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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

> One of the major factors is this weird anti-intellectualism culture that just doesn't exist in Russia.

It was the same thing in Romania, at least in the '90s, when I went to school/high-school. It was always strange to me seeing all those American movies of the "nerds"/geeks getting persecuted by the "cool" kids, it certainly didn't happen to kids in my school and I'm pretty sure it generally didn't happen to kids generally around the country.

I know because I was a "nerd" guy but I also played sports and actively enjoyed doing that, was never made fun of by my high-school colleagues because of me studying/getting high grades, that would have been pretty awkward to hear.

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It even went further: in Romania, there was a popular movie in the 80s where the main plot is a high school student going to the math olympiad and his classmates cheering for him (with additional romantic threads of course).

What movie is this?

https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liceenii

Obviously all culture, and certainly mass culture in the Soviet bloc was controlled for "proper social message". I don't suppose Romania was more lax in respect to that?

A movie cheering for, or even trivializing anti-social behaviors would find it difficult to go past censorship (not to mention - to be conceived in the first place...)

It's for the same reason that you'd be hard-pressed to find a pre-1989 Central/Eastern European movie depicting any subcultures (like punks or hippies) sympathetically.

In the West the mass culture is also controlled in some way (for political correctness).

You're correct, but anti-intellectualism (as defined for the context of this thread) doesn't belong to its targets.

Yes, that's a good point, and it was a positive side-effect of Soviet times that intellectual pursuits were valued/supported, especially those that were "pure" enough (math, chess, etc.) to be harmless to the regime.

Based on my experience (Poland) bullying typically targets social ineptitude and sycophantism towards teachers, which tends to be somewhat correlated with good performance at school. But I've never really seen anyone being persecuted for good grades as such.

I wouldn't assume that's the case in American schools, though - not based on movies, at least. Could be just a convenient stereotype peddled by "college comedies", not a genre I'd take as valid social commentary

There is also this often link-to essay by Paul Graham, called "revenge of the nerds" [1], that was also one of the reasons why I wrote about the situation in US high-schools (of which I have no direct experience).

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html

Frankly I find it difficult to figure out how the essay relates to the subject. Care to expand on it a bit?

> But I've never really seen anyone being persecuted for good grades as such.

As someone who went through the US public education system in a lower-class neighborhood in the 2000s, I can't speak for wealthier neighborhoods [1], but people are definitely persecuted solely for their grades.

[1] One of the most interesting things about American culture is the dichotomy we have due to the large population and inequality (meaning there's ~no group overlap prior to college) - educational experiences had been so vastly different for many I met in college, and we were shocked at hearing the other side's experiences.

I don't know if it's a class thing so much as an aspiration thing. In my diverse community, which could be broadly characterized as "middle -class/upper middle class black, lower-middle class/middle class white," it was the people who put on airs who had the biggest problems with me getting higher marks than them. There was also a transition; when I was younger, I got the most guff from the ghetto-fabulous black kids and got along relatively well with the white kids. Starting in middle school and intensifying in high school, the black kids seemed to chill and the hostility and ostracization from the white kids grew. I attribute this to the changing social dynamics: while the black kids who weren't getting the best-of-the-best scores had already been tracked into standard classes and could read the writing on the wall in terms of how academia was going to treat them going forward, the mediocre, insecure, and would-be upwardly-mobile white kids were becoming aware of the precariousness of their situation. They'd been boosted beyond their natural ability by savvy parents and a system set up to do so. An aloof black kid waltzing into class and getting by with little effort was threatening. God forbid he learn to study.

In Romania in high school (Sf. Sava) being good at math and physics made you automatically very popular, everyone wanted to sit near you whenever you had written exams :) In any case, smart people were appreciated, there were no "nerds".

A Sava person in the wild :) My significant other went to Lazar and I wasn't aware of the rivalry between the two high-schools until I met her, I personally grew up in a small-to-medium town where these school rivalries were pretty much absent.

It's also sociologically interesting because Sava/Lazar/Vianu people (or, generally speaking, people who went to good Bucharest high-schools, it's probably the same for other big-ish Romanian cities like Cluj or Timisoara) are more "aware" of the high-school they went to and they generally tend to keep friends with their high-school colleagues for way longer (my so's boss went to Sava and he's still active friends with his former Sava colleagues 25+ years after finishing high-school). Like I said, we don't have that thing in small-ish cities.

I say it's interesting because I kind of noticed the same thing in this thread with people who went to prestigious schools in Moscow (#57, #2), they tend to remember fondly said schools and some of them kept closely in touch with their former colleagues.

> Like I said, we don't have that thing in small-ish cities.

It's definitely a thing even in smaller cities with good highschools. Reunions for 10,20,30,40 years are very common and attended by all, including teachers still alive, etc.

We all have reunions, but I was saying that apart from them we don't keep that well in touch and we don't seem to show that 'esprit de corps' showed for example by OP (who mentioned his high-school) and by other people who went to prestigious high-schools from bigger cities.

Oh in small towns there is definitely some of that too, as in former classmates doing favors to each other, doing business together, as a miniature cartel running towns -- what I noticed to change in the past ~20years is that a good part of the elite left the country, so these local groups fell apart.

I keep in touch with former colleagues from high school, nobody from college, if that tells anything. The problem is that all these people live abroad, I am the only one living in Romania.

There was no rivalry between Sava and Lazar 30 years ago, except for the Cismigiu park. They were in the top 5 schools in Bucharest, but there was no direct competition, they were all considered good places to study and kids used to choose based on the location and other preferences. Lazar had easier access to Cismigiu and lower admission grades, Sava was in a strange neighborhood but a nice, larger building, MF1 (Vianu) was smaller and harder to reach from some places, etc. They all had good teachers back then, no longer these days.

To add more color, the top few high schools in Bucharest at the time were all highly competitive, with low % admission rates. So the student body was naturally skewed towards more academically inclined students. In a sense, if you made it in you were more or less a "nerd" compared to the general population.

I was the nerd in my class and I was bullied at primary school in Poland in 90s, but that's because I had lots of pretty obvious sicknesses (asthma, skin allergies, half the time I was going to school with my arms bandaged, I wasn't participating in sports, etc.).

Being good at everything was actually cooler than being bad, especially if you were pretending you're naturally smart and didn't have to work to achieve that. I never understood how come kids in American TV are bullied for being smarter than the others, usually being smart is an advantage. On the other hand if you worked hard for grades or (even worse) were a favorite of some teacher and sucked up to her - you were a "kujon" and that was very uncool.

So everybody pretended they are brilliant and never study for even 10 minutes just know everything :)

It's not that way anymore. That's even "propagated" to movies (see the scene in 21 Jump Street where they go back to high school and unsuccessfully try to persecute smart kids).

But as an American someone in their mid-40s...can anecdotally say it was definitely true in the 80s-90s.

It's a senseless/strange phenomenon that definitely existed but seems to have naturally died off. Guessing it's related to the increasing amount of tech-billionaires during this time. In general in American society, people with money are considered "cool".

Would you mind linking to the 21 Jump Street scene? I'm very curious. As an American nerd in my late 30s, I definitely recall being relentlessly teased as a kid. I don't have kids of my own now and so I don't really know how and if things have changed, but if true this would be a very positive development!

Not sure I can link it but I can definitely describe it. To be clear I'm referring to the 2012 film not the original show. The scene though is sortof referencing the original series because if memory serves it was sortof how they would have done "high school undercover" in the 80s.

Basically the adult cops undercover as high school students try to make a first day impression and they sortof trash academics and try to intimidate kids interested in studying etc. So they try to be stereotypical 80s/90s popular kids. It spectacularly backfires and they have to change their approach. It's actually a surprisingly insightful scene in the context of this discussion.

All out kids are relentless teased by the popular ones. You have observer bias to what you were teased about, but if you look you will see many out groups teased about different things. You will often find kids in the in group not teased despite having the same characteristics.

Idk. I graduated in the past decade. My school had a pretty expansive program of advanced classes and not advanced classes, which resulted in basically isolating the smart kids from the not so smart kids. Because of this, it was fine to be nerdy and smart. Yet in senior year there was an unexpected sort of social war when the not so smart kids wanted to control things like prom, and were unhappy when the rest of the school, who were never seen in their social circles, also had a voice. Got quite nasty. My area was relatively wealthy, and people probably had generally good lives. I think it would have been very unpleasant if it were a poor area with no separation of classes and more frequent trouble at home situations.

At the end of the day, if kids are struggling, they're going to feel frustrated. And they're going to take it out on the physically weakest kids and the ones who are most making them look bad by being good at school if they're not separated, protected, or somehow made mutually engaged (all of which are expensive things to implement). I don't think it has anything to do with anti intellectualism personally.

I also went to high-school in Romania in '90s.

But I think you are wrong on "nerd" thing. Which doesn't mean technical excellence or excellence on a particular subject. "Nerd" means being weird while somehow interested in some technical matters.

There were a lot of "cool" kids doing great at math, physics or programming.

According to Mirriam-Webster, a nerd is "an unstylish, unattractive, or socially inept person".

Yeah, didn't know how to best translate "tocilar" into English, I guess it's a combination between geek and nerd? Couldn't tell.

> an unstylish, unattractive, or socially inept person

I was definitely unstylish, that's for sure, and I was no Adonis, that was also certain, but the good thing is that back in the day that didn't matter, how you looked and dressed as a kid didn't matter. I only had 2 pairs of jeans for my 4 years of high-school because that was all my parents could afford to buy me back then, but to be honest I wasn't aware of that back then. I'm afraid nowadays things are completely opposite.

> It was always strange to me seeing all those American movies of the "nerds"/geeks getting persecuted by the "cool" kids, it certainly didn't happen to kids in my school and I'm pretty sure it generally didn't happen to kids generally around the country.

In the United State there is an extreme anti-intellectual bias among conservative middle and lower class whites.

Intellectualism and being a "nerd" is appreciated in black Democratic strongholds?

There was this movie called Black Panther, you may or may not have heard of it....

"In the United State there is an extreme anti-intellectual bias among conservative middle and lower class whites."

On the contrary, progressives in the US outright reject factual information and statistics and instead focus on political correctness and feelings.

There are many anti-intellectuals on both sides.

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