Anti-bullying program focused on bystanders helps students who need it most

From what I recall of highschool here in Australia, students are deliberately rotated and mixed up as much as possible to prevent cliques and long-term rivalries from forming. A teacher once told me this makes it easier to assert control.

While I would have preferred the other way back then as a student, I wonder what the statistics say, in terms of outcomes. My gut feeling is that it reduces the outliers in student relationships (long-term sexual relationships, cycles of revenge, etc) that cause the school expensive problems.

This is largely untrue. It is prevented by having "ingroup" friends. I had a circle of 5-8 fellow "weirdos" who I had a grand time playing with.

Collectively we were the target of bullying. Our academic excellence (and thus copious free time) was the direct cause of being targeted. When you pound out the 50 problem worksheet in 20 minutes, and have the remaining 30 min to draw, imagine stories, and live in a shared fantasy world with that small group it's REALLY easy to be targeted.

The official policy from schools lately has been "zero tolerance" for violence, meaning if someone hits you and you defend yourself, you get suspended for just as long as they do. It's set up to let the school wash their hands of any responsibility, but without having to have an uncomfortable "Your kid is an asshole who keeps starting fights" / "My kid is a perfect angel and I'm suing you for suspending him" conversation.

It's not designed to solve the victim's problem, it's designed to make it not the school's problem.

The budget and political will aren't there to do much more than they already do. A detention here and there, kid's back in class the next day. Parents of bullies are usually uncooperative, to say the least. Combative and with shocking amounts of free time, more often. Academic stats (and therefore budget) suffer just as much for the school regardless of whether the reason two dozen kids did a step worse on the standardized test than they would have is because they spent three weeks each under suspension for bullying. There's no where else to send them, not in the volume they are present. No budget for it, no mandate. We're allergic to categorizing and separating (and hopefully rehabilitating! But... that costs money) kids on the scale that would be necessary.

The teachers and administrators can at best treat the symptoms, not cure the disease. Of course they fail at this as well, sometimes, but there just isn't much they can do unless the bully's so violent that they can kick them out with little risk of losing a lawsuit afterward.

"Could that be because the efforts have focused on having students, mostly those not subject to bullying, stop the bullying?"

The article didn't go into a whole lot of detail on the other less effective programs. But it did talk about how this program was effective precisely because it focused on students instead of focusing on punishment[1].

[1] I realize punishment isn't the only way to get teachers and administrators involved, but it does seem like programs focusing on punishment would have to get teachers and administrators involved.

> Teachers and administrators know who the bullies are, they just don't do anything at all to stop them,

You can't stop them, not even teachers and administrators. Bullying is psychologically tormenting as much as physical. Even the "physical" can't be stopped... punished afterward, but the deterrence effect is minimal and by that time the damage is already done anyway. Next year it will be a different bully that hasn't had the deterrence effect kick in.

And the psychological? How are you supposed to stop gossiping or name-calling or any of the other forms? You could turn schools into prisons (haha, like they aren't already) and not stop that.

This isn't difficult to understand. If we fail to understand it, that's because we don't want to understand it.

You take every kid aged 5 to 18, drop them in an institutional building for 40 hours a week supervised by minimum wage workers who couldn't hack a real major, miseducate and propagandize to them... and you get bullying in there. It's not a function of any single one of these factors accept perhaps classroom size and school population size... but it's still a result.

The only way to prevent it would be to do away with public education. If each child was supervised by an adult, or ratios were tiny (say 3 kids per adult), you wouldn't much have this. But that ratio is impossible with a public school system.

And since you want the system, you can't do anything about the bullying. So we pretend that bullying is a problem solvable with half-assed non-solutions like this.

Not only that, but they are encouraged to stay out of it by teachers/administrators. Think about it like this:

"I can step in, and try to stop the bullying, and possibly get beat up. At the very least I'll get detention. Or I can just sit-back and watch."

And, IME, the kids that were bullied, were the "weird ones" (that was me!). So it generally doesn't improve your social status to help that kid. So bystanders have all the incentives to stay out of the bullying.

If the bystanders weren't the kind of people that record the incident instead of helping, you wouldn't have seen the depictions.

So the good news is that the amount of physical bullying that happens is probably overestimated. The bad news is that non-physical bullying is underestimated.

Yeah, to an extent, but this idea that school is "the real world" is totally overblown - I've never been as exposed to the threat of violence, cliques, drugs, etc as I was in school.

Dealing with a asshole boss etc is nothing like that, and imho the school environment itself makes it worse.

Honest, critical feedback. I can't put it any other way. Based on reading multiple posts by you over the past few days.

You're not nearly as quality of a communicator as Alan Watts, not nearly as good of a thinker, not nearly as insightful as he.

Since you're still green, I recommend just making a new name, and then continuing to do the internet forum philosophizing you do under some other name. That's my best honest recommendation, not trying to say you're bad at communicating, thinking, or being insightful, when compared to everyone else in general.

Just it bugs me to see someone posting regularly, philosophizing, under that name. So let your content exist, but under a new name. While you're still green.

The unfortunate answer to that question is, "Yes".

Civilization is largely the product of a set of norms and institutions that allow the collective might of those willing to cooperate to be greater that that of bullies.

Thrasýmachos has a more interesting take on might makes right. It's hard to tell if he's a proponent, or if he's arguing it into the ground to be buried.

A kid who's a bully usually is bullied by someone else. They're angry for a reason.