Fights happen at school all the time...so it seems normal.
Normal masculine teasing is a two player game and if the players aren't experienced enough to play, dumb stuff gets out of hand. Happens in adult settings too where practical joke wars get out of hand, for example. So adult-ish male jokes around with adult-ish male, "yer mom" jokes are exchanged, its all cool.
Inexperienced jock kid calls inexperienced nerd kid a nerd, jock kid stands there waiting "he's supposed to "yer mom" me back" meanwhile nerd kid panics and starts looking for a safe space. And sometimes it escalates.
And that's why adult teachers, especially male teachers, used to ignore bullying. So as a grown adult I'm supposed to tell the nerd kid how to "yer mom" the jock kid? Can't you kids figure this stuff out on your own like 99% of the population? Clearly not...
But sure, it's just kids being dumb and silly.
Humans are naturally physical animals. Get some toddlers together, and (in addition to lots of other nice behavior like sharing and talking), they will push, grab, hit, etc. each other. We're primates and we do primate-y things.
As we get older, we learn the mores of our culture and learn to not physically interact with people in this way, but that process takes a lot of time. Kids haven't completed it yet (some adults never do). In the meantime, we have to provide an environment that handles the fact that they are behaviorally different from respectable, trustworthy adults.
Above, you say "We create these Lord of the Flies type situations for children", but the whole point of Lord of the Flies is that savagery is how children naturally act when taken outside of the strictures of society.
A Lord of Flies situation doesn't have to be manufactured by adults—it's what you get if you don't work hard to prevent it.
The fact that it's natural means nothing. It's natural for small groups of humans to make war on their neighbors, to kill their men, rape their women, and enslave their children. But we don't put up with that kind of thing now, for the most part.
I agree with your last sentence, but my question is: why aren't they working hard to prevent it? Of course children have to learn this stuff, it's clearly not innate, but if they're going through their school years being bullied then clearly they're not learning the lesson.
Now, no doubt their responsibility is different, because their brains are different. It'd be appaling to jail a kid on charges of assault for a fight in school ofc.
However, this def does not mean that getting bullied wouldn't have similarly negative effects on the kid, as it would on the adults (easily worse, given the kid's personality is only forming).
Hence, the op was suggesting, rationally, preventing it should be just as high of a priority to the school, as it would be to the judicial apparatus in the case of adult assault.
Instead, it is just normal. And that is appaling.
For instance, zero tolerance drugs policies have gotten kids suspended or expelled due to having a single tablet of aspirin in their book bag because the rule is that any medicine must be registered and administered by the school nurse, and even OTC drugs count as part of 'zero tolerance' drug policy.
The same such policy would be hard to implement for adults in a workplace.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who has noticed that many bullies stopped bullying you or even became friendly with you after you made a real effort to fight back.
In American schools violence is often institutionalized. Teacher beat children, children get used to violence. The children are often not too reflected. People advocating violence as a tool for education are usually not big fans explanations and calls to reason. So children have no clue weather they are subject to education or sadism. Probably they are often at least partly subject to sadism.
And if they get used to the feeling that they are subject to the teachers sadism, it's no wonder that they see this as usual. Their educators and there for role models do, so why shouldn't they do?
Children probably do not think about what causes serious harm and what does not. Weather it was justified or not. Expically because it's only natural to assume that teachers punishment against oneself is usually not justified.
Tl;dr: if you beat children, to be surprised that said children beat other children.
/edit: disregard this, it's bullshit:
>Most urban public school systems, even in states where it is permitted, have abolished corporal punishment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_corporal_punishment_in_...
Has this been permitted within the last 50 years? It definitely happened in the 1960s and earlier, but corporal punishment has not been a thing in American schools for a long time.
Corporal punishment is widespread in Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi schools.
Corporal punishment is routine in some schools in smaller districts of Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas.
It's only in 2011 that parents had the right to prevent their children being hit at school.
(This is all public schools. Hitting children in private schools is legal in all but 2 states.)
This isn't just children. Some 18 and 19 year olds attend schools and a subjected to physical violence as punishment.
Over 100,000 students received corporal punishment in 2011/2012. (And some of them will have been hit on more than one occasion)