Kids are cruel to each other because they do not yet know any better. They are still developing empathy and have not yet learned social skills. Kids in mixed-age environments can (and do) take their cues from older children and adults; kids who are isolated into the bizarre, historically nonexistent single-age environments found in the modern school system do not have that advantage, and accordingly tend to brutalize each other. Outside of prison there is nothing like it in adult life.
I do not see that kindness at the airport or the grocery store, or most other instances that are closer to a random sampling of the US adult population.
No, you learn maladaptive patterns. Your options are artificially constrained. Most of the ways a grown adult would deal with e.g. bullies are just not available to you.
Take physical violence for example. As an adult, if you're threatened with physical violence you have the options to:
- Get out of there. But kids can't do this because they're physically confined to the same classroom with the same people, every day. And obviously you're not allowed to just leave the school when you want to.
- Fight back. Risky, but you at least won't be punished by the courts if you can argue self-defense. But kids can't do this because "zero tolerance" policies punish both the aggressor and victim, by design, if the victim fights back
- Call the police. Kids can't do this, police don't care about schoolyard disputes. Snitching to a teacher just gets you bullied even more.
- Talk the person down. Maybe this works, but in a school they'll be back again the next day, and you'll have to do it again, and again, and again. Adult interactions are not so predictably repeated, unless in some other highly institutionalized setting like the military or a prison (guess which places also have problems with violent bullying).
Adults can, well, solve their problems like adults. Schoolkids literally aren't allowed to solve their problems like adults. Fuck, they're not even allowed to go to the toilet without asking someone first.
Is there any wonder they develop behavioral pathologies to cope: passivity, social withdrawal, self-harm, proactive aggression, self-sabotage, etc etc.
And I wonder how much of adult suffering comes down from not un-learning bad behavioral patterns learned in school? How many people have put up with being treated like garbage for years (at work, in a relationship, etc), because they haven't internalized that they don't need to ask an authority figure to be allowed to leave?
At some point I had to defend myself from a bully (that probably had a awful home life, since that guy managed to come home to school 7:00 in the morning already drunk, multiple times) by bashing the guy with a metal table and then threatening to kill him with a knife. Only then, he stopped bothering me.
Also I knew more than one guy that admired Columbine guys, their reason is that it was a good way (in their minds of course) of both getting out of their shitty life and taking revenge at same time.
Thankfully, now that I am adult, all problems so far I could solve by just talking to people, no tables, knives, planks or chains necessary.
Note: I went to "good" private schools, thus nobody died or got seriously injured, but I have friends that went to public schools, and one of them for example was forced to cause serious injury when 3 older students ambushed him right outside the school, and the only thing he had to defend himself was his skateboard, so he proceeded to hit them with the metal axis where you attach the wheels, broke half of the teeth of one guy, caved in one of the temples of another, and broke the shoulder and one knee of the third, after that the school started to have the police patrol near the school to prevent a repeat of this. Also that school banned skateboards, yoyos, long rulers (specially a particular metal ruler distributed as souvenir during a political campaign, that people found out you could sharpen and use as a decent machete) and spinning tops (specially those with metal tip, one kid made a hole in another kid head with one).
I went to a rough inner-city school and there was literally nothing like this. The fights were all between people who were already involved.
I went to a pretty rough school (repeated fights, people I went to school with murdering people, etc.) and I basically was never even once threatened with violence. All the bullying is through words and making fun of people, etc.
Is physical bullying of this sort actually that common or more media depiction?
- work-life balance. we expect kids to do "homework", but we don't expect adults to do work outside of actual working hours. we call those places "toxic working environments" and avoid them if we have any sense. I actually have more time to myself as an adult than I did as a kid.
- doing things only so that they can be graded for the approval of some authority figure, rather than because they are intrinsically worthwhile or enjoyable
- a peer group artificially constrained to be only of kids within a year of your age. interacting with kids a few years older or younger is out of the norm, friendships between year groups are rare. that's not how adult life works. I have a pet theory that so much bad behavior in schools is caused by this age stratification.
I am genuinely questioning whether public school makes children socially mature rather than only being a traumatic experience for many pupils, for no other reason than that public schooling is the default choice.
It's the choice that everyone goes through. So unless you want your children to be unable to adapt to the people that were shaped through that horrible system, you will need to introduce them to that system in some capacity. Sports are not really enough. School is like day job for kids until they're 18. Everyone goes through the same standardized garbage, and they will have to live their lives with other people who went through the same standardized garbage.
Your only choice is to pay exorbitantly so they don't go through that garbage, but will face adulthood with 99% of the population that did, which can have mixed results.
But I don't think school is what makes them mature as much as it's the adults that they look up to and emulate that shape that. And whether it traumatic can depend on how they're able to internalize it.