Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school • Hacker News Board

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

#581

Post by chr1 » Sat, May 09, 2026, 8:22 AM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #534

chr1 wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>>Later they only get ability to sit at the same classes at the same public schoo I have to ask, what public school would accept adults taking classes along the rest of 15 year olds? >> In any case people should be allowed to make choices by themselves not be forced by the government. I'm sorry, but kids/teenagers are generally not allowed to make these choices, for good reasons. If you're an adult, then sure, do wha…

I went to school at 6 years, our schools were for 10 years, and at 16 i went to university. At the university with us were some 20 year olds, who went to school at 7 years, were not able to get to university in their 17, were drafted to army at 18 and came back. 20 year old being around 16-17 year olds did not cause any catastrophe.

20 year old who wants to study is not going to cause any problem for the public school either, it will even be beneficial for the class as children will see that studying is useful.

> teenagers are generally not allowed to make these choices, for good reasons

When they are not allowed to make choices, the parents are supposed to make choices for them, not corrupt politicians and bureaucrats.

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

#582

Post by danhau » Sat, May 09, 2026, 9:14 AM UTC

mrguyorama wrote: post #506

VimEscapeArtist wrote: post #462

The comments here are fascinating. A generation of men who've never been in a physical confrontation in their lives are absolutely certain that physical consequences don't work. How would you know? A boy who bullies needs to learn that the world hits back. You can teach that with a cane at 13 or let him find out at 25 when he mouths off to the wrong person. One of these comes with a controlled environment and a schoo…

Most bullies already know the world hits back, that's why they are acting out Beating a child who acts out because they get abuse from other people in their life is a reliable way to not at all improve things and merely reinforce their broken worldviews. If getting the shit beaten out of you by authorities was a reliable way to raise people, my parent's generation would have had zero crime and zero bullying, and the…

> Most bullies already know the world hits back, that's why they are acting out

Not in my experience. There definitely will be some problematic kids, but to the majority of school bullies, I don't think this applies. To recall two of my own experiences:

As a boy I was being bullied by a group of kids. Some day I snapped at them and decided to resolve the matter there and then. I didn't care they outnumbered me. I didn't care if I'd win or lose. I genuinely was ready to fight to the death (lol). But it never came to that. Showing some teeth spooked them and they left me alone after that. I remember the dumbfounded look on their faces. So while it didn't come to violence, the threat of violence scared them off.

On the other hand, when I was bullying a boy (I honestly don't know why), he eventually fought back. That really surprised me and I vividly remember how much respect he gained in my eyes for it. It was humbling. We became friends.

The best thing that can happen to a bully is their victim standing up for themself. Like the person you responded to said: "A boy who bullies needs to learn that the world hits back." The exception to this is kids with sociopathic tendencies (for lack of a better term) - kids that double down on their behaviour despite being confronted with the consequences. How a kid will respond is, I think, more of a function of their personality than the punishment received. But what do I know?

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

#583

Post by userbinator » Sat, May 09, 2026, 10:11 AM UTC

2000UltraDeluxe wrote: post #253

eastbound wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s generally the solution for bullies. I wonder whether that is also the solution for victims, making them strong enough.

There's no denying a broken nose and some lost teeth will make many bullies twice about trying again. Problem is it's often illegal or against the rules to do it since deliberately beating the crap out of a bully isn't self defence in the traditional sense. And in the cases where it doesn't work, the situation may escalate or the victim might end up being punished harder than the bully.

You don't attack the bully first; you retaliate.

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

#584

Post by t-3 » Sat, May 09, 2026, 11:21 AM UTC

noufalibrahim wrote: post #149

t-3 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who was often caned/belted/hot-wheel-tracked knows they didn't stop causing trouble, they just weren't afraid of discipline or fighting anymore because it couldn't be much worse than that. Beating children has always been about desensitizing them, not making them behave! Rather than being "raised by women's hands" and becoming soft and submissive, beat them so they can fight and win/live.

Not wholly. If you have a strong positive relationship with your children, an unambiguous show of displeasure can be a very strong corrective force. A gentle slap on on wrist is a one to show this and it's not damaging especially if followed by something affirmative once he or she has corrected the mistake. I've heard of people from previous generations who've tied their kids and belted them. I find it hard to think…

To be clear, I don't think beating children and desensitizing them to violence is good, I was just arguing that there's a reason why it has been practiced throughout history. The modern era of relative peace and social order in vast tracts of the world has changed laws and norms profoundly for the better, not least in making such barbaric practices obsolete and unacceptable to most people.

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

#585

Post by postalrat » Sat, May 09, 2026, 11:32 AM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #509

naasking wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing that's not the lesson then. Of course if you see any use of physical correction as violence and abuse, then you're just assuming the conclusion.

I see any use of violence as violence, yes, and find it abhorrent to see people justifying violence against children. I'm happy I grew up in a civilised country where it was and is a criminal offense

Do you consider putting someone in jail as violence. It's not much different than kidnapping and that's usually considered violence. How about a time-out for a child?

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

#586

Post by nephihaha » Sat, May 09, 2026, 11:38 AM UTC

bji9jhff wrote: post #554

nephihaha wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They may also have dyslexia, ADHD or social anxiety, which cause them difficulties in other areas and this is how it manifests.

I'm tired of trying to find excuses for their bad behaviours. The first goal should be to protect the victims. By whatever is necessary. People have a right to live in security. Then, once that first step is done, we can think about pampering the bullies into conformance. Not the other way around.

The bullied often end up becoming bullies, and in my experience, two children can bully one another, so that is not necessarily a one way experience. In some cases, a smaller child can even bully a taller one, although an adult would think that was unlikely.

While it is possible to stamp out physical bullying, psychological and verbal bullying are near impossible to eliminate, and so any sizable school which denies having it is lying. It is a matter of degree, and how they handle it.

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

#587

Post by kordlessagain » Sat, May 09, 2026, 11:59 AM UTC

sholladay wrote: post #324

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…

Some of the generic policies can be very strange, too. I once got detention for getting punched in the arm. I was much taller than any of the school bullies, so they mostly didn't start anything with me. But every now and then, they would try. The punch barely hurt and I didn't really care, but another student saw it and reported it. The staff knew what happened, understood that I was the only one that got hit, and t…

Or, it was a pop quiz to stand up for yourself, which you then failed.

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

#588

Post by nephihaha » Sat, May 09, 2026, 12:01 PM UTC

madaxe_again wrote: post #488

andsoitis wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stereotyping all Afrikaners with that brush is despicable.

I’m sorry, calling Dutch colonists colonisers is despicable? Well, I suppose not just Dutch colonists, they did have their population bolstered by a lot of Austrians and Germans escaping war crime prosecution in the 40’s. Anyway. In the early 90’s, in the U.K.? They were coming over for one reason only. The Afrikaner masters were always racist, always fans of collective punishment and bizarre corporal punishments.

Some Afrikaners resent British people and Anglophone South Africans, and this dates back to the Boer Wars and beyond. The British interned large numbers of Afrikaners and some of them died in their camps. They marginalised their language, and tried to replace it with English in administration (much the same as with the Québecois etc). The Afrikaners remembered all this, and the insecurity it gave them was partly what led to apartheid and attempts to reinstate Afrikaans as the main national language.

We tended to hear a lot about black-white relations in South Africa, and even fighting between different black African groups... But much less so about the split among whites. I'm told by white South African English speakers that certain Afrikaans speakers were very resentful of them. Some of them didn't like the rugby and cricket boycotts of the 1970s and 1980s either.

It is perfectly possible that some of what you experienced from that teacher came from all this.

I do not agree with this statement though "They were coming over for one reason only." Many South Africans came to the UK for economic reasons, or cultural ties much like Aussie and Kiwis. I had a white South African drama teacher at school and while I could criticise many of my other teachers, I always found him to be pretty easy going. Except in one area. Some of the children used to make fun of his accent and he didn't like that, which I can understand. He came over years before apartheid was dismantled by the way, but never gave any indication of supporting it.

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

#589

Post by Xmd5a » Sat, May 09, 2026, 12:13 PM UTC

rdtsc wrote: post #452

sybercecurity wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zero tolerance can lead to a new type of bullying: state sponsored. I remember a younger colleague who talked about her school experience, this was just at the start of zero tolerance because there was a belief that bullying caused school gun violence. Bullies quickly found out it was easy to just report "weird" kids as potential shooters and let the school torment them with investigations.

> Zero tolerance can lead to a new type of bullying: state sponsored. Absolutely. The more of a victim you're perceived the more attention and the more punishment the bully gets. If the system overreacts, bullies would be stupid not to use the over-reaction in their favor. One of the kids at my daughter's school figured it out and was getting others in trouble by falling down then telling the teacher so and so pushed…

> the scapegoat cannot appear as scapegoat, as it does in the Gospels, without losing all credibility. To account for it, let us look more closely at an expression I have used throughout these lectures as if it signified something quite obvious — scapegoat. It is not an ordinary concept. Instead it is something paradoxical, a principle of illusion whose efficacy requires complete ignorance of it. To have a scapegoat is not to know that one has one. As soon as the scapegoat is revealed and named as such, it loses its power. To reveal its purely mimetic nature, as the Gospels do, is to understand that there is nothing in the scapegoat phenomenon intellectually or spiritually deserving of faith; it is to see that the persecutors of any scapegoat, and not only of Jesus, hate him without reason, by virtue of an illusion that propagates itself irresistibly but no less unreasonably among them. It is pure, collective illusion, spectacular but deceiving.

René Girard

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

#590

Post by chr1 » Sat, May 09, 2026, 12:19 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #572

dotancohen wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have to answer the question because my goal is more the welfare of the remaining children in the school and less whatever happens to the bully. I really don't care what happens to them. Let their parents care. Let their parents find some solution. The more difficult that is, the better.

But someone has to answer. Saying "I really don't care what happens to them" is just such a lazy way out of this conversation. The whole problem is that we have to decide as a society what to do with them. You suggested work programs - great! Now give some examples of work programs you would put 12 years old in. If you can't or won't, then you have no more solution to this than someone who thinks having an idea equal…

For instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_service. 12 year old would be pretty fine to spend 4-5 hours a day cleaning streets for a while.

Btw. I am not advocating for work programs as a particularly good solution, expelling and letting the parents to figure out what to do with their misbehaving child is a good solution too. School is a privilege for smart children to study, not a prison for those who do not want to learn.