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Comment by oifjsidjf | Hacker News Reader

"School is the only place where modern humans will experience violence".

FYI: The full quote is "Public Schools are prisions for children, and are one of the only places where many people will experience physical violence."

Interesting. https://twitter.com/michaelmalice/status/1129603377401401345

“So the solution is to siphon even more money into charter schools, so that the public schools are left to rot even more due to lack of resources, and ensure the only children left in public schools will be the most desperate and poor among us. Their bullying problems will be 100 times worse, but it won’t be your problem. Let them rot.”

May as well be the rest of the quote.

At this point you may as well just advocate for executing the poor.

why is that exactly, there is some weird purification/concentration of social things that only happen at school. Is it the spike of age cohorts (+/-6mo) all thrown together without any regulating factors that would occur with older wiser children (say +6 years) being able to correct the misbehaving individuals? Is it a factor of the sheer outnumbering encountered from high student to adult ratios? Is bullying less likely to occur when the adult count increases?

If an adult attacks someone they can go to jail or at the minimum are arrested for assault. In school the consequences are much less serious

That's nothing to do with school though, just youth. Kids who get into fights in the summer months away from school aren't sent to jail for it like adults. Being at or away from a school isn't a factor in that difference.

Children are forced to be around children in school. Outside they can avoid bullies most of the time.

Children don't decide what neighborhood they live in.

You’re right there’s sort of less freedom of escape in this environment. It’s like captive prey pretty much. Good insight.

In the US, probably a combination of reduced birthrates means there is less density of children, in conjunction with real estate development that requires cars to travel point to point, effectively filtering out situations where children get together without adults.

Teachers/admin can't long-term isolate the shitheads unless they go really far—notably, it's very hard to be kicked out for bullying that's short of repeated cases of extreme outright violence. A teacher and even school admin can't "fire" a chronically disruptive and/or bullying student. Other students can't vote with their feet and flee the classes with the worst bullies. They're stuck and no-one has the power to fix the situation.

That's why it's so bad. One employee starts pulling dumb shit and several employees report it to the manager, good chance that employee's not going to be able to keep it up much longer or they'll be gone. Yes, abuse happens at workplaces, but school-type bullying doesn't have the same kind of cover it does in a school. Several students report a bully, that bully will still be there next week. And next quarter. And maybe in their class next year. Still being a bully.

Selection bias during admissions gets talked about a lot when it comes to private schools, but they also have the superpower of being able to tell a kid who won't shape up to GTFO permanently. One family's tuition isn't worth risking several other students leaving. This can and does happen, and it doesn't solve all the problems, but it means the worst of the worst don't stick around like they do at public schools, poisoning the whole school atmosphere.

Nah, that doesn't ring true to me. I got into plenty of scraps during the summer when I was a kid. Nothing that rose to the asymmetry I would describe as bullying, but certainly it was violence. And besides the overt fights, many of the games we played were essentially organized fights.

Maybe things are different now, with kids spending too much time indoors playing video games instead of running around in the woods. But I think violence is generally an outcome from boys being together and relatively unsupervised. The insidious part about violence in schools is the double-jeopardy you face from administration; first you get your ass kicked by the bully, then you get your ass kicked again by the bureaucracy putting you through the wringer.

But they will witness violence all the time through media of different types. Which affects you in a different way.

A number of military personal might beg to differ with you. But I'm willing to hear justification for your comment.

Only in the military? Wouldn't it be easier to steelman the argument by inserting the missing "most"?

Certainly not only the military. I was countering an absolute statement, I don't need to list all exceptions to prove the statement wrong. I only need to list one.

Is that some manipulative jingoistic pro-military shaming?

A boxer obviously will see violence, so will a pigskin football player. Those are things they signed up for and the violence is part of the voluntary activity.

A soldier (or policeman) signs up to be in war, either an active one or one that might happen.

A high school student, a cube worker, a barista, a fireman, they do not sign up for violence.

The difference is that children have no choice but to go to school. They are sent to the slaughter.

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