The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth
nytimes.com
Book Review
Robbins’s mission is noble. She wants to push back against the marginalization of nonconformists, whom she calls the “cafeteria fringe.” She writes, “It is unacceptable that the system we rely on to develop children into well-adjusted, learned, cultured adults allows drones to dominate and increasingly devalues freethinkers.”
Her fundamental argument is simple. Many of the traits that correlate with “outsider” status among high school students — originality, self-awareness, courage, resilience, integrity and passion — reveal themselves as assets later in life. (If you’re geeky enough to know the definition of “schadenfreude” as an underclassman, you’ll probably get to experience that very feeling at a high school reunion one day.)
The teen-to-adult turnabout theme isn’t particularly novel. One of its latest incarnations is a forthcoming Warner Brothers film, “Revenge of the Jocks,” about middle-aged former athletes struggling under the yoke of the nerds, their onetime victims. Robbins articulates the concept crisply, however. She also gives a name to the phenomenon that points to the geeks’ eventual triumph: “quirk theory.” (As coinages go, this phrase and “cafeteria fringe” feel a bit spurious; both plant the author’s flag in old ideas rather than elucidating truly new ones.)