The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth – a great title for a great book

 

I have some homeschooling related questions that I’d like to answer, one of which is, how do I propose to help my children integrate socially in this culture if they aren’t going to be in school?  It’s a good question and I’ll address it in a different post!  Right now I’ll share about a related point – the perceived importance of a child having a lot of friends and of being popular.

My feeling about this is that being popular is highly overrated and doesn’t correlate well to future success in life.  I was delighted to recently read the delightfully titled, The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth – Popularity, Quirk Theory, and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School – by Alexandra Robbins.  Ms. Robbins is a researcher who interviewed high school students and teachers all over the US and shares the results of her extensive research with readers.

What is Quirk Theory?  “Many of the differences that cause a student to be excluded in school are the identical 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.”

In this book, she tracks seven different students who are all struggling with the social situation they are locked into at school (the loner, the gamer, the new girl, the popular girl, the nerd, the weirdo, the geek).  She writes about the dynamic of groupthink, in which the actions and thoughts of students are pressed into socially acceptable molds. Not only does this affect students, but there’s something about the school atmosphere in which the teachers are also affected by these values.

Unfortunately, popular people are often not nice people, a concept in the book that I was discussing with the older kids at dinner last night.  Read this book if you want to understand this more, but in short, popular people build themselves up by pushing others down. So they become popular not because of their wonderful personalities that shine through and attract people, but because they are powerful and know how to manipulate the social dynamics in their favor.  They need to keep others down to keep their power.  As soon as I started talking about this, ds14 (who is popular and also nice to people – a number of mothers in the US commented to me about how unusual this combination of qualities was) exclaimed, “I know!  There’s this kid I know who’s really popular,  but no one really likes him.  I wonder sometimes if he has any friends because when he wasn’t around, all the kids talked badly about him.”

She writes about how important it is for society to have people who are creative, free thinkers, willing to stand for what they believe in and more – all qualities that are suppressed and cause people to be marginalized in high school.

As a parent of a daughter who will be homeschooled for eighth grade next year, I’ve done a lot of thinking about high school for her – what are the benefits and what are the disadvantages.  This book isn’t about homeschooling at all, but after reading it, I thought to myself that she makes a very, very strong case for homeschooling your children in high school, allowing them to bypass the pettiness of the social scene and have a healthier and more accurate self-image, while being able to spend their time doing things that are meaningful to them.

Whether you have kids who are in high school or not, homeschooling or not, this book is a very engaging and entertaining read.  I was happy to have stumbled onto as part of my ebook library selection, which allowed me to read it on my Kindle.

Avivah

5 thoughts on “The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth – a great title for a great book

  1. Hi Aviva,
    What you wrote really hit home to me. I know you are very busy, but would I be able to address some personal homeschooling questions to you off list.
    Rivka

    1. Welcome, Rivka!

      I am very behind on answering questions people have sent me (this is pretty much the norm) but I try to get to everyone eventually! You’re welcome to email me privately; what I generally do is answer online (removing personal details) since then others who have similar concerns will benefit. If you’d like to do that, make a note of anything you wouldn’t want me to quote and respond to here. Generally as far as personal questions, I just don’t have the necessary time to respond to each person.

  2. I totally agree with this!! My husband is always worried about the social aspect of homeschooling. And I always feel that it is completely overrated. Being with 30 kids your own age in a classroom all day is simply unnatural. And I always feel that the social structure I had in school didn’t serve me well, after school at all. There is so much pressure to be social so much energy is wasted on that aspect. Precious energy that really needs to go into the young developing personality. It’s like after you are 20 and the school social pressure is off you really start becoming yourself. Unfortunately, today 30 is the new 20 as it takes people an extra 10 yrs to find themselves after the social pressure is off!

  3. I agree that kids can be cruel, but it seems like avoiding school altogether is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I think it’s a shame for kids to miss out on all the positive aspects of school, all the good experiences, and all the fun classes and classroom activities they might not get at home. Plus, I don’t think it’s the best thing for a mother to be around her kids all the time- I don’t think it’s good for the mother or for the kids. I think each needs some time away from the other every day. And not every mother is cut out to be a teacher. I know I’m certainly not! I don’t WANT to be their school teacher (as opposed to “life teacher”, which I am whenever we’re together). I’m happy for someone else to teach them math, science, etc. Being their mother is enough for me.

    1. Jessie, your comments deserve a post of its own to respond to!

      I agree that one shouldn’t homeschool to avoid school, but because you can offer your child something better than school. I have to say that the fun classroom experiences are really, really overrated – when you know how much fun you can have when you homeschool, you realize that a once a year trip with loads of other kids and a few activities in school during the rest of the year just aren’t that compelling.

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