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Comment by kesselvon | Hacker News Reader

This does not bode well for the next generation's social skills.

That's one way of looking at it. Here's another: the fact there are kids who feel an entire school can make them feel unwelcome doesn't bode well for parents and teachers who are failing raise children to be decent people. If there are children who are bullied and ostracized at your kid's school then you are failing to teach your child to stand up to oppression and hate.

Children are learning this stuff largely by trial and error. Adults have a responsibility to point them in the right direction.

Children are not adults who are just physically smaller. Unless you have a magic invocation that can instantly train children to behave the way you want, there must, by necessity, be a window of time where this is still a problem even if everybody is behaving as perfectly as can be expected.

Further, the idea that even adults act this way is pretty silly. It's masked by the fact that in the adult world, we have far more power to self-sort into groups we find acceptable. I am not aware of anybody who actually makes everybody else feel welcome, and that certainly includes even those who make a big show about how inclusive they are, which generally gives me a lot of statistical information about exactly which groups they're interested in excluding.

Unless you have a magic invocation that can instantly train children to behave the way you want, there must, by necessity, be a window of time where this is still a problem even if everybody is behaving as perfectly as can be expected.

I didn't say it could be done easily or instantly. What I'm saying is that children bullying one another isn't just a problem for the children; it's a problem for the adults who those children are learning standards of acceptable behavior from.

It's not necessary in practice for everyone to be equally inclusive to everyone, just that for every person there is adequate inclusion from someone.

I think you could argue that people are going to be less "well rounded". In the past, you were pretty much stuck with the people in your school / town. It was probably pretty common to feel like the only person that cared about incredibly specific nerdy hobby X. But also, maybe you made friends with someone that cared about completely different things. Now a days, it's really easy to find other people that also care about incredibly specific nerdy hobby X and make friends with them. Whether that's good or bad (possibly missing out on other experiences) is yet to be seen.

Different times call for different skills. If you can't communicate effectively with someone 20 years younger than you, you might interpret that as a flaw in their social ability, but they get along just fine with their peers and all agree that you're the one who's out of touch for not being able to text at 500 emojis per minute.

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