Idk. I graduated in the past decade. My school had a pretty expansive program of advanced classes and not advanced classes, which resulted in basically isolating the smart kids from the not so smart kids. Because of this, it was fine to be nerdy and smart. Yet in senior year there was an unexpected sort of social war when the not so smart kids wanted to control things like prom, and were unhappy when the rest of the school, who were never seen in their social circles, also had a voice. Got quite nasty. My area was relatively wealthy, and people probably had generally good lives. I think it would have been very unpleasant if it were a poor area with no separation of classes and more frequent trouble at home situations.

At the end of the day, if kids are struggling, they're going to feel frustrated. And they're going to take it out on the physically weakest kids and the ones who are most making them look bad by being good at school if they're not separated, protected, or somehow made mutually engaged (all of which are expensive things to implement). I don't think it has anything to do with anti intellectualism personally.

Would you mind linking to the 21 Jump Street scene? I'm very curious. As an American nerd in my late 30s, I definitely recall being relentlessly teased as a kid. I don't have kids of my own now and so I don't really know how and if things have changed, but if true this would be a very positive development!

Not sure I can link it but I can definitely describe it. To be clear I'm referring to the 2012 film not the original show. The scene though is sortof referencing the original series because if memory serves it was sortof how they would have done "high school undercover" in the 80s.

Basically the adult cops undercover as high school students try to make a first day impression and they sortof trash academics and try to intimidate kids interested in studying etc. So they try to be stereotypical 80s/90s popular kids. It spectacularly backfires and they have to change their approach. It's actually a surprisingly insightful scene in the context of this discussion.

All out kids are relentless teased by the popular ones. You have observer bias to what you were teased about, but if you look you will see many out groups teased about different things. You will often find kids in the in group not teased despite having the same characteristics.