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Comment by abricq | Hacker News Reader

I wish this was true but unfortunately, I must disagree with saying that it is different in Europe. In France, 10 years ago, high-school was a constant lookout for who's the 'popular' kids (literally called like that). And reversely, nerds kid would often be made fun of, or socially excluded from breaks / activities. However, i have talked about this before with my wife who's from Italy and said that she never experienced this in Italy, apparently it was like you described: groups of friends, into studying and trying to make it to the next year. I wish it was like that in France.

However, I very much enjoy the original's post analysis about 'being into things', I think it's just brilliantly exposed !

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So controversial anecdote: I was an exchange student in france (from denmark) for a few months - when i was around 14. And i was shocked to my core when i saw how teachers and the schoolsystem was put together.

There was a boy in my class that had difficulties at home and struggled in school (daydreaming instead of focusing etc) and i clearly remember this scene where the teacher mocked him infront of the class saying stuff like "looking out the window again are we, no wonder you're slow and stupid when you dont participate" - queue the other kids laughing.

This happened across classes, multiple times with different people. The teachers where petty, confrontational towards other with differing opinions and did not enjoy being challenged in any ways, shape or form.

(I landed myself at the principals office multiple time by defending the vulnerable ones against draconic teachers) - and i'm not sure if it's still allowed - but i witnessed multiple times where teachers hit students.

(This was a "good" school btw.)

It was clearly an institutional culture, and they didn't know what to do with me because i came from the complete opposite and had the moral highground constantly - the kids where sad when i went back, the teachers (& principal) happy.

Oh, and the actual level of teaching was super bad, all learning by hearth - no "think for yourself", composition or divergent thinking allowed

Yes the educational culture in France is really into public shaming. You can directly see its effect on the rest of the culture

btw "cue the other kids laughing", rather than queue. In stage acting a cue is a signal to synchronize things like a new player entering the stage.

Thanks appreciated!

Also “were”, not “where”.

maybe they get the kids all lined up and ready to take their turn laughing; that feels like a public school-type activity.

Was it in a private or public school? Anecdotal but I've never seen that when I was in school in the 90s. Friends who went to "good" private schools though complained about public shaming and had similar experiences to the one you had.

Also in terms of teaching, I actually appreciated the fact that we had a lot of compositions that emphasised critical thinking (more so than I had when I went to Germany for 6 months as an exchange student). Wonder if that's because things have changed since the 90s or if it's due to the private/public school difference.

On the other hand, I was very heavily bullied in middle school but that was by other kids not by professors. And once I got to High school the bullying completely stopped.

This was actually a public school in "thonon sur le mans" (lake geneve)

Oh that's sad that it'd happen even in a public school. When was that?

It's a pointless effort to box the whole Europe into one stereotype, it's too diverse for that.

From my POV, the school social structure in USA seems very "schematic". Like there are popular kids and they look like this and have these attitudes, then there are geeks who are socially awkward and physically weak, then there are jocks etc.

My experience from growing up in Czechia was way more "random". There are kids who are more prominent than others, of course, but there aren't really many stereotypes to them. Some of them are dumb, but many of them are also pretty smart and have strong interests. All these people qualities are there, but they are not strongly categorized and appear in various permutations.

There's no good translation for "geek/nerd/jock" in Czech, like you would probably need to spend 2/3 sentences to explain each of them. You can translate "popular kid" literally, but it's not a concept being used. Kids of course still associate into various cliques, they just aren't "schematic".

>From my POV, the school social structure in USA seems very "schematic". Like there are popular kids and they look like this and have these attitudes, then there are geeks who are socially awkward and physically weak, then there are jocks etc.

What are the odds your POV is coming from television and movies?

It surely comes from television and movies, that's where I first got to know it. And for many years I thought that this is just a media illusion.

But seeing real conversations using those stereotypes ("I was your typical nerd kid at school") here, on reddit and even talking to people IRL convinced me that this "caste system" does actually exist in real life (of course not to the overblown degree shown in movies).

> What are the odds your POV is coming from television and movies?

I'd be interested to know what the odds are that students themselves are self-selecting into categories based on what they seen in TV and movies.

Today it would be more IG and Tiktok, but what even are those if not micro-reality TV full of tryhards desperate to get a TV deal?

“It's a pointless effort to box the whole Europe into one stereotype, it's too diverse for that.

“From my POV, the school social structure in USA seems very […]”

I agree that it’s harder to generalize over all of Europe.

FYI, the US and Europe are roughly the same population and size (ignoring, as ever, poor Alaska) — ~350 million vs ~500 million, and ~8 million square miles vs ~5 million square miles.

While the US is considerably more culturally homogeneous than Europe, it is also quite hard to generalize across the United States.

Europe is actually 750 million. EU != Europe (EU had ~500 million before brexit)

Yes, and if you include the Russian bits the size comparison changes considerably.

In my experience, when non-Europeans say “Europe” they mean something like “the union of the EU and the EEA and the UK”. They probably exclude Russia and a few of the Russian-adjacent states, and if they think of Iceland, they include the part on the North American plate as well as the Eurasian plate.

More like France + Germany and maybe UK.

I saw that in movies but not in real life going to HS in the US. People had friend groups but it wasn't uber-insular. The star quarterback can't really call you out for being a nerd when you're in the same calculus class

>I wish this was true but unfortunately, I must disagree with saying that it is different in Europe. In France, 10 years ago, high-school was a constant lookout for who's the 'popular' kids (literally called like that).

A lot of this is a recentish phenomenon with kids mimicking what they see in US made movies and tv series - and also a whole lot more toned down than in the US.

>And reversely, nerds kid would often be made fun of, or socially excluded from breaks / activities

As a nerd, this has always been going on everywhere, and it's basically by definition, as people describe as "nerds" not just people that are good at school and have scientific and brainy interests, but the subset of the above that are socially clumsy, not into sports and the popular social activities, etc part of being a nerd.

Kids with "nerd" interests that are also socially savvy and also like the stuff the majority does, are still popular.

So, nerds being excluded in this sense is almost a tautology, and in many areas, even happens by preference (e.g. not liking parties and drinking). Of course one could argue that we nerds would like them if those were more into our preferences, but, well, those are not the preferences of the wider school population. So this is not exactly active ostracizing, just the 90% not changing what they like to accomondate the 10%).

Would a nerd be targetted for bullying? Yes, but in the same sense that a non-nerdy "weird" kid, a kid with a disability, a fat kid, an "ugly" kid, etc. It's not particular about being a nerd, it's about being different - and it's not built into the wider structure of school life like some kind of appartheid between groups, the way it seems to be in the US. And the bullies are not groups, like the popular kids or the jocks vs the nerds, but individuals. The bullies are usually are not even popular (just the school's sadistic kids with troubled homes and no future).

There are also not explicit popularity contests built into the school life, like "the prom", cheerleading, or some jock sport being a "big thing" with official school teams and everything, which appears to be the case in the US. If anything, the equivalent of the "popular" kids in some European countries would be the "cool kids" and those are not into school sports or popularity contests at all (more like the opposite).

So, the forces at play here are not as strong as described (from accounts I've read) in the US in any European country that I know of.

I was also in a French highschool around 10 years ago but I was lucky enough to have different experience that yours. People part of the "geek" group (like myself) were never excluded from activities and had good relations with the so called popular kids.

It was a time where playing Magic the gathering was really popular so I guess that reduced the stigmatization of nerdy kids.

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