coolness is about control

Why are teenagers so sarcastic?

Why do hipsters seek irony in all they do?

I think it ultimately has to do with control. By being blase about something, you don't care for it, you're not subject to it.

For instance, a teenager who is too cool for school. He doesn't want to subject himself to the control and discipline of an academic environment. He doesn't like it that his teacher and parents are telling him what to do, how to do it, at all times of the day. In order to reassert control over his life, he delegitimizes the values of this environment and creates or adopts a substitute set of values and lives and acts accordingly.

That's why the best way to get a kid studying is to somehow get him to internally adopt the values of the authority structure and let him motivate himself.