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Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

theguardian.com

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

#521

Post by chr1 »

gambiting wrote: post #401
chr1 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You mean they enroll back at a private school to get their education? I mean the money that government wastes keeping them in school while they are 15 and don't want to learn, can be given to them later when/if they decide to learn. > most likely the path is that they just stay at home doing nothing all day if their parents let them. That's up to the parent to decide: leave them at home, convince them to find a job…

>>I mean the money that government wastes keeping them in school while they are 15 and don't want to learn, can be given to them later when/if they decide to learn. So you want to financially incentivize kids to drop out of school? "Drop out now, we'll give you a bunch of money later". >> these are rather misguided attempts by politicians to look good, and are harmful to the society. Saying that keeping 15 year olds…

> Drop out now, we'll give you a bunch of money later

Later they only get ability to sit at the same classes at the same public school, so there is no financial incentive.

15 year olds forced to sit in classes they don't want are way more miserable than those allowed to work and feel like adults. In any case people should be allowed to make choices by themselves not be forced by the government.

> the school I went to had special classes for unruly kids

That's a great solution too, and must be available option for parents. Sadly very few schools do that, making both unruly kids and good kids miserable as a result.

> schools should be given the resources

I don't think the problem is the lack of resources, specialist for helping unruly kids is not going to cost more than a math teacher. The problem is that most schools are simply opposed to the idea of splitting students based on their ability and willingness to study. As a result they have a system that harms everyone involved.

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

#522

Post by iammjm »

cineticdaffodil wrote: post #206
iammjm wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> From all the bugs in humanity, this one is one of the nicer ones.

> I never said its nice or justifyable

Sir are you schizophrenic?

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

#523

Post by electriclove »

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.

Simple, boys and girls ARE different.

Yes, girls can be bullies too, etc..

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

#524

Post by Fernicia »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #170
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…

Looking back at my own time in school, my primary bully already got beaten up by his own parents, which probably caused him to act out in school in the first place. I would not wish him to also get beaten by the school, and I do not believe that this would have helped me in any way.

I doubt his parents beat him because he bullied other kids though. In other words, if the kid thought that reducing his bullying would mean no beatings, perhaps he would have acted differently.

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

#525

Post by coldtea »

teiferer wrote: post #467
coldtea wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What differences in social roles have been proven "necessary"? Given that we're in a huge democraphic crisis which will bring untold disaster and misery, a huge depression crisis, marriage crises, and a loneliness epidemic, perhaps we're not the best arbiters of whether they've been proven "necessary" or not. As for the questions, to some degree they indeed do, so partly yes, but also those differences in treatment…

> huge democraphic crisis If the west would stop vilifying people of different skin color and continent of origin, we'd realize that humanity as a whole does not have that much of a demographic problem. "We are too many" as an argument to keep borders closed and "we are too few, get more kids" are incompatible arguments, unless people are honest about racism.

>we'd realize that humanity as a whole does not have that much of a demographic problem.

Humanity as a whole has a demographic problem. A few countries are just outliers (being still quite above > 2.1), but nowhere enough to offset anything at a global scale, and besides, they're on the decline too, just earlier in the curve.

Second, caring about your ethnic culture is not the same as "vilifying people of different skin color and continent of origin". It's just not treating nations as comprised of interchangable consumer/worker units whose shared culture and history (or lack thereof) doesn't matter.

Most countries have a long history tied to a culture created from one or a handful of ethnicites, they're not just pieces of land for settling associated with a civic contract, like the us has been (and of course even that came at the erasure of the native cultures and populations).

>"We are too many" as an argument to keep borders closed and "we are too few, get more kids" are incompatible arguments

They're totally compatible if you don't treat people like interchangable units arbitrarily exchanged, but as humans with a past, a history, an ethnicity, a culture, and so on, they've build over time.

Same way you wouldn't just exchange one of your kids with another kid, but that doesn't mean you think the other people's kids are inferior.

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

#526

Post by lostmsu »

rlonn wrote: post #182
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Seems there actually is a fair amount of research pointing to prohibiting corporal punishment for kids leads to better mental health, lower suicide rate, etc. and it does seem like a no-brainer to me that less violence leads to more stable individuals, and a more stable and happy society in general. In medieval times there was a lot of physical punishment, and society was violent, dangerous and unhappy compared to no…

> a fair amount of research pointing to prohibiting corporal punishment for kids leads to better mental health, lower suicide rate, etc

But is that research of high quality?

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

#527

Post by nephihaha »

frereubu wrote: post #459
nephihaha wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was quoted a figure of approx. £200,000 per year for each patient at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital by someone who works there but I can't vouch for it. I know someone who has been in there a year. :( Carstairs, where violent psychiatric patients go, is probably even more.

Sorry to hear that - I knew someone who was sectioned in the Royal Edinburgh about 30 years ago now. A really difficult place to visit emotionally. I can believe it's expensive given the kinds of difficulties the patients are experiencing.

Yes, it's some place. There are buildings lying empty (one had a Legionnaires' scare recently), and the grounds could be better but are run down. There are some mature trees that look good, but the bowling green has been ripped up as well. Morningside is a good area which is a mixed blessing as it means it may end up being developed.

As one of my friends remarked to me it's not a healing environment. The staff there, in my limited experience, vary a lot in their attitude. Some of them are great. Some not so much. It depends who you are dealing with.

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

#528

Post by rayiner »

kbbgl87 wrote: post #514
rayiner wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Singapore can undoubtedly be brutal to some. But it's surrounded by countries where that brutal existence is the norm for almost everyone. My dad tells stories like that about his village in Bangladesh. He has a hard time denying my kids treats when they ask. When he was a kid, one of his cousins had asked for his favorite meal and his parents told him they'd have it the next day. But he got a fever and died overnigh…

The ironic thing is that the latter taxi driver I mentioned was actually Bangladeshi-Singaporean (I believe ~9% of Singaporeans are of Indian descent). Reading the book Banker to the Poor by Muhammad Yunus really opened my eyes to the instability and poverty in Bangladesh.

Yeah, Yunus is good at self promotion. But people like him are the reason that poor man’s wife died alone, thousands of miles away from her family and homeland. You see that story as a failure of Singapore. But in reality it’s a failure of Bangladesh, its founders, and its people. Singaporeans could have been in that same situation today if it hadn’t been for the actions of its leaders after independence.

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

#529

Post by chr1 »

stevetron wrote: post #471
chr1 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You mean they enroll back at a private school to get their education? I mean the money that government wastes keeping them in school while they are 15 and don't want to learn, can be given to them later when/if they decide to learn. > most likely the path is that they just stay at home doing nothing all day if their parents let them. That's up to the parent to decide: leave them at home, convince them to find a job…

Show me a single law that was not given by a politician? I don't think there are any. Aside from maybe F = MA or Pie are squared LOL.

Laws like "do not kill", "do not steal", have been found long before politicians existed, by the natural selection of societies. That is groups of people who did not follow these laws were largely outcompeted by those who followed.

If you decide to break the law of "do not steal" in large extent you get millions dead like it have happened in communist Russia or Maoist China. If you break it in smaller extent (e.g. by very high tax) you get stagnant economy like in EU.

In contrast to that, the laws banning children to work were adopted at the point when children did not need to work, so they are largely irrelevant. If these laws existed in 18th century London or Paris they would cause many deaths too, since there was no other way to feed these children.

So not all laws are given by politicians.

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

#530

Post by vablings »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #419
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Expel the kid I guess (from my experience) the expelled kid is actually not that unhappy ;-) about being expelled, since very commonly it actually would prefer not having to go to school. :-)

At that point it's not about punishing the expelled kid, it's about stopping them from ruining the other kids education

It's a hard line to balance. In my younger years I should have absolutely been kicked out of school, but as I grew older and my hormones calmed me down, I then was a good student.

I really think I would have benefited from not having schooling for around a year though

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