Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 713 posts

Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#201

Post by redleader55 »

randomNumber7 wrote: post #171

Singapore also hangs people for possessing weed.

Others have already replied this is not exactly the case and it's trafficking weed and other drugs that gets you hanged.

That being said, I'm not so chill about weed. Weed people, like smokers before them, don't consider weed to be a big problem for the people around them and ignore anything you might have against it. That means you'll be laughed at when you ask neighbors to stop smoking two floors below you, to stop growing the plants in their tub, etc. It also means you'll have to go through a lot of places that smell like shit because people smoke weed there often.

Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#202

Post by imtringued »

xienze wrote: post #198
throwawayk7h wrote: post #188

I've never understood the illiberal desire to treat boys and girls so differently. I'm glad I live in a country where sexism is illegal at a fundamental level -- this kind of law would be quickly struck down.

This sounds crazy, I know, but perhaps boys and girls are different.

This comment explains absolutely nothing and it feels utterly irrelevant in either direction and probably shouldn't have been posted. It can be read negatively against boys or negatively against girls so why post it?

Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#204

Post by Gareth321 »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #168
dash2 wrote: post #157

This seems a good place to point out that the evidence for the harmful effects of corporal punishment is very low quality: https://wyclif.substack.com/p/the-academic-literature-on-sma...

That's an interesting article, but I find the conclusion peculiar. So there's no good scientific evidence that corporal punishment helps children in the long run, and the best available evidence links it to worse outcomes rather than better ones, but because we can't do stuff like double-blinded studies with control groups, "bans on smacking have got far ahead of the evidence, and should be actively opposed until the…

I interpret their argument differently. We know that bullying leads to harmful outcomes. We know that punishment reduces the frequency of undesirable behaviour. So we know that this policy will lead to an aggregate reduction in harm. The question is whether it could lead to some degree of harm to the bully. In the absence of compelling evidence of that, the policy itself seems merited.

For the record, bullying is a complex problem to solve, and no nation or policy or tactic has the silver bullet.

Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#205

Post by armchairhacker »

BrenBarn wrote: post #146
danpalmer wrote: post #129

The only effective punishment/threat that I saw work on my bullies at school was the threat to remove one of them from the football team and prevent him from playing for the school. He turned it around and was ok after that. It was highly effective because it was a bigger punishment than those used for not doing your homework, and because it was highly relevant to him specifically. It worked because we had 16 student…

The generalized version of this is "take away something they care about". But it's not always easy to do. In many cases, schools have nothing the kids care about. If they do, rules often prohibit them from using it as leverage. And in many cases parents also are unwilling to apply any kind of consequence that would make their kid unhappy.

Expel the kid

I want everyone to succeed as much as possible, I feel bad for such kids. But at that point, the kid won’t learn, won’t launch, there’s no benefit to keeping them in school and massive consequences for the good kids.

Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#206

Post by cineticdaffodil »

iammjm wrote: post #158
cineticdaffodil wrote: post #127

Bullying is pack animal cohort behaviour. The selection of a "victim" by social means to be fed to the wulfes when they come, by biting said animsl. It reduces drastically when the environment provides the ilusion that there exists already someone who is "next" , be it a frail, because old teacher or a "known" underperformer. The dynamic cant be altered, but managed. From all the bugs in humanity, this one is one of…

No, it’s not a nice one and it can and in fact does ruin whole societies and generations of people. Here one case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedovshchina

I never said its nice or justifyable. I wish there was a grown up to talk with here. I know the russian bully culture.

Stop talking down to evil people that only exist in your head.

Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#208

Post by blks »

xienze wrote: post #198
throwawayk7h wrote: post #188

I've never understood the illiberal desire to treat boys and girls so differently. I'm glad I live in a country where sexism is illegal at a fundamental level -- this kind of law would be quickly struck down.

This sounds crazy, I know, but perhaps boys and girls are different.

When you impose gender ideology, gender roles on them from age 0, yeah you will get vastly different outcomes for boys and girls.

Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#210

Post by blks »

ryandrake wrote: post #123
quiet35 wrote: post #78

I see at least 2 issues with the physical punishment: - it will only make the bullies taking their revenge on vulnerable ones with even more cruelty. And they will plan it carefully to be hard/impossible to prove. It will lead to the escalation, not to the resolution - the power will be abused, it's inevitable. I would be so scared to be in a class where "teacher" has the power to harm me physically! (to clarify: I a…

> - the power will be abused, it's inevitable. I would be so scared to be in a class where "teacher" has the power to harm me physically! (to clarify: I am very much out of the school age, but just thinking about this perspective is making me feel uneasy) Absolutely. I would never agree to allow teachers the ability to apply violence to my kid with no due process or proof of wrongdoing. Teachers play favorites and ca…

This comment implies that you’d okay with your child being beaten if there are strong evidence against him?
Post reply on HN