Nerds and Jocks
Growing up without any noticeable athletic skills, the nerd-jock duality was a pretty important part of my childhood. Nerds were the kids who carried calculators, wore glasses, dressed poorly, read books for fun, liked to be right in class, and had few friends. Jocks were athletic, well dressed, and popular, but probably stupid. Every person in my class could have listed, by name, the “nerds” and the “jocks” among our classmates, and if we’d transferred to a different school, we could have identified them on sight. It was, for me, and I suspect for many other kids like me, the primary sorting system for my peers (I guess there was also “goth” and “punk,” but we only had one of each at the entire school, so they didn’t count).
Both these terms are pejorative, but “nerd” was my stigma. At dinner one evening in 3rd grade, I explained to my parents that my friends and I were the nerds, and that we were proud of it. I still remember my father’s horrified reaction. “You’re not a nerd!” he said.
Of course as you get older you find that the labels that dominated your childhood don’t make any sense – but early childhood perspectives sometimes linger, lensing your experiences in ways you don’t notice.
So when I moved to Germany, and found myself having to explain this whole concept to bewildered friends and colleagues, I started to think about the nerd-jock duality a little deeper. What I realized is that, in Germany, engineering is not stigmatized in the same way that it is in the US. It is possible to self-identify as an engineer, even at a very early age, without being a nerd.
Germany is, in fact, a country of engineers. It has to be. Think about it: a cold, cloudy country ranked only 62nd in land mass, 14th in population, and yet in 2008 Germany was #1 in the world in exports by dollars! Yes, ahead of the US and ahead of China. How is that possible? Nerds! Oops, I mean engineers; engineers who design and build high-quality cars, engines, tools, machinery, scientific equipment. This is what happens when you don’t stigmatize engineers: you get a country full of engineers, self-identifying as engineers, growing up dreaming of being engineers.
But what kind of country do you get when you do stigmatize nerds? I’m afraid you get a country of importers. A country of investment bankers and “famous for being famous” celebrities and television “news” shows that are frighteningly reminiscent of some of my worst memories of grade school. A country of people who don’t make things.
My 20 year old sister informs me that the “nerd” thing has softened a bit in recent years, but maybe not always for the right reasons. Lots more people spend time with technological devices now, and to be part of the priesthood that creates them, tweaks them, hacks them is more impactful than it used to be.
But one of the reasons “nerd” isn’t such a dirty word now is because some nerds get rich. And that’s the wrong reason to appreciate nerds. Because only very few nerds will get rich, but we need lots of engineers to build our society.
The archetypes that you have as a country matter. They affect the kind of society you create. We have a lot of good archetypes in the US. We have the pioneer, the frontiersman, the individualist, the entrepreneur. Let’s keep those. But we can do without the whole nerd/jock thing. It isn’t helping.
And I think we’d do well to celebrate the engineer archetype again. I hear it was a big thing in the 50s. Can we bring it back?
Eleftherios Kosmas on 4 July 2009 at 6:42 am
Last time I was called a geek/nerd or something like that (actually it was the Greek equivalent) was a couple of years ago. A GP I was working with brought up the “Which sports were your favorite as a teenager?” topic. When I replied: “I wasn’t really into sports… ??, I always enjoyed playing some basketball but just for fun! I was more into hiking, and I always enjoyed reading books and trying to do something useful with an ancient home computer I had.” Well her reply was “God, I cannot believe you used to be a “nerd”! You look so normal…!”.
?ever expected to hear “that” from an adult…!
luis on 4 July 2009 at 7:38 am
I’ve been recommended this book on the subject of Nerds in America by a friend (her review here.. It sounds like a fascinating read.
krn on 4 July 2009 at 7:57 am
people in the US produce a lot of the world’s science, and that is definitely nerd-generated, but i don’t think that counts as “making things” in the way you mean since it’s more or less open to the public and doesn’t count as an export (i don’t think). a hell of a lot of it comes out of schools in the US though. despite that, it’s nearly impossible to find a job in science, maybe excluding some things like biotech.
anyway… apparently it’s really prestigious to be an ‘ingenieur’ in france… i read in a book that one can also call oneself an “intellectual” in france and not get laughed at, although i haven’t tried it. i’m not sure jocks in the US sense exist here although the french version is pretty adorable…
chris on 31 July 2009 at 9:47 pm
Well, being an ingeneer in France is indeed considered as prestigious. Although, when you qualify yourself as an intellectual kind of person; or more frequently, when you’re being qualified as such; you don’t get laughed at…but you surely don’t look ‘cool’ either.
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Joe Buck on 4 July 2009 at 8:27 am
The US manages to produce a lot of the world’s science by importing highly talented foreigners to do it. We have a lot of high-quality universities, but much of the quality is produced by foreign-born graduate students and professors. Many other countries are less accepting (or perhaps I should say “even less accepting”) of foreigners than the US is, or have more barriers to a talented immigrant who wants to get ahead. Americans didn’t get to the moon; the space program was run by Germans, the same people who launched the V-2 rockets against London in WW2.
The US had an anti-nerd culture even in the 1950s, but Sputnik terrified everyone, so it got better for scientists and engineers for a while. But we have a culture where many get ahead by bragging about how ignorant they are (Reagan and Bush II in particular).
Mark Gordon on 4 July 2009 at 8:42 am
I think part of it might relate to gender role issues. Nerds/geeks are not seen as being truly manly; at the same time, they’re not truly feminine, either. In high school, gender identity gets exaggerated, and to be a nerd is to be androgynous.
Udo on 4 July 2009 at 11:55 am
Well, China recently became exporter #1.
And oldschool engineers are well regarded. Computer engineers are not. We have different words for these similar jobs. One is “Ingeneur” and the other is “Informatiker”. Maybe that explains it.
Matt on 4 July 2009 at 12:26 pm
I don’t think the 1950s celebrated engineering. The word “nerd” dates to 1951, so the “jocks” must have mocked and abused the smarter-than-average kids then in the same way they do now. The difference was that in those post-war, pre-Silicon Valley decades engineering was more visible. My grandfather, for example, was an aerospace engineer, and he had models of the things he worked on – the space shuttle, the Blackbird, etc. As a kid I knew what he did before he retired; the things his math and science knowledge contributed to were both visible and conveniently coincided with America’s paranoid defense thinking. Now America’s nerds grow up to work primarily in IT, which people simply don’t think about, and biosciences, which people don’t tend to even understand. I can’t explain what I do at work to my mother, but my grandfather could just point to a model and say “I helped build a big version of that”.
I don’t know why America celebrates belligerent ignorance but it certainly would be nice if the American school system encouraged kids to focus more on math and science and less on team sports.
Bob on 4 July 2009 at 12:39 pm
Interesting read.
Personally I like to see/call myself as an engineer even though that word is not really used for those doing software in the german speaking countries.
Simon Hawkin on 4 July 2009 at 1:00 pm
So the country is full of nerds, they do not consume much, so it has to export! That explains it, I hope.
Max on 4 July 2009 at 2:14 pm
I believe 90% or more of this “nerd” stigma is absolutely self-inflicted. No good at basketball or football? You can still work yourself out a better body that the so-called athletes, by swimming, for example. Like to read? Doesn’t mean you can’t date girls. and yes, do try to dress a little better.
Stormy on 4 July 2009 at 2:51 pm
I’ve found that the “jocks” are now quite intimidated by the “nerds” but when they laugh and say they can’t do any of that, the “nerds” think they are laughing at them. So both groups feel like the underdog. (Not in school but now in the adult world.)
jose on 4 July 2009 at 2:52 pm
Hi, I’m from Spain, today an industrial engineer, I love computers, making things… but I can’t really relate to you. I mean, why I can’t love to play soccer or tennis or dancing or girls as much as I love to make things, why I have to have bad taste wearing? “Plato” philosopher was so called because he was very exercised and has big shoulders.
I’m athlete too, having my body in shape is important for being able to do mental work(read Cesar Vidal dog trainer books, we need phisical activity for being happy as much as dogs).
Jeff Walden on 4 July 2009 at 3:09 pm
“But what kind of country do you get when you do stigmatize nerds? I’m afraid you get a country of importers. A country of investment bankers and “famous for being famous” celebrities and television “news” shows that are frighteningly reminiscent of some of my worst memories of grade school. A country of people who don’t make things.”
I think you overgeneralize and draw very tenuous conclusions in the above paragraph. Nerd stigmatization is mostly a matter of childish envy and of finding some way to feel better than someone else, and we grow out of it over time. I suspect this is more a matter of parents not condemning such behaviors strongly enough than of anything else — which may or may not be a matter of stronger families in other countries; we don’t do enough to create incentives for maintaining strong families with sturdy moral foundations. (I get the impression that families are more cohesive in European countries, but I have no data whatsoever to back it up, and I could easily be wrong.) As for your celebrity/news laments, those are more the product of people having provided for their own basic needs and finding themselves with expendable income — which then is expended in ways that seem foolish to those not doing the expending. I’m amazed that you can deduce that cultural banality is the result of nerd envy rather than considering a deeper cause that might even have been the cause of both the symptom and the purported effect.
Last, to say the United States is a country of people who don’t make things, a country of importers, is absurd. We make plenty of things, they just happen to involve more intellectual heft and service components than goods or manufacturing — and we buy more of it from ourselves than some do. Does it matter if we run a trade imbalance? (How’s Germany doing lately with the overlarge trade surplus it’s been running, by the way? Not so well when demand collapses, last I heard.) Does it matter that I run a trade imbalance with my local supermarket? Lamentably, Ricardo’s difficult idea continues to be so.
Haha on 4 July 2009 at 4:05 pm
Neeeeeeeeeeeerd
Troy McClure on 4 July 2009 at 4:41 pm
I’ll give you my sexual answer to you question..
Well, till today, intelligence or being an engineer or being an intellectual are not values or roles that causes attraction or sexual interest on women, instead, if you look at more detail the behaviour of that “jocks” you’ll find they got more attention from the female gender.
I bet if saying “I’m an engineer” causes on women the same effect of saying “I play on a rugby team” or “I’m a pilot or dance teacher or policeman or fireman” then you’ll probably got a country full of engineers, not being very vocational but happy engineers.
Bob on 4 July 2009 at 4:49 pm
Max, hmm “do try to dress better”, well, this is just such a subjective matter and even if 99% of people had a consistent opinion about what “good” would be like, this could still be irrelevant for my own taste.
And for some people looks is not so important altogether — shocker. But this is exactly what the “jocks” don’t get.
John on 4 July 2009 at 6:31 pm
I think nerds and jocks are in every country. I think you are overgeneralizing a little bit. The only country to build the internet, go to the moon, advanced space operations (NASA), go to mars, dominant in software (Microsoft, Oracle), has 3x times the stock exchange to the next largest, 13 trillion economy to 3-4 trillion of Germany’s or Japan’s, largest and most sophisticated military is only the United States. These achievements are unparalleled. I’m not denigrating Germany, but Germany produces a lot, but it doesn’t have the people and land to consume everything just like Japan, so they have to export (export driven) economy, but the US on the other hand has the land and the people to consume what they create (the market is there). Economic circumstance between them are quite different.
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Rob on 4 July 2009 at 10:06 pm
This is why I am moving to another country.
I have never really liked the social attitudes present in America and I know I’m a hypocrite by not wanting to be proactive in changing it.
Alberto on 4 July 2009 at 10:32 pm
nteresting discussion!
. I guess I’m in the middle too: an engineer who practices sport, even if just to keep in shape and for my my personal fun.
@John,
you are absolutely right when you US are the country where the technological achievements you listed were achieved, and there are various reasons for that.
The first one is surely the ease of making business in US compared to, say, Europe, due to the different regulations. US is literally a country built with the idea of making business on everything (I don’t judge this, just pointing it out).
The second reason of this success is that US is a huge importer of culture. Many of those achievements, especially in research, but also in industry, were, and still are, obtained also thanks to engineers and scientists coming from Europe, China, India, Japan and other countries. It is quite evident if you enter research centres, univerisities or just take a look at the increasing requests for specialized workers from the industry.
About the economical data you cite, they’re true, but not useful to a fair comparison: as you said Germany and Japan are a lot smaller than US, so it is obvious that the size of the economy is smaller there.
. on 5 July 2009 at 12:38 am
Things are not as clear-cut as you might think. I have rarely experienced a country where aptitude (in particular of the maths and science variety) is dismissed by the school and the surrounding society. There are state secretaries of education (who are most influencial around school and university politics) boasting how bad they are at maths. I would think that Japan’s and Germany’s industrial success is more about the fairly thorough technological start-from-scratch post WW2.
, on 5 July 2009 at 12:39 am
woops. The description above is about Germany.
Mauricio Gomes on 5 July 2009 at 3:16 am
Man I’ve missed your writing…
Judith on 5 July 2009 at 12:13 pm
@Troy McClure: “Well, till today, intelligence or being an engineer or being an intellectual are not values or roles that causes attraction or sexual interest on women, instead, if you look at more detail the behaviour of that “jocks” you’ll find they got more attention from the female gender.”
Many nerd women find nerd men quite attractive, thank you
In Germany, the distinction between “nerd” and “jocks” may not be as clear-cut as in the US (and being popular here depends way less on sports – our jocks don’t have to be athletes!), but if you spend your teenage years reading books on quantum physics, going to Star Trek meet-ups and writing (bad) poetry, this is frowned on just as much as being a “nerd” in the U.S. Studying engineering is considered OK (hey, they make loads of money, these engineers, or so you hear), but a genuine INTEREST in it BEFORE college – that’s something quite different. And, please don’t believe that engineers aren’t belittled at all. The following saying is a nice reminder that engineers aren’t exactly considered cool:
“Karohemd und Samenstau – der Mann studiert Maschinenbau.”
“Checkered shirt and lack of sex (=very rough translation, no idea how to literally translate “Samenstau”) – the man is studying engineering.”
ry on 5 July 2009 at 8:54 pm
You clearly have a different friend-set type than I do in Germany. I don’t hear the word ‘nerd’ but about often about the lame math students and physics students. There is a large humanities scene that, while not jocks, are certainly not nerds.
dicennian on 5 July 2009 at 11:46 pm
Interesting post. Well I’m a nerd
Apoorv Vaidya on 6 July 2009 at 2:53 am
Honestly, I’m in high school right now (12th grade), and that whole nerd and jock thing has totally blown over. Yeah, there are lots of guys who are totally into sports and are pretty dumb. Yeah, there’s that other end of guys who are into things like playing card games, reading, and not really being into sports. But now, there’s no classification of people as “nerds” and “jocks”. Everybody just meshes in together; everybody’s friendly and doesn’t disregard a person based on their appearance without getting to know them. I’d say I’m like a mixture of both; I like reading books, doing web development, and a couple of other things typical of a nerd (and I’m proud of it; I don’t try to hide it). On the other hand, I’m also fairly good at basketball, and I like playing sports. I have friends who are “nerdy” and friends who are “jock-y”. So do the rest of the people in my school. I guess people are starting to recognize that labelling others serves no purpose.
Azargled on 6 July 2009 at 9:55 pm
Well, skills are always skills, even if they are athletic or academic. There’s no point making fun of “nerds” or saying bad things about “jocks”, it’s all about priorities. One gets chills out of studying and solving problems, other wants to beat other in sports and be popular with girls. Also, you can bother with both athletic and academic activities if you want, you don’t have to be 100% nerd or jocky. I think I tend more in the nerd side because I have a passion for ‘intellectual’ things and don’t really care about fashion etc, although I love running and playing some basketball. Well, good text.
nat on 8 July 2009 at 10:15 pm
Sorry I wasn’t able to respond until now. It seems I missed an excellent conversation! Thanks to everyone for the thoughtful comments.
Having lived almost all my life in the US, and now a couple of years in Germany, I am fascinated by the cultural differences between countries. I always considered myself to be a pretty open-minded American, but there is no substitute for living in another culture to challenge your assumptions about how people and societies work. That has been a great experience for me, and so this blog entry was an attempt to share a part of what I’ve learned with you.
Cultures are different, and there are things that are wonderful and beautiful about one culture that may be entirely different from the things that are positive about another.
@Jose – I like what you said. There’s no reason you can’t be both a brilliant engineer and a great athlete. And there are a lot great heroes who were both intellectuals and athletes, like da Vinci and Thomas Jefferson.
Also, great thoughts from Jeff Walden. But Jeff, I think you go too far in implying that expendable income necessarily leads to the trivialization of culture. Nerd stigmatization is not just a childish thing that people grow out of. The grown-up version of nerd hazing is anti-intellectualism, and I’m sorry to say it, but American culture has a strong anti-intellectual strain. The US is not alone in that, for sure, but it’s my country and it worries me. Researching, understanding, listening, and questioning are not valued activities — this is what Al Gore called the “assault on reason.” Can’t we be rich and rational? It’s too depressing to think that there aren’t examples of this.
Also, Jeff, thanks for the reference to Ricardo’s difficult idea, I hadn’t read that before. And to both you and @John, of course the US makes things and is a wonderful country. But wouldn’t it be good if more of our best & brightest college graduates aspired to be actual engineers, instead of financial engineers?
John on 10 July 2009 at 12:02 am
Nat,
I don’t know what you mean by financial engineer, but there are a lot of real engineers in the United States like in NASA, department of defense, google, microsoft, oracle and numerous small companies. I think there are going to be plenty of companies coming in for the green job. I think the number of companies and entreprenuers are a lot in the US. I think they still create a lot of technologies and most other countries usually fully copy them are expand them these days. When I was seeing this website CrunchBase.com, there were a ton of companies ranging from 1+ employees and most of them are in the US dedicated to building web browser for mobile phones, os for mobile phones, twitter, search and you name it. The amount of VC capital a entrepreneur can raise in US is staggering because Americans are more willing to take a risk, which leads to more innovation. I don’t think you can secure a 1$ million dollar capital easier in other countries compared with the US. But on the other hand, this optimism and aggressiveness can lead to some kind of bubble for sure though like the .com and the current financial bubble.
Guillermo on 10 July 2009 at 7:37 am
The only way it’s to handle this is accept yourself as you are. In fact, it’s a bless because be a nerd act as a people filter, of worthless people.
Jeff Walden on 12 July 2009 at 5:45 am
“I think you go too far in implying that expendable income necessarily leads to the trivialization of culture, and the “assault on reason” that we see in the American news media today. Can’t we be rich and rational? It’s too depressing to think that there aren’t examples of this.”
I actually wasn’t trying to say say that, certainly not “necessarily”. Does it result in more non-cerebral culture quantitatively than might otherwise be present? I think the answer to that question is yes. Is it also more by overall proportion? That’s less clear, but I’ll still say yes. Will everyone necessarily respond that way? Certainly not, nor is it a given that a person will respond one way and not another. That said, people generally don’t call in votes for American Idol for hours unless they have incomes that give them leeway to allocate their time in that manner. Expendable income doesn’t inexorably lead to a less cerebral culture, but it does perhaps take more effort for people to move that way, and ultimately it’s their choice to do so (although we certainly can and should influence them to do otherwise).
I’m also not sure I see an “assault on reason”, other than the healthy asking of questions and considering of more than just the prevailing story from one interest group. In any case, I’m not sure I see what’s wrong about a “question everything” philosophy.
“And I don’t think nerd stigmatization is just a childish thing that people grow out of. The grown-up version of nerd hazing is anti-intellectualism, and I’m sorry to say it, but American culture has a strong anti-intellectual strain. The US is not alone in that, for sure, but it’s my country and it worries me.”
I disagree that the two are related and see it more as a “question everything” response, often coupled with a differing cost-benefit analysis.
“But wouldn’t it be good if more of our best & brightest college graduates aspired to be actual engineers, instead of financial engineers?”
It takes all kinds. Certainly there’d be far less home ownership if it weren’t for financial companies; paying for a home with cash is nearly impossible without a several-decades-long loan, and as long as you’re careful (a quality lacking in many homeowners and loan companies of late, to be sure, but one that is being learned in spades by everyone now) a loan is usually a better use of your money than letting it sit (invested, but still relatively idle) and accumulate. I disagree that financial engineers are less worthy than “actual” engineers. (Also worth noting is that many graduates with physics degrees — actual engineers, that is — go into the financial industry because their skills and ability to work with equations are necessary to that industry.) Last, if you’re worried about there being too many people in finance, I think recent events are going to substantially depress how many enter those fields for awhile.
Albert on 15 July 2009 at 1:25 am
Growing up in Germany and attending the German education system, I’ve never been confronted with stigmatization in the sense of being a nerd. Since, I’m living in the US, I’ve received the impression that there’s a difference in mentality. America is about winning and loosing, sometimes simple and straight forward. You’re classified to be a member of one of both parties. In Germany, I’ve had the feeling it’s about being part of a social system. This sounds socialistic and it’s indeed. Germany is not pure capitalism. It’s a mixture. Our mentality is to value education. Germany has no strong domestic market, is not rich in natural resources and hasn’t good weather most of the year. Germany lives from export and it’s only good is education to compete with other nations.
CG on 24 July 2009 at 7:30 am
I was surfing the net and found your site.
I grew up in the ’80s, and was often an outsider growing up. I was the type of person who spent a lot of time in the library reading about things, and was very unathletic and disinterested in sports. Yes, I was nerd.
The good thing about growing up in the ’80s is that it was actually a very “nerd-friendly”/”nerd-positive” time in the media. And it was actually the time when things started to change a bit in the U.S. with regard to the view of “nerds. See this article:
Check this out
Heres a quote from the article:
“But the popular understanding of nerdiness–that a nerd is an uncool person–doesn’t stand the test of time. In particular, it doesn’t survive the 1980s, an era the New York Times deemed was characterized by “nerd chic.” By the middle of the go-go decade, fashion magazines touted the popularity of nerd couture–plaid plants, horn rims, and oxford shirts buttoned all the way to the top. Further, witness the proliferation of ’80s teen movies valorizing nerds: Revenge of the Nerds, Weird Science, and Real Genius, to name a few. Underlying this transformation of the nerd’s image was a transformation of the nerd’s economic status. With their entry into new high-tech industries, many nerds suddenly became millionerds.”
I dont know what the situation is in schools today with regard to nerds vs. jocks, but it still seems that we live in a society that doesnt sufficiently respect people who use their brains. Sure, its true that one can be both smart and athletic, but if a person has only been blessed by one or the other, its the one with athletic skill that is celebrated in the public schools, not the brainy kid. Thankfully, the passage of time often helps to even things out, when the smart kid gets to go out into the world and gain some respect and money.
Check out my site:
Nerd Source
MarkS on 29 July 2009 at 9:19 pm
I grew up in the 60′s, and wonder if part of the shift occurred because of my generation’s rebelliousness. We became convinced, as we interacted with peers and the media, that our parents were soulless, materialistic dolts, many of whom were indeed engineers. So we went into living, caring professions, or at least ones that would ‘make a difference’. And now relatively few of us have had the mathematic chops to hang with our children in any math past junior high level, so they’re on their own to become or not become engineers and scientists.
So when I was growing up, which became the foundation for your growing up, it wasn’t so much about nerd vs jock, but meaningful vs materialistic. Same result in slamming hard stuff, and oddly enough ending up with the most self-centered generation in American history. All those hippies ending up as hedge fund managers…
Ana Weaver on 31 October 2009 at 1:53 am
I had always wanted to be an engineer in my youth, and everyone else at school relentlessly made fun of me. Then, in 6th grade, we had to go around the room and say what you wanted to be, and the new kid wanted to be an engineer, too. I decided I should have a crush on him, so I told him so, and we dated for 3 years. This is a true story! Aren’t little kids weird?
Daniel bull on 19 June 2010 at 11:10 am
It’s funny. In Australia Jock’s nearly only studying engineering. While nerds tend to study english literature, philosophy, mathematics, and physics.
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