Hacker News Reader

Comment by ohmschool | Hacker News Reader

Worth noting, “discipline” issues are pretty serious and schools are disempowered from doing anything.

Issues of “indoctrination” aside, I find the rampant bad behavior and lack of action far more concerning. I’ve been concussed from random assaults circa 2010 with no action being taken. Students with slap-on-the-wrist punishments for serious crimes being allows to commingle with legitimate students is an affront to reason.

Here recently, a friends daughter attempted suicide. She and several other girls were sexually assaulted by a pair of recurring criminals predating upon students. Guidance counselors swept it under the rug in spite of “mandatory reporter” laws. Only on the fourth assault we’re they finally held accountable.

Why would I want to send my kids to a place where this is normal and acceptable?

View on HN

Schools are not safe, but schools are safer than homes.

> Issues of “indoctrination” aside, I find the rampant bad behavior and lack of action far more concerning.

Prioritizing safety over education becomes prioritizing process over purpose. There will never be perfect safety anywhere, and if being safer than home isn't perfect enough, we logically should be intervening a lot more at home. The content and structure of education, however, we have almost complete control over (aside from the latitude of individual teachers who we hire and fire.) It's very convenient to ignore the thing we can control for the sake of the thing we can't.

It's to postpone fixing the thing we can fix (matching educational content and process with our agreed upon intentions) for the sake of the thing that no institution in any place or culture has ever fixed (ending all crime, discomfort or suicide.)

Schools are safer than homes? Where do you get that fact from? Has there been a study on this?

Anecdotally, 3 of the 4 homeschooled people I know were horribly abused in the course of their “education.” As children they had no trusted outlet or frame of reference to report it outside the home. Maybe not exactly what the comment was referencing, but it comes to mind for me immediately.

> Schools are not safe, but schools are safer than homes.

Yeah, um, forgive me if I don't just believe your say-so. Got a source for your claim?

Personally, I would say that it depends on the school, and on the home.

> Prioritizing safety over education becomes prioritizing process over purpose.

How well do you think people learn when they are worried about their safety? If you want to prioritize purpose, then make an environment conducive to the purpose. (In fact, looking at the actual environment created, one might suspect that education is not the actual purpose.)

> Schools are not safe, but schools are safer than homes

You know those jokes about the statistician who says that such-and-such thing kills fewer people than car crashes and people worry too much about it, and the other statistician responds that the people who know the statistics about car crashes probably don't worry enough about such-and-such?

See for example https://xkcd.com/795/

School safety is a bit like that. If you look at generic statistics it looks like school is safer than home, but if you are the sort of person who worries about relative safety of schools vs homes and looks up statistics, then schools will in average be less safe than your home.

Where did this happen? Sorry but I find it hard to believe.

This sounds unbelievable.

Luckily it's not normal or acceptable.

Imagine thinking such a thing about schools.

Slipping assault, violent acts etc under the rug is incredibly common from my experience. Even regular cases of bullying, schools will never intervene and if they ever do, it's largely very surface level i.e. telling the bully "don't do that again" etc.

Also, the way the consequences of school intervention works is bonkers.

The bully is rewarded since they get suspended (that's a reward from their pov, not a punishment) while the victim gets punished since they get suspended (but now that's a punishment from their pov).

This is entirely normal from my experience and perfectly acceptable from the schools at least. Not sure it's acceptable by parents just yet.

Sexual assault and physical assault to the point of concussion are serious crimes. That is no longer the school's problem but a criminal justice system problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com