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Comment by rsp1984 | Hacker News Reader

rsp1984

I'm baffled that people are (or pretend to be) surprised by this. This should be completely obvious to anyone who's ever seen the inside of a high school.

What's actually going on is that rather than taking the uncomfortable step and questioning our current day school system where we send our kids to prisons (in anything but name), give them BS tasks for years and call it "education", the people in charge prefer to make the bullying problem one of the "socially disadvantaged" fringe groups, which allows them to throw public money at "anti bullying programs" and other pedagogical bullshit that target said fringe groups, so they can say "look, we're doing something!". Utterly disgusting.

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I've seen just as much bullying at elective academic summer camps (e.g. Space Camp, JHU CTY), as at public schools. Both as a student and as a teacher. I don't agree that it's necessarily a product of the American public school system.

Particularly, in my experience, bullying tends to be exacerbated during periods of social uncertainty, such as a change in the class cohort. The bullies feel vulnerable and are looking to prove themselves, and the bullied are vulnerable, having not yet had any chance to form social support groups.

Totally agree, which is why I think junior high is often the worst when it comes to bullying. In my school district elementary schools (up to 6th grade) had about 100 kids per class, and they all fed into one massive junior high that had about 1500 kids total in 7th and 8th grades. Plus, that is the time when kids are going through puberty (often at vastly different rates and times), trying to figure out their own bodies and hormones.

Your description of "The bullies feel vulnerable and are looking to prove themselves, and the bullied are vulnerable, having not yet had any chance to form social support groups." was spot on in my experience.

Frankly, I don't understand the purpose of junior high at all, seems like it would make much more sense to just have elementary schools go up to, say, 8th grade, then go to a high school (lots of private schools already do this).

> junior high is often the worst

I worked at a summer camp for a few years. It's split into "sessions" for different age groups by grade level: 4/5, 6/7, 8/9, 10/11/12. It was staggering how bad the bullying was in the 8/9th grade session compared to all other grade levels. The rest of the groups barely ever had any issues at all other than isolated, subjective cases, while the 8th/9th grade sessions would almost all have HUGE drama with kids (boys and girls both) changing friend groups, kicking kids out of their group, and joining new groups, all within the span of one week at camp. More drama than a reality TV show, it was nuts.

I agree about eliminating middle school / junior high. It's too narrow a band of ages, they aren't exposed to enough more mature kids to learn how to act, or much less mature kids to show them a reflection of what they used to be like.

I had the impression that the goal was to narrow the bullying to each other, so they don't pick on the younger ones and get picked on by the older ones. If they happen to learn anything in the meantime, great, but it really felt more like I was being warehoused through puberty than anything else.

That is how it is done in many European countries - elementary school has eight grades (used to be nine a few decades ago in some places), then it's 4-6 years of high school, and then optionally a college.

Worth noting is that some countries such as Poland switched away from this system 2 decades ago and experienced exactly all the issues attributed here to 6 grade elementary schools. They have since switched back to 8 grade elementary school.

Those kinds of summer camps usually mimic the structure of school systems, so I don't see how you're disproving anything with that example.

Yes, the analogy between school and prison is spot on.

In everyday life, if an environment/person bothers you, you can simply CHOOSE to deal with it if it's worth it or avoid it if it's not. Schools and prisons are closed systems where the social hierarchy inevitably gets established and constantly contested.

As someone who has been on both sides of the game telling kids not to fight back is counterproductive. If the situation is handled correctly it can become an incredible opportunity for growth.

> Yes, the analogy between school and prison is spot on.

In general, I don't agree with this. However, after reading a couple of prison experts argue that prison gangs, and most prison violence could be eliminated simply by reducing the size of the prisons. They argue that prison gangs are a rational response to the inability to make prisons safe for prisoners, and that inability is simply a question of prison size.

I wonder if a similar effect isn't present in modern public schools. That above a certain size it. becomes impossible to maintain an environment which is physically and psychologically safe for the students.

I dunno about that. I went to a smaller private school (~60 kids per grade in middle school, ~100 per grade in high school), and we certainly had bullying. maybe this is already too large? I didn't simultaneously attend a large public school, so I can't say whether there was a difference in degree.

we probably had more teachers per student, so more supervision, but I can't say that really helped. kids wouldn't physically attack each other in front of a teacher, but a lot of the verbal bullying was coded in a way (nicknames, in-group slang) that it wasn't obvious to an adult that it wasn't playful. the kids all knew exactly what was going on though.

For a year of middle school and a couple years in high school, I went to a "distinguished" secular private prep school in Oklahoma City. I think there were 60 to 80 students per grade, with small class sizes, much smaller than public schools. And let me tell you, there was plenty of bullying there. It was endemic.

One of my regrets is that I didn't just drop out of high school at 15 and get my GED. I took the ACT test twice, once at 15 and once at 18, and there wasn't really a difference in my score. I suppose the one real difference is that the second time, I had fewer fucks to give, and a buddy smoked a joint with me before I took the test.

The only institutions in life that I know of where you are forced to attend and prohibited from leaving on your own recognizance are school, prison, and a mental health facility to which one is involuntarily committed. Perhaps nursing homes are another.

That said, I have a lot of respect for the teaching profession. I had some truly incredible teachers.

I doubt that a larger school has more bullying per student. In large schools the students tend to subdivide into non-intersecting groups (e.g. nerds, jocks, rednecks, punks, etc). I went to a medium/largish high school and there were kids in my graduating class that I had never met, did not know their name, etc. Kids in these differnt groups largely left each other alone, because they did not compete for the any of the same things. Fights were usually between members of the same group.

Maybe the problem is not related to size of the school but only related to the fact that kids have no choice in going there?

In the adult world, in most cases you aren't forced to go anywhere and only do so because you have a good reason, whether it's the workplace (earning money), universities (learning things because you need that knowledge), etc. Most people go into an establishment with a goal in mind, work towards that goal and have little time nor motivation for things like bullying.

School is different because kids have no say in the matter, so even if they aren't interested in learning (because the coursework is boring, irrelevant, etc) have to go there and waste ~8 hours a day and need to occupy themselves. Typical sources of entertainment (television, video games, etc) are forbidden so bullying, or similar anti-social activities happens to fill the gap. This results in a lose-lose situation; kids that aren't interested in the coursework are having a miserable time and entertain themselves by making the environment miserable for everyone else (both other pupils as well as the school staff).

I suspect you may be right that even ~400 or ~500 students is too many.

This is just an anecdote. I went from an enriched program with a high school of about 500 students, which was quite wonderful, but still had the usual high school social issues, to another enrichment school of about 60 students. It was socially different. Everyone knew everyone well. You had to get along.

Bullying happens everywhere regardless of group size. All it takes is the wrong mix of personality types and lack of impartial, interventionist supervision

Er, right, the question is about how size affects the ability to have effective supervision. You also need to at least try to have supervision, but I think that's taken for granted by the proposal to make things smaller (I guess assuming that lack of interventionist supervision now is due to it failing in the large group, and will come back at smaller scale).

>Yes, the analogy between school and prison is spot on.

Well, only in the sense that the analogy between prison and society is "spot on".

>In everyday life, if an environment/person bothers you, you can simply CHOOSE to deal with it if it's worth it or avoid it if it's not

There are myriads of ways you can't just "chose" (from not wanting to make a fuss, from them being powerful and that would turn against you, from you needing a job, and tons of other things besides).

I remember being relentlessly bullied during a specific period as a kid. Only when I decided to decisively fight back did it end and it ended immediately. It’s a lesson I won’t be forgetting.

Same experience. And I lost the fight badly.

Just showing that you have the ability to strike back is often enough.

Oddly, became friends with my tormenter and had a lot in common.

I've seen the same thing happen with one of my kids, including the development of a friendship.

Grandfather was right -- if you get hit, hit back, twice as hard.

Does this advice work for any difference in sizes between the people? I suspect if one is so small as to not pose any threat at all and/or take on extra damage, it would end badly for them more often than not.

For me... yes. I was significantly smaller and was only able to weakly punch his chest. I got punched in the face and got a black eye and a sore skull.

As an adult the concept works. Bees can’t hurt me significantly, and even when they land an attack they die - but I go out of my way to leave them alone.

> I suspect if one is so small as to not pose any threat at all and/or take on extra damage

The trick is to turn off the switch in your head that tells you to stop if you're in too much pain or something is very wrong. Only real lunatics will keep going at someone that fights like that, and those are pretty rare.

The bullying that I experienced was verbal. Hitting the bullies for saying mean things probably would have been overreacting (and lead to me getting in trouble), but it was happening in class so I couldn't "walk away" either.

I experienced a lot of bullying in middle school (junior high I guess in the US), almost everyone in the school called me the fag (le pédé in French). This was in the 90s so at that time homosexuality was much less accepted than it is today. It was verbal, I didn't fight back and had a hell of a year.

When I went to highschool, someone in the class came up with a new nickname for me, despite much smaller than that person I fought back, I punched him as hard as I could, got badly punched back too. But after that, no one ever called me by that nickname.

When my son goes to school, I will tell him to fight back in case of bullying. It's the way the world works and if I had known that in middle school, I would have had a much better time and wouldn't have had thoughts of suicide.

It also supports another common sense observation, which is that mixed-age schooling results in much better behavioral outcomes. Kids don’t obsess over their place in the artificial Lord of the Flies hierarchy when there are younger and older kids around to provide frequent role reversals.

Has that been studied?

Anecdota:

Mixed-age groups of home-schooled kids (e.g., at co-op events) tend to just play, with the older ones typically watching out for the younger kids, whether they are siblings or not.

Mixed-age groups of formally-schooled kids begin by setting up a hierarchy that usually depends on grade in school* and then is continually refined.

* H-S kids in a mixed group are immediately marked as outsiders by this question. They either don't know or operate at different levels in different subjects.

Home schooled kids are typically in groups of far, far smaller sizes. The social dynamics of a high school with 2000 students is naturally going to be different than the dynamics of a home school of a dozen or so.

I think the point is that the ingrained dynamics continue even when the context / group size evens out later.

>Has that been studied?

Depends on how studious you are.

One primary thing that stands out as actual humanity are behaviors which are almost never dominant in any other beings, and which further the progress of true civilization.

Which is of course supposed to be civil if nothing else.

Anything less is realistically a lack of human nature, often still remaining along a not-completely-civilized continuum.

So _human nature_ should never be used as an excuse for uncivil behavior, and further progress can best be made by recognizing _lack of human nature_ as the problem instead.

This should be obvious to behaviorists but once you go there you've got to figure lots of them would need more _common sense_, except there still remains some prevalence to _common lack of sense_ . . .

Every public school will be analogous to a prison no matter how good, because children have no choice on the matter. If you want to change the dynamic there the only solution is school choice because children simply must go to school, letting them (and their parents) choose which school is the right one is the way to improve the child's well being and make them feel like they have control over how they spend 200 days of their year.

I grew up in a school system where families had the ability to switch schools.

It did not solve any of the problems you mention. In fact, it introduced a new set of problems where some number of students (and parents) at every school would conclude that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence no matter what. Most of the students who switched schools struggled to make friends or were frustrated that the switch didn’t automatically solve their social problems.

In retrospect, I realize I learned a lot about social maturity by staying one place with a semi-random group of people that I had to learn how to work with.

> Most of the students who switched schools struggled to make friends or were frustrated that the switch didn’t automatically solve their social problems.

What do you think the reason was?

Denver Public Schools has a forced school choice program. In that each parent/guardian must register what school they want their student to go to; there is no default. All schools in DPS are charter schools, with many different focuses and education tactics. It may sound a bit odd, but it's been working for the ~90k students for a few years now.

That said, bullying doesn't seem to be any less or more at DPS. Some quick googling seems to show a few cases of 'extreme' bullying in the local news, but nothing I can really point at to say the bullying is less or more. In the absence of really any stats or evidence, I'd assume bullying is probably the same as in other large metro districts.

My cousin had a getting bullied problem in elementary school. His mom switched his school 6 times to no avail.

My other cousin had a similar problem, his mom switched his school 3 times and in the end he wanted to go back to the first school. In the meantime, he fell way behind in his learning.

Mental health is waaay more important than anything you could ever possibly learn in school.

Why do you think his problem did not get solved?

Students wouldn't get to choose their school under your so called "choice" suggestion, their parents would, or it would be assigned based on how wealthy the parents are or their location or where their parents could afford transportation or which school is willing to take them or lottery results or whatever.

As long as kids get arrested if they don't attend the prison analogy applies.

In my area, diocesan Catholic schools are very popular, but they don't really seem to solve the bullying issue.

One of the side-effects of the current pandemic, at least in the US, is that dysfunctional educational institutions have been revealed for what they are. There's a lot of talk about a realignment of priorities at the university level where students' money is directly at stake, but hopefully this will spur some positive changes for younger students also.

What are you talking about? The overwhelming message I hear is that people cant wait till schools open. And that includes also kids themselves.

Everyone wants them open, but mostly to eliminate the nuisances associated with child-care while working. I think a lot of parents hadn't realized just how messed-up their kids' schools actually were until now. (Edit: So, there are two separate problems: "Get my kids out of here so I can work and keep the lights on" and "Really?? That's all they've been getting all this time?")

My 4th grade son can crush his entire day of actual work in 30-45 minutes. I very much value the additional hours of socialization and fun that come from traditional schools, but it’s not a very efficient mechanism of scholastic/academic achievement.

> My 4th grade son can crush his entire day of actual work in 30-45 minutes.

Sounds like he's ready for an office job /s

I want my kids in school, because they actually learn more in school then in home school. And they enjoy that learning more. Homeschool did not made me realize how messed up school is. It made me realize teachers do more then I assumed.

And the stuff that is missing at home, even with video calls, is the more intersting stuff around communication. At home learning is slower and more composed of those less fun activities. That is also what my kids were telling me about what they miss from school.

This whole "now people see how horrible schools are" is not sentiment I an getting from people I know. They worry about kids learning less and are trying to figure out how to offset it, they worry about kids not socializing and so on. Maybe your school was horrible place, but the covid situation does not seem to prove that. Instead, it seem to make everyone including kids idealize the school.

I have two kids so they played together and they could play a lot more on tablets, so they were onle little bit more distractive then in person office gets.

>What are you talking about?

Is this just me or does this phrase come across as needlessly hostile?

I'm hugely critical of our industrial-age schooling system. But I think it's a mistake to suggest that bullying is only a factor in those schools. Bullying happens in families, in churches, in neighborhoods, in workplaces, in any environment where you have groups of people. Primates are big on dominance hierarchies, often violently enforced, and humans are definitely primates.

Everybody needs to learn how to deal with bullying. How to recognize it, how to combat it, how to build relationships and cultures that are proof against it. And if there are things we want everybody to learn, school doesn't seem like a bad place to start.

If you define bullying as preying on psychological and/or physical vulnerabilities, even parents, mothers included, do this. Its the quickest shortcut to addressing an anxiety or uncertainty on your part by displacing it onto the victim. Without external address, victims begin to identify with their suffering as a metaphysical certainty, something that must happen in order for the universe to keep on ticking correctly. Freud called this kind of adaptation a "secondary fixation" and can take years to peel back in order to address the core anxieties and uncertainty that's been deeply implanted.

It doesn't help that American culture has a particular distaste for empathizing with "weak people". Everybody is suppose to present some narrative of being a winner however narrowly scoped. It's no wonder "Chad or Virgin" memes are ubiquitous, people will never avow publicly to it but I suspect enough teeter on perceiving reality as if that kind of toxic binary was metaphysical in nature and therefore beyond empirical reproach.

Very insightful thank you

To have some significance, you'd need to link to a statement you wrote on this topic prior to the research being published. Otherwise this looks like you're just standing on the shoulders of giants to sing about how tall you are.

To be clear-- even if you had published your 2nd paragraph prior to this research being published, that wouldn't qualify as something that is "completely obvious." At the very least you would have needed to give a hypothesis as to why it is you think the current anti-bullying programs cannot work. That hypothesis would have needed to at least include something like, "in my experience people end up bullying their friends most of the time."

Otherwise, you can't convincingly claim the truth was obvious and people who didn't get it were likely pretending. Without the research, everyone just shrinks back to become little mice noisily speculating about the state of the world.

Edit: clarification

You are giving a lot of weight to the originality of academic institutions and their platforms as authorizers of knowledge.

There are plenty of examples of people knowing things, or seeing things as obvious, which are only much later acknowledged by academic research.

You are welcome to base your reality on what academia publishes, and accept that authority, but let’s be clear that this is what you are choosing to do.

Also, it’s worth looking at the majority of comments on this post. Most of them also appear to assume that the research’s result was obvious.

Actually it’s possible for people to have opinions on matters where they are not a published author or academic.

Also “little mice noisily speculating about the state of the world” is a pretty good summary of a lot of academia.

Yeah we should burn the universities down

No but they could certainly use a little bit less "theory" and a little bit more "real world".

Tell that to the people who invented laser or who developed the theory of evolution or who refined economics with behavior or who put experimental evidence in front of theory in psychology or who insist on using data to uphold sociological theories.

I have no idea what you could possibly mean by this.

Do you want trade schools? Those exist.

"Too much theory" was the exact reason we studied RNA vaccines and have a fast, working covid vaccine.

I suppose math departments, being 100% theory, ought to go too

You’re assuming the parent is arguing in bad faith which seems kinda pointless on the internet because only they know what’s in their head.

I had the same reaction as the parent but I was also mercilessly bullied in middle and high school. It’s no different than any other form of abuse in that you have no choice but to understand the social dynamic so that you can protect yourself.

I didn’t get bullied solely because I was nerdy, I got bullied because I was a nerdy kid who was trying to make friends.

I didn’t get bullied solely because I was queer, I got bullied because I was queer and tried to not be ashamed of it.

As soon as I accepted that my only permissible friends were the other misfits and queers then the bullying (mostly) stopped. It only started up again if as a group we started having too much fun in public because that started to threaten the popular kids’ position in school. If people saw us enjoying ourselves they might want to join us or shudder be like us. And that would make us… popular. Can’t have that.

pretty spot on from my experience. there were always a couple truly cruel kids who would pick on anyone they perceived as weak. but most bullying seemed to be for the purpose of defending group boundaries. people would mostly leave you alone if they didn't think you were trying to join a group that wasn't "for you".

I got lightly bullied in high school and the first part matches my experience: deciding that I didn’t care [very much] made it [mostly] stop, but if I let it get to me, it spiraled upward.

If some scientist comes to you and state "we proved that people can get hurt ridding bikes", it's fair to point out that there is little surprise about the formal proof of something so many people empirically experiment in their daily life.

> To have some significance, you'd need to link to a statement you wrote on this topic prior to the research being published. Otherwise this looks like you're just standing on the shoulders of giants to sing about how tall you are.

Not GP, but I've been advocating that children learn to defend themselves, both physically and verbally for many years. Here's a gem from a little over five years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11111126

Confrontation is a part of life and it's important to understand response in kind. If someone in school makes fun of your shoes you don't run away or punch them in the face, you make fun of their shirt.

Anti-bullying can't work because the real world does not have referees jumping in to break up non-violent situations. Children need to learn to address their own situations and that the words of their peers are totally meaningless.

> ...you make fun of their shirt.

I agree that is an essential life skill, and I'd add that you have to judge the situation to know if that's appropriate.

Sometimes your verbal assailant is not playful, but emotionally unbalanced, and responding in-kind will only put them farther over the edge, maybe dangerously so. I've had good results by yelling back with equal volume, but neutral tone, saying things like "Good morning. How you doing today?" and received a befuddled, and much quieter "Oh, good morning."

It’s unreasonable to assume that people who are part of a bureaucracy will publish serious, critical research about it.

It’s more convenient to find another problem to solve. For this issue today, we look at bettering the plight of gay eskimo pre-teens and declare victory over bullying.

I can tell you from personal experience as a member of a non-marginalized demographic who was relentlessly bullied in elementary school that bullying is not limited to any one type of target. In my case, a feckless bureaucracy and adult laziness were key enablers of bullying and bullying behavior. Personally, a amazing and brave teacher “saved” me and did so at his personal initiative and at his peril from a career perspective.

I'm baffled that people are (or pretend to be) surprised by this. This should be completely obvious to anyone who's ever seen the inside of a high school.

Obvious how? Not everybody is socially astute. Granted, I had never been bullied in high school but I wasn't much of a social operator.

That school is basically daycare (or a prison to some) is something I read often and there is maybe a tiny bit of truth in it.

But a school is also where you learn to read, write, speak, maths, some physics, some chemistry, etc.

In doubt I put my kid, from a very early age, in a top-notch private school in english (she's not a native english speaker).

My thinking being that, even if it's daycare/prison where nothing is taught (which I don't think is the case but I'm at least entertaining the idea), she's at least learning to speak english fluently : )

Bit if a side note: One thing about the “daycare myth” that bothers me, usually when it’s used to diminish the status of teachers, is how hard daycare workers work and how important that job is.

Don’t you see that you’re doing what the article describes, right now? Your shallow analysis and careless invective, somehow pointing the finger at school systems for something that is largely a result of human nature, is bullying. You’re throwing school systems under the bus for internet points.

Could schools handle bullying better? Probably. But your call for “questioning” is not at all constructive or actionable. To me you demonstrate only that what the article describes works just as well on hn as it does in schools. Dunking on easy targets for social standing.

Can an individual bully a nationwide organization?

First, "human nature" is a logical fallacy straight away: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy

Second, in many existing societies outside of the US school bullying is extremely uncommon.

How exactly would you prove that school bullying is uncommon in schools? I highly doubt your second point is true. If you have some research it would be much appreciated.

The Naturalistic fallacy is

  if something is 'natural' it must be good/desirable

I don't see that op said or implied that this was the case; They said something was 'human nature' (i.e. natural) ass opposed to the result of the school system. This doesn't imply that it is therefore desirable, but rather, that it is undesirable but not the result of the school system.

TBH, almost all internet discourse is: Post strategies: '<statement to grab internet points from like minded folk>'

Reply Strategies: '<Agree collaborate to get basked glory points>'

'<take down, by proving status difference between op and self - either by lowering op(insult /humiliate/mock/intimidate) / raising own status (showoff based on anything)>'

> Don’t you see that you’re doing what the article describes, right now?

Clearly they are not doing what the article describes. No individuals were hurt by the writing of that comment.

> Your shallow analysis and careless invective,

Seems like you are trying to hurt the poster with this insulting dismissal. The poster is an individual who can be hurt.

> somehow pointing the finger at school systems for something that is largely a result of human nature, is bullying.

This is a false dichotomy. Bullying is clearly a result of human nature.

However an individual’s exposure to bullying is clearly a result of the social systems they are exposed to. If there are differences in incidence of bullying in different social systems, we can certainly say that systems are also a cause.

> You’re throwing school systems under the bus for internet points.

You are throwing an individual peer on HN under the bus for internet points. This is against HN guidelines, unlike critiquing a system.

> Could schools handle bullying better? Probably.

Seems like you think the current level of bullying may be the best we can do?.

> But your call for “questioning” is not at all constructive or actionable.

This is obviously totally false.

1. There are many alternative schooling systems, and many alternatives to schooling.

2. Many comments on this post are doing the exact questioning the commenter is calling for.

It’s certainly constructive to question the school system which results from government policy, and certainly actionable.

> To me you demonstrate only that what the article describes works just as well on hn as it does in schools. Dunking on easy targets for social standing.

The OP is critiquing an abstract system. You are attacking an individual. Which behavior fit the description in the above paragraph better?

Admittedly I came at the GP harder than I could have, but it's so easy to write off large diverse institutions as "fucking bullshit" and poison a discussion before it even starts that I think it was warranted (that was the top comment at the time). One of the things about bullying is it's so easy to walk around tossing bombs (metaphorically) that sometimes people don't realize what they're doing until one of those bombs explodes a little closer than usual.

The OP didn't critique anything. Simply decrying an entire institution isn't a critique, it's a denouncement. A critique involves analysis.

Also, if I violated HN guidelines, so have you, by calling me out in turn.

> if I violated HN guidelines, so have you, by calling me out in turn.

In a mild way, yes. The guidelines actually say to flag and not comment.

However, I didn’t try to insult you, and there is a difference.

This comment of yours result seems to be just doubling down.

> it's so easy to write off large diverse institutions as "fucking bullshit" and poison a discussion before it even starts

The commenter didn’t actually say this. You are misrepresenting them.

Also, they didn’t poison the discussion. It seems to have proceeded just fine, both in the replies to them, and elsewhere.

> What's actually going on is that rather than taking the uncomfortable step and questioning our current day school system where we send our kids to prisons (in anything but name)

I'm surprised more people haven't read Michel Foucault's "Discipline and Punish", it sheds light on the way the prison became a blueprint for organizing labor, education, our very social fabric

> What's actually going on is that rather than taking the uncomfortable step and questioning our current day school system where we send our kids to prisons

The reasons for this are deliberate.

1. Parents are assholes. In poor areas many patents couldn’t give two shits about spending extra time to contribute to their child’s education. In rich areas the parents are at war with the teachers either because their little angel can do no wrong or because there is serious money on the table for scholarships.

2. Child performance is measured in numbers devised by standardized tests. The average of that performance is a primary determinate factor in state funding.

3. It would be nice if we taught children to think and to form original output. The sad reality is that most people, including adults, are utterly incapable of originality. Attempts to force that square peg into a round hole leaves many children behind while simultaneously confusing and infuriating parents.

1. Parents are assholes. In rich areas many parents doesn't give two shits about spending time with their kids as they are only interested in their job and friends.

It's baffling and yet it's not. Most people don't remember their childhoods very vividly, and high school is still in the cusp of childhood, especially these days. Combine that with our predilection to look back on the past with rose-colored glasses, and it's no wonder the education system is so bad.

This study isn’t even about school systems. It simply says that bullying is more common among friends than previously thought.

Previous anti-bullying efforts focused on non-friend bullies, leaving a blind spot to this bullying between friends.

Oh yeah, personally this insight was much closer to my time in a local music scene after high school compared to my classroom years.

>I'm baffled that people are (or pretend to be) surprised by this. This should be completely obvious to anyone who's ever seen the inside of a high school.

I think it should be a known idea to anyone who has ever seen a movie where a previously uncool kid gets accepted in to the cool kids group.

Sometimes the point of behavioral psych and sociology research is to take “what’s obvious” and collect the data to put a hard number on it. That way policy makers can justify putting money behind different approaches to address the problem...

Yepp, most western schools are more a social ladder creation apparatus than educational institutions. The scandinavian school system takes a very different approach. It's worth to have a look.

Could you maybe give a short explanation to how Scandinavian schools answer the bullying problem? I can't find anything that directly answers that question.

This movie captures it very well: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3215346/

Trailer [en]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_-KrJseVUo

It's very hard to describe shortly... maybe: They start with you as human being first. Abilities and talents to be discovered and developing a humane human who can face the world. They don't treat you like an animal in industrial livestock farming. It has many layers to it, e.g., regular teachers and kindergarden personnel have the social standing of a Professor in your country (assuming 1st world not scand). Teaching the young is understood (like REALLY understood) as one of the most important things a country can do for its future.

I'm still not seeing how this addresses school bullying in particular. I only watched the trailer though.

I've heard all these things about the scandinavian school system before. Bullying never came up as a topic.

What follows from the movie is that there are multi-professional teams at work.

That is, they don't have one teacher who decides about things and especially the fate of the individual pupil but teams containing, e.g., psychologists who decide about things in the regular day to day business.

Of course bullying is an issue there, too. It is pronounced wherever you have esp. social inequality, and minimizing only works approximately. However, they are thinking about this in a progressive and especially compile-ahead-of-time way. The first research on bullying emerged in the 1970ies from these countries actually. See: https://go.gale.com/ps/anonymous?id=GALE|A75022135

Okay I quite like this approach (assuming I understood it correctly).

Instead of a teacher whose job is primarily to educate, having to juggle the job of the emotional development of students that they will always see as a secondary task, there's a professional who is trained for that role who works directly for the school.

"Current day school system". Well, OK. But try reading about English public schools of the 19th or 20th Century. I gather that things were not much better in continental Europe.

It’d be a surprise to me. I was ethnically and culturally an outsider, and was bullied for that. It was rarely because of people I’d consider friends. When you’re different and othered, you’re targeted by the toxic masculinity crowd. It’s how the nerds ended up halfway together. High school was tame in the bullying regard. It was a magnet school full of dorks who were escaping the rest of society.

> When you’re different and othered, you’re targeted by the toxic masculinity crowd

Funny. The worst bullies in my schools growing up were the girls.

My memory is that girls bullied by emotional tactics: mocking, scorn, ostracizing, back-stabbing. Boys were more likely physical, though name-calling was also pretty common.

Girls can and are part of the toxic masculinity problem.

> which allows them to throw public money at "anti bullying programs"

And more employment for more teachers/guidance-counselors, etc.

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