I’m not sure if there’s data/studies on this, but I feel that bullying is a bigger problem in the US than in eg Europe and Asia. If so, would like to see more discussion on why that is and how we could improve things by comparing
In the Western system I could more often rely on just ignoring or complaining to a teacher to result in some action, in the Asian schools I went to, many of the teachers and other parents seemed almost complicit in the bullying (somewhat unsurprisingly, especially the English teachers).
I still remember that on my first day in an Indian school in 4th grade after having gone to school for ~3 years in NY, I had been mocked and called stupid in front of the class by the math teacher for writing out how I answered a problem differently from what had been taught to the rest of the class. Completely ruined me on math for several years because it made me too hesitant to ask questions about fundamental things I didn't understand and as a result I had terrible fundamentals. I only really managed to get over that by spending the entirety of 8th grade self-teaching myself math after school.
The way I like to think of it these days is that Western education made me enjoy learning and helped build up my confidence, while Asian education made me cynical and better at reading people (which isn't a bad thing to me now, but I'd still rather never go through that again).
Of course this is just anecdotal so it doesn't say a lot overall.
- A teacher posed a question to the class and I and another boy answered immediately. The teacher was upset and said "cliquecover and boy are always putting themselves forward"
- A few senior students demo'ed a cool robotics toy they'd built. Our science teacher mocked our class for not being as intelligent as them, instead of explaining how we could build one (doubt he knew anything about it).
- A university lecturer openly ridiculed all the female CS students as "useless"
- A tendency to obscure their incompetence and lack of understanding by focussing on petty details: eg a math teacher ridiculing us for not knowing our multiplication tables and forcing us to memorize them, instead of teaching useful skills, English teachers being obsessed with spelling and handwriting instead of general reading and composition skills
- Universities engaging in extortion by refusing to release student's personal documents unless they would take up the first job offer they obtained via university placements.
Very few intelligent people in India would become teachers in the kind of school I went to. They would rather take up software/IT/private sector jobs, so you get mediocre non-entities who have free rein to treat students as they please.
Is it because children have too much freedom in school, innatentive/overworked teachers? My wife tends to think it's the food(sugars) and TV/computer games (even first graders spend significant chunks of their free time playing Minecraft and other games). Is it because of playdates culture and not being free to play on the street with neighbours after school which helps socializing kids?
Well, unless you count getting griefed on MC as bullying...
All children need to be "socialized", which means "taught the local method of the art of civilization". Currently in the western world there IS no "local method of the art of civilization". There's barely even a "local people". Most people grow up around transplants and whirling hodgepodge of rapidly-evolving ethno-social practices that never comes close to stabilizing on a single, repeatable way of life.
The US's and Canada's failures to raise up kids to behave a certain way is due to the fact that the modern western world is in a local period of flux/chaos. Children rarely see their full-time working parents and live in environments where they have little freedom and few trustworthy allies that will remain with them throughout their whole lives. The several people I know who grew up in the USSR did not experience this, and while they experienced shortages, authoritarianism, and poverty, they also experienced very intensely local community with people who they understood and expected to live the same way. (This broke down across ethnic lines, of course.) The necessary fixes are far more pervasive and difficult than many people realize, and mostly start with "fixing the adults" rather than "fixing the kids".
Bullying is a deeply primal instinct, with the end result of establishing a social hierarchy with the most powerful and violent on top and people who will listen to them and provide goods and services on the bottom. The reason that adults who commit crimes end up in prison is that modern western governments keep a really well-armed and nasty gang on a leash (police) and have a system to deal with the bullies who don't learn how to keep their bullying in line with social acceptability. (For instance, you can emotionally torture an employee into depression, but you can't punch them in the face.) I believe that the bullying we're seeing children do now is closer to status-jockeying in a post-civilization world than as a consequence of our current society's setup. They're trying to establish hierarchies and social norms for themselves, because they've never observed or been taught any.
If we could "sacrifice" the top ~10% most-disruptive students—just keep them out of the ordinary classrooms—it'd improve everyone else's experience and ultimate educational attainment immensely. My wife used to be a teacher and days when the right couple kids both happened to be sick, all the lessons got done faster than the time she'd allotted, giving time to cover bonus material, and she said you could just feel how much more relaxed and jovial the atmosphere was, and could see it on the kids' faces. Consider how much benefit it would convey if that were every day and those effects could compound over years. First person who figures out a way to do that that doesn't condemn the 10%ers who actually have a chance of reforming, and that's palatable to constituents, will have done more for US education than anyone else has in a century, probably.
In Europe, bullying is worst in countries with comprehensive systems (UK/Nordics/Eastern Europe, unsurprisingly they are countries that have left-wing education systems built for the social justice goals of adults, not learning outcomes of kids). I believe it is as bad or worse in Asia although for different reasons.
Btw, there are also quite good stats about sexual violence against girls and, unfortunately, you actually see these levels are highest in comprehensive systems in Europe. This is likely due to under-reporting elsewhere but it is very strange to see somewhere like the UK come out worse than Afghanistan in violence against girls. I think people should also ask why this kind of stuff isn't known (again, it is because schools are designed for social justice for adults, not for kids...it is an unfortunate reality of our world).
Learning outcome rankings are commonly pretty high for UK and the Nordics -- there's a number of metrics, and some asian countries come out outlier strong depending on the test, but it's pretty common to find Finland, Sweden, and the UK in the top, and Finland in particular seems pretty enviable by a number of standards.
Also, learning outcomes for kids are social justice goals -- people who think of their social values/goals in those terms (vs people who use "social justice" as a drive-by disparaging/othering term to signal their own ideological allegiances) are almost always concerned with broadening positive educational outcomes. Perhaps you don't share those goals, or perhaps you believe that some social movements are promoting policy that isn't well-optimized for those goals, but it's entirely false to state that they're mutually exclusive.
And as they say, "citation needed" for stats about bullying or sexual violence.