In your school, was it cool to be smart?

In my class it was cool to be smart. We drove each other to excel. The class one year behind me. my friends started out with A’s, decided it wasn’t cool, and dropped to C’s. It was as plain as day. I think now it’s cool to be smart again

@-@Adirondackwannabe Do you think it matters who is perceived as the pretty girl or good looking guy in the class, the popular ones, and whether they are smart or not? That in each class the tone is set by the charismatic kids in the class?

@JLeslie I think you hit on something there. We were the leaders and the ringmasters in the circus that is highschool, but we also liked to learn. The class after me didn’t have any leaders as I recall. It wasn’t based on pretty people, it was natural leadership. We ran stuff without even thinking about it.

Smart was cool all the way up to Junior High. After that cliques formed and you were either in or out and geeks were NOT cool at all.

There was definitely a difference in my high school between the popular kids and the smart kids, but the smart kids were looked up to and liked as well.

@Cruiser You make a good point about how it changed as we got older. For me it started in Jr. High. The downward trend that being popular and smart did not go together.

No. I don’t know what fancy pants school you went to…......:p

I graduated in 2004 from a high school outside of Portland, OR. It was very typical: with the cool kids being the jocks, suave funny guys, and girly hot women.

@JLeslie We were the smart kids, but we also were the jocks and hellraisers in our school. Maybe that was unusual. My house was party central for years because my mother went away on weekends to stay with my stepfather at his camp. Leave a teenager home over the weekend and see what mayhem develops.

I spent most of the 80’s in class rooms. The only thing cool was Magnum P.I., the A-Team, staying up late to watch MTV2 and getting high. Most of my teachers were probably high on cocaine anyway. I graduated with 3 scholarships, none of which I ended up taking.

I don’t think it is every cool to be smart, except in some movies. I went to a high school in a college town. One-third the kids were professors’ kids, it seemed to me. But none of us were cool.

It wasn’t cool to be on the debate team, but at least people approved of your successes. Olivia got 1600s on her SATs and we all knew and were in awe. Her brother didn’t do quite as well and was a disappointment, but went to Harvard anyway and later became a doctor of some kind.

Awesome, yes. Not cool, though. The cool kids were the popular ones and the popular ones focused on relationships. To be a good student, you needed to study. You didn’t have time for relationships. Besides which, you probably weren’t good at them.

Smart kids work hard. If you work hard, you don’t have time to be cool. I’ll bet you anything that the answer to this question is entirely dependent on how we are defining cool and smart.

I was one of the dumber ones in my class. My overall GPA was barely enough to make Honor Roll, so I graduated 40th out of 160. Then again, I decided early on that there is more to life than just playing others, whether it be by getting good grades or kissing up to the boss.

But I was considered cool (if eccentric) mostly because I had the ability to not give a shit. Being smart had no bearing on coolness where/when I went to school.

Until jr hi, athletics had a slight edge over smart. In jr hi it was pure personality regardless of smarts. Smarts didn’t hurt but they didnt help.
In my HS, of you were not there to learn they didn’t want you there. It wasn’t really about popularity at all.

The grades ahead of us seemed to really care about getting good grades and doing well in school to get into a good University. The grade behind me was full of goof-offs who didn’t care how disruptive they were. If you were smart and had good grades you also needed to be good at a sport or a cheerleader to be considered cool. Getting good grades wasn’t looked down on as being uncool, but you weren’t supposed to CARE whether you got good grades or not. Going out and drinking as well as being record holder on the track team and getting straight As were fine, but you weren’t to show you gave a shit about any of it, or else you were a ‘try-hard goodie-goodie’ and were looked down upon and teased.

I was at school until 2002 and it wasn’t cool to be smart. A lot of the uber smart kids were bullied.

No definitely not. I learned how to hide how smart I was pretty fast.

9–12 it seemed that it was fairly attractive as long as there was some brawn mixed in with the brain.

I was a middle of the road guy. I had the brains, but I also had the love of music. Never had a problem of bullying to someone or on myself. I was 6 ft. 5 in, tall and no one really bothered me. I tried to make a good example of myself to others, even in high school. I think I must have been respected, because I was voted Most Talented in my school Annual.

Never had a problem with violence. IQ of 139 and I finished in the top 15 of my graduating class of almost 1,800 students.

I was a leader and not a follower.

To a point. The super geeky robotics nerds weren’t thought of as all that cool, but for example, some of the most popular kids at my schools were also A-students. But some of the most popular were also kind of ditzy (that goes for guys and girls). There was also an odd group at my school that I labeled the “popular nerds”. As in, they were popular, big group of friends, no one messed with them, they had parties all the time, yet they were A-students, liked video games and fantasy books…it was an interesting combination :)

High school, I was one of the smartest, and in general, the smart ones were not well liked. My girlfriend was very smart and she pretended not to be. She was more popular than I.

When I went to college, it was all about brains. It was that kind of college. Of course, I was just in the middle of the pack there. Figures.

Smart kids aka “Power Swots” were the butt of many a joke.
“Oi Joe 90, brought teacher an apple have we?”
My guess is they had the last laugh, given that they probably took the best jobs/salaries.
Cool karma say I.

@DominicX that’s the group I want my kids in, The Popular Nerds!

I graduated from a public high school in 1983 and it was definitely not cool to be smart. My high school was not all that different from Fast Times at Ridgemont High, there was a hierarchy of cool and smart kids were no where near the top.

It was cool at our school to be smart, but to admit you had to study? That was very uncool.

No, definitely not. I was never bullied for being smart, but I was teased quite a bit, even in elementary school. Later on, I even dumbed down for a while in order to belong to a group of girls who were quite popular. I couldn’t maintain it, though. It felt fake and being popular kind of required being mean to unpopular kids, so I moved on. In high school, the popular kids were the jocks and cheerleaders. I wasn’t disliked or anything, but yeah… people thought I was kind of weird. This was all in the Washington, DC area, class of 1985.

In the 1950’s, the teachers and local administrators were very happy to put the spot-light on smart kids, with awards and such, but my peers teased and picked on smart kids. The media popularized the word egghead, and one politician went so far as to use egghead as a bad name to call his opponent, which encouraged anti-intellectual behavior.

Teacher’s pet was a favorite in the name calling crowd, and we were treated as outcasts.

In my high school, smart was cool, artsy was cool, cool was cool.

I attended high school from 1979 to 1982. If you were very intelligent, an excellent athlete or very good looking, you were considered “cool.” A few people were various combinations of those three things. I wasn’t any of those so I wasn’t cool.

My school was really good about not having defined cliques. We all kinda intermingled and there were really smart kids in all the groups. No one thought it was stupid to be smart. ;)

Yeah, kind of. Lots of the popular people are smart, but lots of them aren’t. It’s not really a thing people tease each other about I wouldn’t say that it’s “cool” necessarily, but it’s certainly not “uncool”.

Tenth grade and above, yes. Otherwise, no.

It doesn’t really matter to most people in my school. There are smart kids and not so smart kids, but nobody is made fun of for being smart or stupid.