A lot of this is a recentish phenomenon with kids mimicking what they see in US made movies and tv series - and also a whole lot more toned down than in the US.

>And reversely, nerds kid would often be made fun of, or socially excluded from breaks / activities

As a nerd, this has always been going on everywhere, and it's basically by definition, as people describe as "nerds" not just people that are good at school and have scientific and brainy interests, but the subset of the above that are socially clumsy, not into sports and the popular social activities, etc part of being a nerd.

Kids with "nerd" interests that are also socially savvy and also like the stuff the majority does, are still popular.

So, nerds being excluded in this sense is almost a tautology, and in many areas, even happens by preference (e.g. not liking parties and drinking). Of course one could argue that we nerds would like them if those were more into our preferences, but, well, those are not the preferences of the wider school population. So this is not exactly active ostracizing, just the 90% not changing what they like to accomondate the 10%).

But again, the forces at play here are not as strong as described in the US in any European country that I know of.

From my POV, the school social structure in USA seems very "schematic". Like there are popular kids and they look like this and have these attitudes, then there are geeks who are socially awkward and physically weak, then there are jocks etc.

My experience from growing up in Czechia was way less "random". There are popular kids, of course, but there aren't really many stereotypes to them. Some of them are dumb, but many of them are also pretty smart and have strong interests. All these people qualities are there, but they are not strongly categorized and appear in various permutations.

What are the odds your POV is coming from television and movies?

But seeing real conversations using those stereotypes ("I was your typical nerd kid at school") here, on reddit and even talking to people IRL convinced me that this "caste system" does actually exist in real life (of course not to the overblown degree shown in movies).

I'd be interested to know what the odds are that students themselves are self-selecting into categories based on what they seen in TV and movies.

Today it would be more IG and Tiktok, but what even are those if not micro-reality TV full of tryhards desperate to get a TV deal?

“From my POV, the school social structure in USA seems very […]”

I agree that it’s harder to generalize over all of Europe.

FYI, the US and Europe are roughly the same population and size (ignoring, as ever, poor Alaska) — ~350 million vs ~500 million, and ~8 million square miles vs ~5 million square miles.

While the US is considerably more culturally homogeneous than Europe, it is also quite hard to generalize across the United States.

In my experience, when non-Europeans say “Europe” they mean something like “the union of the EU and the EEA and the UK”. They probably exclude Russia and a few of the Russian-adjacent states, and if they think of Iceland, they include the part on the North American plate as well as the Eurasian plate.

There was a boy in my class that had difficulties at home and struggled in school (daydreaming instead of focusing etc) and i clearly remember this scene where the teacher mocked him infront of the class saying stuff like "looking out the window again are we, no wonder you're slow and stupid when you dont participate" - queue the other kids laughing.

This happened across classes, multiple times with different people. The teachers where petty, confrontational towards other with differing opinions and did not enjoy being challenged in any ways, shape or form.

(I landed myself at the principals office multiple time by defending the vulnerable ones against draconic teachers) - and i'm not sure if it's still allowed - but i witnessed multiple times where teachers hit students.

(This was a "good" school btw.)

It was clearly an institutional culture, and they didn't know what to do with me because i came from the complete opposite and had the moral highground constantly - the kids where sad when i went back, the teachers (& principal) happy.

Oh, and the actual level of teaching was super bad, all learning by hearth - no "think for yourself", composition or divergent thinking allowed

Also in terms of teaching, I actually appreciated the fact that we had a lot of compositions that emphasised critical thinking (more so than I had when I went to Germany for 6 months as an exchange student). Wonder if that's because things have changed since the 90s or if it's due to the private/public school difference.

On the other hand, I was very heavily bullied in middle school but that was by other kids not by professors. And once I got to High school the bullying completely stopped.

It was a time where playing Magic the gathering was really popular so I guess that reduced the stigmatization of nerdy kids.