The Smart Kid Must Die

On the death of the identity that got you through high school

Identity formation in middle and high school is pretty straightforward. Kids bop around and notice the ways they are different from other kids; ideally different in a way that can be spun as “better.” They’re better at music or faster runners or more artistic or more rebellious or more charismatic. Then they build self-identities around whatever it is they notice, and this is self-reinforcing: the Drama Kid who does really good vocal impersonations will do a bunch of theater and get really good at acting and now he’s even more a Drama Kid.

In middle and high school, I had a bunch of crippling social phobias and had a very difficult time making friends beyond the tiny group I grew up with. I was terrible at athletics; in water polo I was routinely the slowest kid doing laps around the pool, and I sported a similar honor in cross-country running (me and the fat kid, who I quite liked, were frequently neck-and-neck as the slowest ones in the race.) I was terrible at dating; my only romantic experiences were ones that my high school band arranged for me, god bless those beautiful geeks. But in most of my classes I was the top student so I ended up naturally slotting into the archetype of “The Smart Kid” and kinda used that as cope for my numerous social failings, which was reinforced by adults who prized the fact that I would get good grades and not otherwise stir up trouble.

I think The Smart Kid is a disastrous self-identity for a kid to end up with, for a lot of reasons.

The Smart Kid Identity Is Insufferable

Being the Smart Kid doesn’t encourage you to empathize or communicate well with others. In some ways it’s actively hostile to these skills. You look around and other kids seem so very, very slow to do things that seem obvious and natural to you. An adult occasionally congratulates you on your work ethic and this seems clearly a lie because you don’t have any work ethic. But adults keep saying it!

I think the reason the Smart Kid is more annoying than idk the Drama Kid is because the Smart Kid identity is fundamentally ordinal: it’s specifically about your position relative to everyone else on an axis that people pretty much universally care about. Which makes you insufferable.

Looking back, especially in middle school I leaned into using lots of long words and acting in ways mildly alienating to my classmates because they were consistent with the self-identity that I developed. Cringe? Absolutely. I toned this down in high school but ngl it still wasn’t great.

The Smart Kid Identity Is School-Specific

In real life, nobody gives a shit if you’re smart.

People in real life need things, see. People are teeming with needs, social needs and physical needs and career needs. What we call “getting a job” is just what you call the most obvious socially-legible way of plugging your capacities into the teeming throng of needs that capitalist society consists of. Oh, you can write a really incisive literature essay about idk Chaucer or whatever? lmao fuck you nobody gives a shit, write me some software or teach me to dance or make me some coffee or do literally anything that someone else cares about.

School presents itself to kids as life-in-miniature, and the adults reinforce this constantly (“school is your job,” “your grades determine your future”). Then kids (reasonably!) conclude that being good at school assignments means being good at the thing-that-matters, whereas in reality school assignments are a weird artificial thing that has almost no transferability to any of the rest of life. “The Smart Kid” is what you get when someone builds a self-identity around this weird artificial game and it lasts precisely as long as that game does.

(I think this is similarly sad as the fate of Football Kid, who discovers that adult life does not reward top-five-percentile Football Ability in the same way as high school. RIP)

The Smart Kid Identity Encourages Kids To Go Into Grad School

Grad school (by which I mean for PhDs, not like med school or whatever) is a bad idea for nearly everyone. It takes the smartest kids in our society and funnels them into starvation-wage jobs where they are mostly performing unrewarding grunt work that will, in the median-case scenario, get their advisor published in a paywalled Elsevier journal where perhaps a couple hundred people will ever read it.

The advantage of grad school, of course, it is allows the Smart Kid to not have to change their self-identity as the Smart Kid for a few more years, because grad school is an extension of school. You continue to get grades; you continue to do work solely in service of evaluation; you continue to (sometimes) be praised for cleverness. It’s comfortable, even when it’s miserable.

Happily, I was bad enough at chemistry that my grad school advisor kicked me out shortly after I finished the coursework. Most of my peers weren’t so lucky!

The Smart Kid Identity Is Always Slain By The Great Sort

(This is always true unless you are Terence Tao, specifically, in which case nice job i guess)

My self-identification as the Smart Kid eventually got destroyed in college, since that was the first place that I was roughly average intelligence-wise. It’s obvious what happened: I could no longer say to myself that all of my various flaws were Fine Actually since I was super smart. I needed to reach outside of my comfort zone and figure out how to relate to other people, and to find self-worth in things other than grades on tests. And I quickly ended up with a bunch of better, more-robust social roles (Loveable Troll, Magic Player Who Photoshops His Friends’ Faces On Random Cards, Trusted Confidant), so I ended up fine… eventually. But it was still terribly painful because it required the dissolution of like seven years of calcified Smart Kid identity.

I think this is an argument for ability grouping in school. Middle and high school are environments with weak ability grouping, so The Smart Kid as an identity could persist; college had strong ability grouping, so my Smart Kid had to dissolve. Real life also has strong ability grouping; both my work and social life are mostly composed of people who ended up with me in The Great Sort, which comes for us all.

Identity formation is unstoppable; teachers yelling “growth mindset!” at schoolchildren are basically just King Canute yelling at the tides.