Particularly, in my experience, bullying tends to be exacerbated during periods of social uncertainty, such as a change in the class cohort. The bullies feel vulnerable and are looking to prove themselves, and the bullied are vulnerable, having not yet had any chance to form social support groups.

Your description of "The bullies feel vulnerable and are looking to prove themselves, and the bullied are vulnerable, having not yet had any chance to form social support groups." was spot on in my experience.

Frankly, I don't understand the purpose of junior high at all, seems like it would make much more sense to just have elementary schools go up to, say, 8th grade, then go to a high school (lots of private schools already do this).

I worked at a summer camp for a few years. It's split into "sessions" for different age groups by grade level: 4/5, 6/7, 8/9, 10/11/12. It was staggering how bad the bullying was in the 8/9th grade session compared to all other grade levels. The rest of the groups barely ever had any issues at all other than isolated, subjective cases, while the 8th/9th grade sessions would almost all have HUGE drama with kids (boys and girls both) changing friend groups, kicking kids out of their group, and joining new groups, all within the span of one week at camp. More drama than a reality TV show, it was nuts.

I agree about eliminating middle school / junior high. It's too narrow a band of ages, they aren't exposed to enough more mature kids to learn how to act, or much less mature kids to show them a reflection of what they used to be like.

In everyday life, if an environment/person bothers you, you can simply CHOOSE to deal with it if it's worth it or avoid it if it's not. Schools and prisons are closed systems where the social hierarchy inevitably gets established and constantly contested.

As someone who has been on both sides of the game telling kids not to fight back is counterproductive. If the situation is handled correctly it can become an incredible opportunity for growth.

In general, I don't agree with this. However, after reading a couple of prison experts argue that prison gangs, and most prison violence could be eliminated simply by reducing the size of the prisons. They argue that prison gangs are a rational response to the inability to make prisons safe for prisoners, and that inability is simply a question of prison size.

I wonder if a similar effect isn't present in modern public schools. That above a certain size it. becomes impossible to maintain an environment which is physically and psychologically safe for the students.

we probably had more teachers per student, so more supervision, but I can't say that really helped. kids wouldn't physically attack each other in front of a teacher, but a lot of the verbal bullying was coded in a way (nicknames, in-group slang) that it wasn't obvious to an adult that it wasn't playful. the kids all knew exactly what was going on though.

In the adult world, in most cases you aren't forced to go anywhere and only do so because you have a good reason, whether it's the workplace (earning money), universities (learning things because you need that knowledge), etc. Most people go into an establishment with a goal in mind, work towards that goal and have little time nor motivation for things like bullying.

School is different because kids have no say in the matter, so even if they aren't interested in learning (because the coursework is boring, irrelevant, etc) have to go there and waste ~8 hours a day and need to occupy themselves. Typical sources of entertainment (television, video games, etc) are forbidden so bullying, or similar anti-social activities happens to fill the gap. This results in a lose-lose situation; kids that aren't interested in the coursework are having a miserable time and entertain themselves by making the environment miserable for everyone else (both other pupils as well as the school staff).

One of my regrets is that I didn't just drop out of high school at 15 and get my GED. I took the ACT test twice, once at 15 and once at 18, and there wasn't really a difference in my score. I suppose the one real difference is that the second time, I had fewer fucks to give, and a buddy smoked a joint with me before I took the test.

The only institutions in life that I know of where you are forced to attend and prohibited from leaving on your own recognizance are school, prison, and a mental health facility to which one is involuntarily committed. Perhaps nursing homes are another.

That said, I have a lot of respect for the teaching profession. I had some truly incredible teachers.

This is just an anecdote. I went from an enriched program with a high school of about 500 students, which was quite wonderful, but still had the usual high school social issues, to another enrichment school of about 60 students. It was socially different. Everyone knew everyone well. You had to get along.

Just showing that you have the ability to strike back is often enough.

Oddly, became friends with my tormenter and had a lot in common.

Grandfather was right -- if you get hit, hit back, twice as hard.

As an adult the concept works. Bees can’t hurt me significantly, and even when they land an attack they die - but I go out of my way to leave them alone.

The trick is to turn off the switch in your head that tells you to stop if you're in too much pain or something is very wrong. Only real lunatics will keep going at someone that fights like that, and those are pretty rare.

When I went to highschool, someone in the class came up with a new nickname for me, despite much smaller than that person I fought back, I punched him as hard as I could, got badly punched back too. But after that, no one ever called me by that nickname.

When my son goes to school, I will tell him to fight back in case of bullying. It's the way the world works and if I had known that in middle school, I would have had a much better time and wouldn't have had thoughts of suicide.

Well, only in the sense that the analogy between prison and society is "spot on".

>In everyday life, if an environment/person bothers you, you can simply CHOOSE to deal with it if it's worth it or avoid it if it's not

There are myriads of ways you can't just "chose" (from not wanting to make a fuss, from them being powerful and that would turn against you, from you needing a job, and tons of other things besides).

Which is of course supposed to be civil if nothing else.

Anything less is realistically a lack of human nature, often still remaining along a not-completely-civilized continuum.

So _human nature_ should never be used as an excuse for uncivil behavior, and further progress can best be made by recognizing _lack of human nature_ as the problem instead.

This should be obvious to behaviorists but once you go there you've got to figure lots of them would need more _common sense_, except there still remains some prevalence to _common lack of sense_ . . .

Mixed-age groups of home-schooled kids (e.g., at co-op events) tend to just play, with the older ones typically watching out for the younger kids, whether they are siblings or not.

Mixed-age groups of formally-schooled kids begin by setting up a hierarchy that usually depends on grade in school* and then is continually refined.

* H-S kids in a mixed group are immediately marked as outsiders by this question. They either don't know or operate at different levels in different subjects.

Depends on how studious you are.

It did not solve any of the problems you mention. In fact, it introduced a new set of problems where some number of students (and parents) at every school would conclude that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence no matter what. Most of the students who switched schools struggled to make friends or were frustrated that the switch didn’t automatically solve their social problems.

In retrospect, I realize I learned a lot about social maturity by staying one place with a semi-random group of people that I had to learn how to work with.

What do you think the reason was?

That said, bullying doesn't seem to be any less or more at DPS. Some quick googling seems to show a few cases of 'extreme' bullying in the local news, but nothing I can really point at to say the bullying is less or more. In the absence of really any stats or evidence, I'd assume bullying is probably the same as in other large metro districts.

My other cousin had a similar problem, his mom switched his school 3 times and in the end he wanted to go back to the first school. In the meantime, he fell way behind in his learning.

As long as kids get arrested if they don't attend the prison analogy applies.

Sounds like he's ready for an office job /s

And the stuff that is missing at home, even with video calls, is the more intersting stuff around communication. At home learning is slower and more composed of those less fun activities. That is also what my kids were telling me about what they miss from school.

This whole "now people see how horrible schools are" is not sentiment I an getting from people I know. They worry about kids learning less and are trying to figure out how to offset it, they worry about kids not socializing and so on. Maybe your school was horrible place, but the covid situation does not seem to prove that. Instead, it seem to make everyone including kids idealize the school.

I have two kids so they played together and they could play a lot more on tablets, so they were onle little bit more distractive then in person office gets.

Is this just me or does this phrase come across as needlessly hostile?

Everybody needs to learn how to deal with bullying. How to recognize it, how to combat it, how to build relationships and cultures that are proof against it. And if there are things we want everybody to learn, school doesn't seem like a bad place to start.

It doesn't help that American culture has a particular distaste for empathizing with "weak people". Everybody is suppose to present some narrative of being a winner however narrowly scoped. It's no wonder "Chad or Virgin" memes are ubiquitous, people will never avow publicly to it but I suspect enough teeter on perceiving reality as if that kind of toxic binary was metaphysical in nature and therefore beyond empirical reproach.

To be clear-- even if you had published your 2nd paragraph prior to this research being published, that wouldn't qualify as something that is "completely obvious." At the very least you would have needed to give a hypothesis as to why it is you think the current anti-bullying programs cannot work. That hypothesis would have needed to at least include something like, "in my experience people end up bullying their friends most of the time."

Otherwise, you can't convincingly claim the truth was obvious and people who didn't get it were likely pretending. Without the research, everyone just shrinks back to become little mice noisily speculating about the state of the world.

Edit: clarification

Not GP, but I've been advocating that children learn to defend themselves, both physically and verbally for many years. Here's a gem from a little over five years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11111126

Confrontation is a part of life and it's important to understand response in kind. If someone in school makes fun of your shoes you don't run away or punch them in the face, you make fun of their shirt.

Anti-bullying can't work because the real world does not have referees jumping in to break up non-violent situations. Children need to learn to address their own situations and that the words of their peers are totally meaningless.

I agree that is an essential life skill, and I'd add that you have to judge the situation to know if that's appropriate.

Sometimes your verbal assailant is not playful, but emotionally unbalanced, and responding in-kind will only put them farther over the edge, maybe dangerously so. I've had good results by yelling back with equal volume, but neutral tone, saying things like "Good morning. How you doing today?" and received a befuddled, and much quieter "Oh, good morning."

Also “little mice noisily speculating about the state of the world” is a pretty good summary of a lot of academia.

I have no idea what you could possibly mean by this.

Do you want trade schools? Those exist.

I suppose math departments, being 100% theory, ought to go too

I had the same reaction as the parent but I was also mercilessly bullied in middle and high school. It’s no different than any other form of abuse in that you have no choice but to understand the social dynamic so that you can protect yourself.

I didn’t get bullied solely because I was nerdy, I got bullied because I was a nerdy kid who was trying to make friends.

I didn’t get bullied solely because I was queer, I got bullied because I was queer and tried to not be ashamed of it.

As soon as I accepted that my only permissible friends were the other misfits and queers then the bullying (mostly) stopped. It only started up again if as a group we started having too much fun in public because that started to threaten the popular kids’ position in school. If people saw us enjoying ourselves they might want to join us or shudder be like us. And that would make us… popular. Can’t have that.

It’s more convenient to find another problem to solve. For this issue today, we look at bettering the plight of gay eskimo pre-teens and declare victory over bullying.

I can tell you from personal experience as a member of a non-marginalized demographic who was relentlessly bullied in elementary school that bullying is not limited to any one type of target. In my case, a feckless bureaucracy and adult laziness were key enablers of bullying and bullying behavior. Personally, a amazing and brave teacher “saved” me and did so at his personal initiative and at his peril from a career perspective.

There are plenty of examples of people knowing things, or seeing things as obvious, which are only much later acknowledged by academic research.

You are welcome to base your reality on what academia publishes, and accept that authority, but let’s be clear that this is what you are choosing to do.

Also, it’s worth looking at the majority of comments on this post. Most of them also appear to assume that the research’s result was obvious.

Obvious how? Not everybody is socially astute. Granted, I had never been bullied in high school but I wasn't much of a social operator.

But a school is also where you learn to read, write, speak, maths, some physics, some chemistry, etc.

In doubt I put my kid, from a very early age, in a top-notch private school in english (she's not a native english speaker).

My thinking being that, even if it's daycare/prison where nothing is taught (which I don't think is the case but I'm at least entertaining the idea), she's at least learning to speak english fluently : )

Could schools handle bullying better? Probably. But your call for “questioning” is not at all constructive or actionable. To me you demonstrate only that what the article describes works just as well on hn as it does in schools. Dunking on easy targets for social standing.

Clearly they are not doing what the article describes. No individuals were hurt by the writing of that comment.

> Your shallow analysis and careless invective,

Seems like you are trying to hurt the poster with this insulting dismissal. The poster is an individual who can be hurt.

> somehow pointing the finger at school systems for something that is largely a result of human nature, is bullying.

This is a false dichotomy. Bullying is clearly a result of human nature.

However an individual’s exposure to bullying is clearly a result of the social systems they are exposed to. If there are differences in incidence of bullying in different social systems, we can certainly say that systems are also a cause.

> You’re throwing school systems under the bus for internet points.

You are throwing an individual peer on HN under the bus for internet points. This is against HN guidelines, unlike critiquing a system.

> Could schools handle bullying better? Probably.

Seems like you think the current level of bullying may be the best we can do?.

> But your call for “questioning” is not at all constructive or actionable.

This is obviously totally false.

1. There are many alternative schooling systems, and many alternatives to schooling.

2. Many comments on this post are doing the exact questioning the commenter is calling for.

It’s certainly constructive to question the school system which results from government policy, and certainly actionable.

> To me you demonstrate only that what the article describes works just as well on hn as it does in schools. Dunking on easy targets for social standing.

The OP is critiquing an abstract system. You are attacking an individual. Which behavior fit the description in the above paragraph better?

The OP didn't critique anything. Simply decrying an entire institution isn't a critique, it's a denouncement. A critique involves analysis.

Also, if I violated HN guidelines, so have you, by calling me out in turn.

In a mild way, yes. The guidelines actually say to flag and not comment.

However, I didn’t try to insult you, and there is a difference.

This comment of yours result seems to be just doubling down.

> it's so easy to write off large diverse institutions as "fucking bullshit" and poison a discussion before it even starts

The commenter didn’t actually say this. You are misrepresenting them.

Also, they didn’t poison the discussion. It seems to have proceeded just fine, both in the replies to them, and elsewhere.

Reply Strategies: '<Agree collaborate to get basked glory points>'

or

'<take down, by proving status difference between op and self - either by lowering op(insult /humiliate/mock/intimidate) / raising own status (showoff based on anything)>'

Second, in many existing societies outside of the US school bullying is extremely uncommon.

  if something is 'natural' it must be good/desirable

I'm surprised more people haven't read Michel Foucault's "Discipline and Punish", it sheds light on the way the prison became a blueprint for organizing labor, education, our very social fabric

The reasons for this are deliberate.

1. Parents are assholes. In poor areas many patents couldn’t give two shits about spending extra time to contribute to their child’s education. In rich areas the parents are at war with the teachers either because their little angel can do no wrong or because there is serious money on the table for scholarships.

2. Child performance is measured in numbers devised by standardized tests. The average of that performance is a primary determinate factor in state funding.

3. It would be nice if we taught children to think and to form original output. The sad reality is that most people, including adults, are utterly incapable of originality. Attempts to force that square peg into a round hole leaves many children behind while simultaneously confusing and infuriating parents.

Previous anti-bullying efforts focused on non-friend bullies, leaving a blind spot to this bullying between friends.

I think it should be a known idea to anyone who has ever seen a movie where a previously uncool kid gets accepted in to the cool kids group.

Trailer [en]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_-KrJseVUo

It's very hard to describe shortly... maybe: They start with you as human being first. Abilities and talents to be discovered and developing a humane human who can face the world. They don't treat you like an animal in industrial livestock farming. It has many layers to it, e.g., regular teachers and kindergarden personnel have the social standing of a Professor in your country (assuming 1st world not scand). Teaching the young is understood (like REALLY understood) as one of the most important things a country can do for its future.

I've heard all these things about the scandinavian school system before. Bullying never came up as a topic.

That is, they don't have one teacher who decides about things and especially the fate of the individual pupil but teams containing, e.g., psychologists who decide about things in the regular day to day business.

Of course bullying is an issue there, too. It is pronounced wherever you have esp. social inequality, and minimizing only works approximately. However, they are thinking about this in a progressive and especially compile-ahead-of-time way. The first research on bullying emerged in the 1970ies from these countries actually. See: https://go.gale.com/ps/anonymous?id=GALE|A75022135

Instead of a teacher whose job is primarily to educate, having to juggle the job of the emotional development of students that they will always see as a secondary task, there's a professional who is trained for that role who works directly for the school.

Funny. The worst bullies in my schools growing up were the girls.

And more employment for more teachers/guidance-counselors, etc.