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Comment by spacephysics | Hacker News Reader

Being forced to be in a room and work with people who may not like you or you may not like I think is great for a developing child.

It teaches resiliency, builds mental strength, and can develop strategies on how to work with people someone may not get along with.

Taking out extreme bullying or worse, we need to stop sheltering the younger generation else they’ll, on average, become less able to handle stressors later in life.

The key part of this equation, to my armchair thinking, is having parents who are active in teaching the child what strategies to employ in difficult situations, and teachers that mediate to ensure nothing gets out of hand.

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Working with people you don't get along with instead of daring to walk out and find a place where you'll work with people you enjoy working with might be an anti-skill though.

True, you need to have self-confidence and good self esteem to not put yourself through that.

I think verbally standing up for yourself builds that, and in a classroom environment it can be a way where you can’t escape and need stand up for yourself or others.

You don’t want to work with people who you don’t get along with, but at the same time, you shouldn’t let a couple people ruin an otherwise great workplace

(I understand there are times where even 1 person can taint an entire work experience, and it’s not straightforward to simply stand up for yourself due to inter work dynamics. And in those cases, finding a new department or job all together may be best course of action.)

I think sports, or martial arts, or just letting kids run free in a playground are better environments for that. Sitting in a class with a teacher setting the rules will ensure that only the most scheming or socially machiavelian kids have resources to apply or avoid violence.

Martial arts for sure.

I hear what you’re saying, but I’m sure you’ve known people at work or other places that have some dark triad traits, and it serves to recognize them.

At the time I didn’t know what those were, or why I saw some kids as “off”, but looking back they were definitely on that Machiavellian scale.

I learned not to trust them or get tangled in their shit

> It teaches resiliency…

I think the issue often is that this an accidental byproduct of the school experience for many. There’s little or no intentional teaching of these things.

Definitely. I think there are times that schools are more valuable as social environments, teaching people how to act in society (to an extent), than some of the class material that is taught.

I would play soccer after school, and we had this one team mate who was home schooled.

Despite me being awkward and such, he didn’t get some social queues, and would either be mean or hurt kids not knowing the difference between joking around and poking fun, and just going too far.

Not nearly the case for all home schooled kids, but I think parents need to take extra attention to putting the child in social activities with their peers more so than a school-based parent would.

> The key part of this equation, to my armchair thinking, is having parents who are active in teaching the child what strategies to employ in difficult situations

The parents are the crucial part. It's my job as parent to be active in my kids education. The school, is just part of that. Making sure, my kids is in the right school, in a safe environment, and enjoying the process, are my tasks too. As parents, you are people managing your kids in the school.

Fully agree. I went through a few school systems, from a wealthy public school to a less fortunate city public school.

Each have their own problems, but common amongst them were parents that were either mentally absent, or physically absent.

In these cases, kids either ended up doing drugs and racing cars on windy roads, sometimes crashing into trees while high. Or getting into gangs or violence and having a record before 18.

You see it already in the elementary schools. In Germany, specifically, where you have different schools systems like and Hauptschule, Oberschule or Gymnasium, quite often kids that don't qualify to Gymnasium have parents that don't get involved in school topics, don't control home work, don't read with their kids, etc.

Go send your kids to communist concentration camps, lots to learn, guaranteed mentally twisted.

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