be in what she considered the most nonjudgmental, down-to-earth crew at school: the punks. But it didn’t matter. There was no changing groups. Once you were in a group, you were stuck there until graduation, no matter what. That was just the way high school was, Whitney was sure. So she didn’t tell a soul.

The Courage of Nonconformists

If there is one trait that most cafeteria fringe share, it is courage. No matter how awkward, timid, or insecure he or she might seem, any teenager who resists blending in with the crowd is brave.

A closer look at this age group’s psychology reveals that the deck is stacked against singularity from early on. Studies have shown that children are psychologically drawn to peers who are similar and more likely to end friendships with kids who are different. From the age of five, students increasingly exclude peers who don’t conform to group norms. Children learn this lesson quickly. A popular Indiana eighth grader told me, “I have to be the same as everybody else, or people won’t like me anymore.”

35 Numerous studies show that students in the same social circle tend to have similar levels of academics, leadership, aggression, and cooperation. The most influential kids are also typically the same ones who insist most stridently on conformity; researchers have found that even in late adolescence, popular cliques are more conformist than other groups. Given that many children often try to copy populars’ behavior, it makes sense that conformity trickles down the social hierarchy.

But conformity is not an admirable trait. Conformity is a cop-out. It threatens self-awareness. It can lead groups to enforce rigid and arbitrary rules. Adolescent groups with high levels of conformity experience more negative behavior — with group members and outsiders — than do groups with lower levels of conformity. Conformity can become dangerous, leading to unhealthy behaviors, and it goes against a teenager’s innate desire to form a unique identity. Why, then, is conformity so common?

In the mid-twentieth century, psychologists discovered that when asked to judge an ambiguous test, such as an optical illusion, individuals usually parroted the opinions of the other people in the room. In the 1950s, social psychologist Solomon Asch decided to gauge levels of conformity when the test answers were absolutely clear. Asch assumed that people wouldn’t bother to conform to an incorrect group opinion when the answer was obvious.

Asch was wrong — and his results stunned academia. For the experiment, he brought college students, one by one, into a room with six to eight other participants. He showed the room a picture of one line and a separate picture containing three lines labeled 1, 2, and 3. One of the three lines was the same length as the line in the first picture, while the other two differed by as much as several inches. Asch then had each volunteer call out the number of the line he believed to be the same length as the first. Unbeknownst to the college student, who was the last to be called on, the other participants were in on the experiment. Asch had instructed them to call out the wrong number on twelve out of eighteen trials. At least once, even when the answer was plain to see, nearly three-quarters of the students repeated the group’s wrong answer.

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Sixty years later, scientists are discovering that there are deeper factors at work than even Asch could have imagined. New research using brain imaging studies suggests that there is a biological explanation for the variation in people’s ability to resist the temptation to conform. Neuroscientists monitoring brain images during conformity experiments similar to Asch’s have found that participants are not necessarily imitating the majority merely to fit in. Instead, participants’ visual perception seems to change to align with the answers of the rest of the group.

40 To understand how this change could take place, it’s helpful to know that the brain is an efficient organ that likes to cheat. In order to conserve energy, it takes shortcuts whenever possible, such as the reliance on labels explained earlier. Another shortcut is a concept known as the Law of Large Numbers, a probability theorem according to which, “the more measurements you make of something, the more accurate the average of these measurements becomes.” When the students in Asch’s experiment conformed to group opinion, their brains were taking the Law of Large Numbers shortcut, assuming that the opinion of the group was more statistically accurate than any individual’s. In 2005, neuroscientist Gregory Berns conducted a similar experiment, this time using MRIs to measure participants’ brain activity. Berns observed that deferring to the group took some of the pressure off the decision-making part of the brain.

Berns also noticed something else, as he wrote in his intriguing book Iconoclast: “We observed the fear system kicking in, almost like a fail-safe when the individual went against the group. These are powerful biological mechanisms that make it extremely difficult to think like an iconoclast.”

Berns saw increased activity in the amygdala when his test subjects did not conform to group opinion. Amygdala activity can lead to a rise in blood pressure and heart rate, sweating, and rapid breathing. “Its activation during non-conformity underscored the unpleasant nature of standing alone — even when the individual had no recollection of it,” Berns wrote. “In many people, the brain would rather avoid activating the fear system and just change perception to conform with the social norm.” [. . .]

Nonconformists, therefore, aren’t just going against the grain; they’re going against the brain. Either their brains aren’t taking the easy way out to begin with, or in standing apart from their peers, these students are standing up to their biology.

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