I was a kid in post-communist Poland in 90s, and the concept of nerd was absent as well. Being good at math etc was not a problem to your social life (in fact it was sth you could brag about, just not too openly because that&#x27;s uncool too).<p>Also there was almost no &quot;jocks&quot; (there were some sport competitions but no cheerleaders, and nothing as important culturally as it is in USA, also teams weren&#x27;t persistent between classes and there were almost none inter-school sport events).<p>Grades were public as well (or at least - nobody tried to hide them so teachers would just pin a list with results from an exam on the board). Competition was seen as sth natural (at the time unemployment was 20% and kids were told that you have to be good or you will essentially be a hobo).<p>On the other hand you were supposed to pretend you didn&#x27;t had to study a lot, because kids that study instead of playing were &quot;kujon&quot;s = boring, lame bookworms. It was cool to be smart without working for it.<p>Also cheating had no stigma attached, but telling any authority about any misbehaving was the ultimate social suicide. This obviously included telling teachers that other kids were cheating.<p>This was probably because 50 years of paid spying of citizens on each other by abusive government. Even now whistleblowing in general is hard because of that social stigma.<p>Nerd and geek concept was introduced later through movies and internet and in mid 00s it was already established, but still not a negative stereotype (but that may be because I changed environment to CS-related in the meantime and ~ everybody was a nerd&#x2F;geek&#x2F;whatever).