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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

#661

Post by markdown »

rmwaite wrote: post #116
markdown wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol, standard practice in schools where I grew up, though not with a wooden rod but the wooden back of the blackboard duster.

I don't think this is something to laugh at. Whether or not you think it's necessary or a proper method of punishment, it isn't funny.

It was always funny to us as kids, and we often laughed at the poor bugger who had earned that punishment (and were laughed at when it was us).

Our teachers didn't abuse us like some do in other societies, with extra homework and detention. We new the rules and punishment for breaking them, and made choices accordingly. Wonderful teachers who I remember fondly decades later, though some of them have passed on.

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

#662

Post by hackable_sand »

bdangubic wrote: post #637
hackable_sand wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bully is not necessarily a sadist And neither a sadist or a bully are necessarily bad people.

yes they are, bullies some of the worst of humanity

"Bully" is an archetype.

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

#663

Post by techblueberry »

cultofmetatron wrote: post #595
techblueberry wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one of the many reasons America is so screwed up right now Interesting, which metrics are a result of ignoring the very obvious statistically significant dimorphism between genders, and not say political corruption, or corporate consolidation? Which statistical significant dimorphism causes this “screw up”?

well I could start with feminist marginalization of male role models from early education. The school to university pipeline is highly weighted in favor of giving women success. If we recognized that boys and girls are different, we could continue pushing women to success without pathologising male traits by giving each what they need to succeed. instead we have a one size all box that helps one at the expense of the…

The problem is that we treat men and women differently because we don't respect that there's a difference between men and women?

I'm not saying that something is not rotten in the state of Denmark, I just don't think you've managed to clearly articulate it at all, I think it's much more complicated than "we need to respect the differences between the genders" as your word salad reflects. In fact, as usual I think within group differences are much greater than between group differences, and "We need to respect the difference between the genders" is culture war nonsense that gets the prescription wrong.

In fact, couldn't you argue that the problem is too much of a focus on the difference between men and women leading us to help women get to college and not men? Shouldn't we treat them more the same?

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

#664

Post by hufdr »

anarticle wrote: post #600
sholladay wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I had something similar to this happen to me, where some kid was causing trouble during nap time in kindergarten. I was an obsessively good kid, my parents took me everywhere with them and treated me like a peer, within reason. I was well behaved for my age. At the end of the day in kindergarten class, if you didn't cause problems, you received a stamp on your hand. The stamp was everything. A brand that I had ACCOMP…

[dead]

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

#665

Post by joeross »

bonesss wrote: post #485
rdtsc wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

So, what you’re saying is, HR department behaviours start long before HR department employment.

HR and school admin are the same in that many mistakenly think they are there to help the employee or the student. That is not true. They are there to protect the institution, to manage and mitigate risk and liability. Any assistance to employees or students is a side effect of that work.

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

#667

Post by dash2 »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #657
dash2 wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not trying to play word games. Your argument is "smacking is violence against children, by the common sense definition; violence against children is inherently bad" - also, I think, by common sense. My point is that when people say "smacking is violence" by common sense, they don't necessarily think that it is the kind of violence that is inherently bad; and when they think "violence against children is inherent…

So now you're trying to say that "smacking" is not violence? At least where I live, in Finland, smacking someone in the head is considered to be a violent crime (battery). If I smacked you in the head, you could file a criminal complaint, a prosecutor would sue me, and you would win the lawsuit. You want to argue that smacking is not violence? I don't really get this line of arguing.

No, if you reread my point, I didn’t say “smacking is not violence”. My point was subtler than that - if you don’t understand it I can try to explain it better.

You don’t seem to have answered my second question.

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

#668

Post by cultofmetatron »

techblueberry wrote: post #663
cultofmetatron wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well I could start with feminist marginalization of male role models from early education. The school to university pipeline is highly weighted in favor of giving women success. If we recognized that boys and girls are different, we could continue pushing women to success without pathologising male traits by giving each what they need to succeed. instead we have a one size all box that helps one at the expense of the…

The problem is that we treat men and women differently because we don't respect that there's a difference between men and women? I'm not saying that something is not rotten in the state of Denmark, I just don't think you've managed to clearly articulate it at all, I think it's much more complicated than "we need to respect the differences between the genders" as your word salad reflects. In fact, as usual I think wit…

> "we need to respect the differences between the genders" as your word salad reflects.

describing my points as "word salad" seems a bit dismissive and unnecessarily pejorative - but I digress. I'll ignore your obvious ideological axe to grind and see if we can at least reach common ground.

Watch any group of boys and girls at play. sure you have outliers but by and large they do tend to conform to one of two specific behavioral groups that historically we associated as ways boys and girls act. And I say this as someone who is fairy noncompetitive which itself made me somewhat of an outlier among boys when I was a kid. it doesn't change that the vast majority of boys found motivation in being competitive and historically pedagogy used that fact in order to motivate boys in their matriculation.

In my own experience, I tried to get my nieces more into tech and programming. trying to motivate them from a "hey isn't systems based thinking about how these things interact is cool" did absolutely nothing. Showing them how they can make a cool website design to show their friends (with a bit of vibe coding) absolutely got them more motivated.

But if you want to go further, lets start with the entire generation of boys who were told to sit still and listen and got medicated when they couldn't. We expected them to behave like girls and because we changed pedagogy to favor girls, we didn't notice when boys fell behind.

consider the two statements

- boys and girls exhibit dimorphism in behavior, motivations and interests.

- two boys can be more different from each other than between a boy and a girl.

These are only contradictory on a 2 dimensional graph. at 3 or higher, you can definitely have groupings of traits heavily skewed towards one group or another while having a different distribution on other traits.

I don't think the issue is us focusing on getting women into higher education. We changed the way we pick our educators and tuned our methodology primarily to benefit women. Its only a problem because we expect boys to excel in that system. its no more fair than what we had before when women were excluded at every level. treating them the same means shifting our methodology will inevitably benefit one at the expense of the other.

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

#669

Post by modo_mario »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #442
modo_mario wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can think of only 3 times where i or someone else confronted a bully and made it stop. In 2 of those cases the bully was stronger but such stuff can always carry risks that the bully might not like or scenarios they can't take. In the first the bully eventually got hit with a school desk (they were fairly light but hard) pretty bad by the victim that finally crashed out and the bully actually looked like a wimperin…

How about the amount of times when the bully didn't stop? That's the useful metric here. When there was resistance, how effective was it? Judging from your description you didn't lay out any examples of where fighting back failed.

Because I can't really think of examples. Mind you that might be biased because people do often have an intuition for when they'd either get their ass handed to them or it would otherwise backfire so I assume there'd be some examples otherwise if they didn't take that into account.

Also these examples were mostly from incidents where the bullying got physical anyway. Much of it isn't and making it physical even as the victim tends to have drawbacks.

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

#670

Post by baobabKoodaa »

dash2 wrote: post #667
baobabKoodaa wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So now you're trying to say that "smacking" is not violence? At least where I live, in Finland, smacking someone in the head is considered to be a violent crime (battery). If I smacked you in the head, you could file a criminal complaint, a prosecutor would sue me, and you would win the lawsuit. You want to argue that smacking is not violence? I don't really get this line of arguing.

No, if you reread my point, I didn’t say “smacking is not violence”. My point was subtler than that - if you don’t understand it I can try to explain it better. You don’t seem to have answered my second question.

Okay, I reread your comment and I still don't understand what you were trying to say, sorry.

Regarding that second question:

> You also think smacking children is inherently bad. What makes you believe so?

Are you asking me why something is "inherently" bad or good? That question doesn't make sense, because if there was some external reason, then it wouldn't be "inherently" bad or good.

I don't think there's much point in continuing this discussion, because we've now gone several times back and forth where each time I have no idea what you're trying to say.

*edit: maybe you were looking for an answer like this: each person has their own moral foundation (or, most people do, at least). it's shaped by a combination of their genes and cultural influence, and later in life, possibly re-shaped by some introspective moments. some person might feel very strongly that "truth" is valuable in and of itself. another person might feel very strongly that all forms of "violence" are wrong. a third person might not care much about either of those things. everybody has a different set of morals. i don't know what specific causes caused my morals to think "violence against children is wrong", but some combination of genes and cultural influence I guess.

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