Comment by corrral | Hacker News Reader

Comment by corrral | Hacker News Reader

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Ever had a 3rd grader threaten to stab you, and look like they really mean it? A second grader call you the c-word? That kind of thing happening basically every day, often multiple times a day?

Credible threats of gang violence on a regular basis. School-wide lockdowns with some regularity due to threats of violence, or violence that has actually occurred. Admin with extremely limited options to deal with any of this, and having to triage their discipline pretty hard, plus having little to no support from home to back any of it up (this is why the stuff in the first paragraph happens constantly—no time or community/parental willpower to deal with it, given the rest of what's going on). Watching the kids suffering from the same shit day after day, plus all the usually-awful stuff they have going on at home, and not being able to do much about it. Seeing kids die or end up in the hospital with alarming regularity. Distressingly young kids plainly high or drunk in class.

Not many people can do that without burning out or giving up and half-assing everything, very quickly.

Hmm, I can't imagine having to deal with those things. People don't act like that where I live.

Me neither, because I don't live in the part of town ~10 miles away where this is the case.

Why don't I live there, even though the location would be more convenient and has far more nearby parks and businesses, the housing is dirt-cheap, they have better access to public transit than we do, the area's more walkable/bike-able, et c? The schools are bad.

Why are the schools bad? Because people like me (that is, people whose kids have a low-stress life outside of school) won't move there. Digging out of that hole is nearly impossible. It amounts to "gentrify things all to hell" (which just shifts the problem around rather than actually solving it) or "fix huge social and economic problems the US has".

In either case, you can't do much about it by focusing on the schools themselves.

I’ve recently become friends with someone from the inner city “hood”. It’s just unbelievable. Like someone below said, it’s not about race as much as poverty. The sad thing from what I’ve seen is the culture is self-destructive. Instead of trying to help each other up and out, many pull others back down (economically, socially, etc). I used to naively think I had answers, but after seeing the breath and depth of the problem I have no idea what would help.

Lowkey I think the current education system has evolved from communities that allowed teachers to beat their kids to teach obedience. that obedience was passed down through generations in those communities establishing a culture of obedience for teachers. The current system, although non-violent, is still heavily leveraging the culture of obedience from students. when a kid is disobedient, usually the above mentioned communities threaten to move the kid into an environment where the obedience culture is even more strict as a result of even more violent punishment historically. Early days Public school teachers might lightly smack you with a ruler, early catholic school teachers might spank you, and early military school teachers might straight up beat the shit out of you.

So I think by extending the current system to areas in poverty that do not have an established culture of obedience means we have to either change the system or start beating kids again imo. I vote for the former, obviously.

The crab mentality goes hand-in-hand with widespread poverty and lack of community development. In schooling it shows up as bullying those who are most academically successful, for being "nerds" or "acting white".

Consider yourself lucky.

Even worse, imagine being a child growing up in that environment. Actual fistfights were happening every few hours in school where I grew up.

Sounds like you’re enabling some structural inequality, or something.

You didn't even get to the covid restrictions, and parents calling teachers anti-American and traitors and Nazis for supporting mask and vaccine mandates. Teachers were getting death threats after being told they were "essential workers" for a year. Meanwhile they have to use their own funds to buy their own body armor, because they have to buy that along with pencils and paper now.

Teachers are not always 100% sympathetic. When courts in Illinois shot down school mask mandates, teachers at a high school near me retaliated by sequestering unmasked students in a room and not teaching them.

Heh, I omitted that because most of that stuff happens often-enough in our good districts.

And yeah, it's a red state. Even the blue areas are red enough to get plenty of obnoxious assholes harassing teachers.

[EDIT] Downvoters: go talk to some teachers about this topic. I'll wait. It may be a while, because they'll have a lot to say.

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