Academic achievement carried social shame in teenage peer culture
Evidence
Not doing any homework, not paying attention in the lessons was part and parcel of the same attitude. I had always been among the best in every subject, I had always enjoyed showing it, but not any more, now there was something shameful about good grades, it meant you sat at home doing your homework, you were a stick-in-the-mud, a loser. It was different with Norwegian, I associated that with writers and a bohemian lifestyle, besides you couldn’t swot it up, it was something else, a feeling, a natural talent, personality. — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 135
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the narrator’s later identity as a writer and his distinction between studied excellence and natural talent. — connects to: Doing well in school can be coded by minority peers as betraying one’s culture — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1300