>I went to a school where scholastic aptitude was something you hid, if you were smart.
That's a very common experience I'm actually surprised to hear that it's ever any other way.
To go a bit historical materialist on you, I think that if you took the kids at your old school and made them ten times better at thinking and ten times worse at everything else, their values would re-adjust so that they felt valuable again. People balance their values between the need to have a target to work towards and the desire to not feel terrible all the time - if you're very bad at something you're unlikely to find it an appropriate goal or a comfortable self-measure.
That's a very common experience I'm actually surprised to hear that it's ever any other way.
To go a bit historical materialist on you, I think that if you took the kids at your old school and made them ten times better at thinking and ten times worse at everything else, their values would re-adjust so that they felt valuable again. People balance their values between the need to have a target to work towards and the desire to not feel terrible all the time - if you're very bad at something you're unlikely to find it an appropriate goal or a comfortable self-measure.