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.
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.