My understanding is that home-schooling with private tutors > the typical school environment > remote learning without supervision.
Remote learning is not though.
I'd wager that 25 parents banding together to hire a tutor might outperform a typical classroom, if it was a biased sample towards people who care. I'd trust my parents and a group of like-minded parents to pick out a good educator better than the typical teacher, teachers aren't the sort of people I would recommend to teach children how to think.
In pure academics, maybe. What about your children's social/well-being from not interacting with their peers?
Private tutors are the best there is and you won't beat it. Whatever is lacking, can and should be supplemented. It doesn't even need to be a 1-1 with a tutor: 3-5 kids are still a manageable group. 25-1 or sometimes 35-1 is absolutely horrible and it shows in the results.
Remote learning without help and care (honestly, "supervision"? The heck? Are they your child or inmates serving time for the crime of being born?) is obviously even worse than going to school. So, to my eyes, the GP got it right with that quote.
I don't know. It seems like there's plenty of kids suffering at school precisely because they have to interact with other kids. Getting bullied at school is probably something almost everyone's experienced at some point.
Also, the problem with bullying isn't bullying itself but that people are receptive to it and don't defend themselves (partly because school rules prohibit defense). If everyone stands their ground and defends themselves, bullying will disappear. Bullying only makes sense when the reward (whether psychopathic self-satisfaction or bolstering your social status) is worth more than the risk (which is usually nothing if the target doesn't defend themselves). If bullying is guaranteed to result in a punch in the face, it will change the risk/reward calculation dramatically and make 99% of it not worth it.
What are you talking about? Were you ever actually bullied?
The only place where violence is tolerated is school. Post high school, if anyone physically bullied me, I’d just call the police, the person could end in jail or at least their career would be gone.
In school, you’re left to your own devices. Police don’t care, teachers can’t do anything because schooling is compulsory.
> people are receptive to it and don't defend themselves
Another delusional take. Why did she let him rape her, she should have just defended herself! Well, because I’m smaller, weaker, and there’s less of me (1 vs group of bullies). Taking it and hoping they leave is best option, not hitting back and provoking even more violence.
I think it’s best if you don’t contribute to this discussion any more to avoid embarrassing yourself further.
> I think it’s best if you don’t contribute to this discussion any more to avoid embarrassing yourself further.
You can literally just remove yourself from the situation! No such option for vast majority of school-age children (because schooling is compulsory).
No, you really can't in many cases. And even then it isn't healthy to run every time someone crosses a boundary
There's no basis for this claim.
> it isn't healthy to run every time
That wasn't the argument. The point was that leaving isn't an option if you're forced to be in the situation by the school.
In a way, his post was a form of negotiation. He wants the other person to stop posting opinions he considers invalid and embarrassing, so he appealed to their self-interest in order to get them to change their behavior. Real violence comes with the threat of escalation: "you better stop, or else".
Verbally, yes - though it never escalated to actual violence. To be fair, they weren't "career" bullies (for the lack of a better word), but simply a clique of kids (that were otherwise decent in school) that like to make fun of other people - turns out that actually not being afraid and confronting them is all it took to 1) stop the bullying and 2) completely change the dynamics of the relationship where they saw me as one of theirs and from that on we had decent interactions. The only violent incident I was involved in had nothing to do with bullying and was about stealing my phone.
> The only place where violence is tolerated is school
Violence still costs significantly more than verbal bullying, so most bullies would generally not want to resort to it if they can avoid it. If your option is 1) pick on the weak kid or 2) pick on the weak kid that shows a willingness to fight, you will pick option 1 because option 2 will still attract significant more attention from authority even if you easily win the physical fight.
I'm sure there are gangs of violent bullies, but for each one of those there's probably hundreds of verbal bullies that just pick on people verbally for fun and have no desire for violence or even significant confrontation because it's too much risk & effort. Standing your ground would at least protect you against those as they'd rather move onto an easier target. Will it protect you against 100% of bullying? No. Will it protect you against 90% of it? Very likely.
Seems kind of odd to see this written on an anonymous forum
> If bullying is guaranteed to result in a punch in the face, it will change the risk/reward calculation dramatically and make 99% of it not worth it.
This just isn't how violence happens. Bullies don't select targets they can't win against. In addition to that, they often come in groups. Victim managed to punch one guy? Not only is it likely that he'll overpower the victim, his buddies are there to make sure he doesn't lose.
"Just defend yourself" is what leads to kids bringing weapons to school. Because that actually is how you defend yourself against violent thugs and certainly what a responsible adult would do when faced with unprovoked violence.
It's not really any different than literal gangs of criminals to be honest. The best way to deal with such violent people is to avoid them. You can't avoid bullies at school. If your plan is to defend yourself, then you better be able and willing to dish out extreme violence when warranted because that's what it's going to take. The ability and willingness to do that is the threat you speak of. Victims of bullying pretty much always have neither. Chances are the bullied kid isn't some hardened street tough capable of taking out three guys before they do the same to him.
Even if these victims were that tough, they can't do that because schools don't really like it when kids create liability for them with violence like that so they impose harsh consequences to violence regardless of how warranted it is. So not only are victims weaker and outnumbered, schools will also punish them for defending themselves as is any human's right.
If you get into a proper fight you will lose, however most bullying is verbal and even bullies have no interest in escalating it to physical violence if it risks yielding consequences (if not for the violence itself, but their other behavior, that might otherwise fly under the radar). So merely showing the intent to fight back will make them move onto another target.
Yes, this is completely different from gangs and I'm not talking about those. If your school has a gang problem, this advice won't help you. However below "gangs" there will generally be a clique of people that may engage in occasional verbal bullying (because it's fun for them and/or bolsters their social status) but otherwise generally do well in school and have no interest in jeopardizing that standing - therefore violence will not be in their best interest, regardless of whether they'll actually win the physical fight.
> You can't avoid bullies at school. If your plan is to defend yourself, then you better be able and willing to dish out extreme violence when warranted because that's what it's going to take
You can't avoid 100% of them. You can avoid 90% of them by being stronger/more difficult than the other targets.
This is magical thinking. "If I do A, he will do B" as if it were a cosmic law. No such deal exists! Bully has a whole alphabet of responses to choose from, including taking you up on your challenge.
You need to take a hard look at what you're suggesting here. You're describing people who are verbally violent. You're telling people that the way to get them to stop is by using physical violence. You're escalating the situation. You're doing this on the assumption that verbally violent people are not willing to go further. This is false. The problem with violent people is there's always someone willing to go further than you.
What you're actually doing is telling kids to make a threat display. Like a thug displaying his gun to intimidate the other person into backing down. This is an effective deterrent but you better be able and willing to follow up on that threat if necessary. If you do this, all bets are off. There is no guarantee that your opponent will back down. It's also possible that your threat will be perceived as a challenge to his masculity, especially if you do it in front of his peers. He'll think he'll have no choice but to take you on because he'll lose face if he doesn't.
If you're going to do this, you better be able to quickly incapacitate your opponent. I don't mean punching his face once and walking away victorious. I mean literally breaking his jaw and then following up with more attacks until he's unconscious on the floor. Then you better hope that this display of extreme violence was enough to intimidate any other bullies hanging around or you'll have to do the same thing to them before they gang up on you. If at any point your confidence in your ability to do this ever wavers, you should not attempt it.
You're putting people in actual danger with this advice. There's any number of things people can do in response to your threat display. You're telling people the aggressor will always fold. They might call your bluff instead.
Can you actually retaliate? Because eventually someone is gonna wonder if you're for real and you're gonna need to make good on that threat. If there's even the slightest doubt in your mind about it, you can't.
You will lose either way.
If you're a kid that does something really obnoxious/socially unacceptable, bullying is a way for peers to correct you. The kid that picks their nose will be made fun of and they'll grow up to be an adult that doesn't pick their nose.
As with most things, bullying can go too far but that's not the norm.
It's possible to nudge proper behaviors without causing physical (or emotional) harm to a person. That kind of violence is never necessary, and the thinking that justifies it is hideous complacency at best
These days, bullying has grown to an umbrella term that includes things like teasing. Teasing or making fun of a kid who does gross things is part of a natural reaction from the other kids. Sure you could nudge that kid to stop in a positive way but whose job is that? The other kids? Probably not. The teacher/parents? They have probably tried and failed. So what complacency are you describing? Do you think as a society we can stop kids from being mean to each other?
There was a kid I went to high school with who was in a friend group I was also in. There was a point where we started calling him names just as a joke to mess with him. It got to a point where he became emotionally distant, but we kept doing it anyway just bc we didn't think much of it. His personality completely changed. He went from being a happy person to a shell of a person. We were his only friends at the time. He was still distant when we weren't around. He's (apparently) still like this also
I still feel sick to my stomach about that situation to this day, but tl;dr there's a line at which teasing goes from just teasing to something horrible
Agree. The worst things people do are to themselves. If you're trapped in an abusive situation, it'll fuck you up. But if you're receptive to that kind of abuse and stop seeing it as an inherent wrong, this is where people go from being abused to abusing themselves.
This is the difference between someone getting bullied vs someone becoming an emotionally scarred shell of a person
And I'm not saying bullying is good, but it's virtually impossible to eradicate completely (if you think there is no bullying you just need to look closer), so short of getting rid of it, trying to at least get see the "good" parts of it in the form of a lesson on dealing with conflict is IMO the most pragmatic observation.
This is even worse nowadays with social media where bullying "leaks" outside of school premises and can follow you around even across schools.
And bullying did not magically appear later in my life.
The bullying was damaging I agree, but I think taking me out of school completely would have been so much more harmful.
I'm glad you've made it out of that situation without major harm (and even some constructive conclusions), but you're an outlier, I think. Normally it doesn't go that well. It really shouldn't happen in the first place...
With "social skills", you mean either tolerating bullying or becoming a bully? (Compulsary) school is a prison, so the only social skills that children learn in school are about surviving in this prison.
Not saying this is right, but you can't change the world (neither as a parent nor as a kid), so adaptation is the best strategy.
Also, some communities, like online games, provide serious amounts of social interaction set around reaching a common goal to willing peers.