441–449 of 449 posts
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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.
Heh, decent timing. My last CBT session ended with me realising one of my issues may be a lasting effect of bullying. Essentially I was trying to find out why I procrastinate, beyond "it's just the ADHD lol" Boiled it down and down and down until we hit the core of the issue and realised I don't want to poke my head up and ship code/sites/ideas/etc because I believe I'll be bullied for it. In school doing anything th…
> Essentially I was trying to find out why I procrastinate, beyond "it's just the ADHD lol" Along this vein, I think the internet (Reddit especially) has been spreading an idea that "ADHD explains everything" in recent years. Every year I feel like I see more and more people self-diagnose with ADHD and then stop looking further for any explanation for their psychological situation. In some cases, people seem to get w…
It wasn't until I found a psychologist that had an opening 90 days(ish) later that I was able to get fully diagnosed that I was even mentally able to think about myself differently. That said, I had the resources to see a doctor, I'm in my 40s, so there was no family to tell me I was making things up, and the only pressure I felt was from myself to address the issue.
If I couldn't do that and was stuck in a world that acknowledged ADHD was a thing, felt I had it, and yet felt disempowered to do anything about it, I could see myself easily falling down the rabbit hole you describe.
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The original assertion I disputed was that we should accept that the social dynamics in a school match those of a prison. Certainly I don’t pretend there aren’t environments where adults are violent and unreasonable. Such as prisons, or other places with “people who regularly commit violence, rape, and beat their wives.” If your argument is that school environments must be similarly unpleasant because they take stude…
> should hold schools to a higher standard than environments where violence and mental abuse unavoidably happen constantly This seems harmfully naïve to me. In pursuing this aspiration we ignore the realities that exacerbate conflict. Children and teenagers are literally not cognitively developed enough (on average) to function to this standard. This remains true no matter how much we wish it weren't. More effective…
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33795206
Why do we have to violence as inevitable just when kids are involved?
Although I'm not suggesting that we literally 'arrest and imprison' bullies, I think the first paragraph of your linked post is exactly right. The best way to stop bullying is to make it clear that it's not an acceptable behavior and to punish the perpetrators.
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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.
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Not an "intervention", but part of communicating basic civilization to one's children. People aren't born civilized. Do you have a reference for your claim?
You propose people, other people, should do a specific thing. That's an intervention you're proposing. Yes, I've mentioned elsewhere in the thread the book that is school bullying 101, "Bullying in school: what we know and what we can do", Dan Olweus, 1991. It contains the results of the first large scale intervention studies on preventing bullying in schools.
Or, maybe you think raising your kids not to be savages is an “intervention”?
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>But what if bullying is just fun for some people? We have a word for those people: "sociopath"
Nah, that's too glib. The people at one extreme end of the spectrum might accurately be called sociopaths, but lots of more ordinary people fall to the right of center on the "enjoys bullying" bell curve.
If "ordinary people" are on the right of centre of the bell curce, all you are arguing is that the culture you are in encourages sociopathic behavior.
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> should hold schools to a higher standard than environments where violence and mental abuse unavoidably happen constantly This seems harmfully naïve to me. In pursuing this aspiration we ignore the realities that exacerbate conflict. Children and teenagers are literally not cognitively developed enough (on average) to function to this standard. This remains true no matter how much we wish it weren't. More effective…
In another context you seem to take quite a different view: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33795206 Why do we have to violence as inevitable just when kids are involved? Although I'm not suggesting that we literally 'arrest and imprison' bullies, I think the first paragraph of your linked post is exactly right. The best way to stop bullying is to make it clear that it's not an acceptable behavior and to punish…
Children and adults are significantly cognitively different, they may as well be different species. We should embrace this reality.
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In another context you seem to take quite a different view: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33795206 Why do we have to violence as inevitable just when kids are involved? Although I'm not suggesting that we literally 'arrest and imprison' bullies, I think the first paragraph of your linked post is exactly right. The best way to stop bullying is to make it clear that it's not an acceptable behavior and to punish…
Right, I'm suggesting that adults are sufficiently cognitively developed to take personal responsibility for their actions. Children clearly are not. I'm not suggesting we stop punishing bullies, I'm just suggesting that we apply our knowledge of childhood psychology to the engineering of the school social environment. Unlike adults, there has been no intervention that has been demonstrated effective in stopping chil…
It tells you what children might do if left to their own devices without adult supervision – i.e. in an environment completely unlike a school. The Lord of the Flies is also a work of fiction that's not based on any real life events, as far as I'm aware. In any actual instances of kids being stranded on an island that I've been able to find, the results were rather different: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-...
>Unlike adults, there has been no intervention that has been demonstrated effective in stopping children from applying violence to the construction of dominance hierarchies
In my school there was an effective intervention: you got punished if you beat someone up, and excluded from the school if you kept doing it. I guess no-one had told us that we were required to form 'hominid dominance hierarchies' and that we were cognitively incapable of responding to simple incentives.
>I'm just suggesting that we apply our knowledge of childhood psychology to the engineering of the school social environment
And what would this mean, exactly, beyond just accepting the inevitability of violence?
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from another comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33808521 > There's a point at which the child cannot possibly deal with it and you as the parent must step in to protect them, but most of the time if a child learns how to deal with bullies you don't need to. And the next step isn't to start arguing about what does, and doesn't, constitute a bully. --- The way my mother tells it, I started crying whe…
Yeah, that sounds like a situation where you needed someone else to stand up for you, and I think that's a lot more common. If you can get out of it on your own toughness alone, it probably wasn't bullying. It's part of the definition of bullying that it's one-sided, that the victim has no good ways to fight back. If they DO have a way to fight back, it's called conflict, not bullying. It's of course possible that on…
I don't care what you call it, if person A starts mistreating person B and person B knows how to deal with these situations, person A will quickly stop mistreating person B.
Your argument here appears to be that bullying if person A doesn't eventually fight back. I don't agree with that, but I'm not willing to argue over the names of things.