> Adults bully, too, so you do need to learn to handle it. Delaying that learning experience likely has both costs and benefits.

Adults have legal recourse, children don't.

If your workmate hits you, only he'll get fired if you defend yourself. In school, if you hit back at a bully, both parties are placed at fault.

If your company refuses to stop bullying, you can leave and get a huge settlement out of them, which is why they are quick to stop harassment when it is reported. In school, you can't leave, you are forced to endure and the school is never liable for someone mugging you of your lunch money.

That’s incorrect. Schools can and are sued successfully for not protecting kids from violence and harassment, just as happens in workplaces.

https://www.today.com/parents/parents/teen-1m-lawsuit-school...

> That’s incorrect. Schools can and are sued successfully for not protecting kids from violence and harassment, just as happens in workplaces.

Yeah, and people win lotteries too, and you can find more news stories about lottery winners than about successful suits against schools for turning a blind eye to bullying, but ... that doesn't mean that winning lotteries is the norm.

With the workplace, you also aren't doing an expensive civil suit like you are forced to do with the school - you can cheaply bring your employer to task using your countries employment protections (and associated agencies).

There is no such thing for schools.

In fact, schools punish both aggressor and victims, because it's preferable to having to deal with implicit acceptance of liability by punishing the aggressor only. It's in the schools interest to make sure that victims never come forward (less liability), rather than punishing bullies (more liability).

In the workplace, due to employment laws, it's almost never in the employers interest to protect the bully, like it is in school.

> Adults bully, too, so you do need to learn to handle it.

Eh, they do. But not nearly as frequently as children in my experience. I was tormented mercilessly in school, but I'm actually struggling to think of a single instance of bullying I've experienced as an adult. And I don't think that's because I "learnt to deal with it". I think it's partly because most bullies grow out of it, and partly because as an adult you're usually afforded the agency to leave situations where you're being bullied.

In my experience as a school student there is very little you can do about it beyond making yourself a small target which comes at a fairly high cost.

You can make it worse once it happens while being on the receiving end of a wildly hypocritical lecture about how the school "will not tolerate bullying". Standing up to organised group bullying is folly.

As an adult you have many more cards to play than that and everyone knows it even if they don't know which cards you have or which of those you're willing to play; the doubt surrounding potential consequences for picking on you counts for something.

Precisely none of that improvement in lived experience comes from "learning to deal with it" and "socialization"

So that's my experience, others may differ.

> I think it's partly because most bullies grow out of it, and partly because as an adult you're usually afforded the agency to leave situations where you're being bullied.

It is because you can defend yourself. That's all there is to it. If you can defend yourself, people will not mess with you.

Parents that leave children into "schools" so they can get "bullied" and nobody protects them are committing cruelty of the highest order I can imagine.

> Parents that leave children into "schools" so they can get "bullied" and nobody protects them are committing cruelty of the highest order I can imagine.

The grandparent poster here is saying that this bullying is a feature not a bug, and that the bullying prepares you for adulthood! I don’t buy any of it, but that’s the counterpoint to what you are saying.

1. Terrible kids grow up into terrible adults.

2. You’re among your kindred, which is why you’re now bullied less.