The problem is the selective and performative guilt:

Why don’t kids who have a terrible home life, but are studying diligently to better themselves and improve their lives equally deserve our help?

For this same reason I've always hated (since a kid) the way anti-drug education has been presented to children. It's not taken seriously and doesn't present the reality of how prevalent drug (even prescription) use is among adults in society. It doesn't treat prescription drug use, alcohol, nicotine or caffeine abuse with any weight whatsoever and doesn't prepare children for the reality of having to deal with people who are on drugs.

Are people with a pattern of disruptive, dysfunctional behavior allowed to be present in your workplace?

Is this something you would see as desirable to experience, for the same reasons you've given that children should experience it?

Yes, actually. The standard to fire people is high and HR wants these people constructively managed out rather than fired. This is incredibly common in large corporations.

Had a bad hire once that abused an entire engineering department for 2 years while they had no responsibilities and did no work until they were finally bored enough to quit.

These are not gotcha questions. I'm honestly trying to understand your worldview here.

If you get expelled _by a public school system_ you may not have another option.

My worldview is that all kids have the right to an education, regardless of how "manageable" adults interpret their behavior. "Disruptive children" are more often a failure of the adult to meet the needs of the child. Also they're children. They haven't learned how to behave like adults yet. Expecting them to do so is cruel.

What if most people don't want this type of education? Are they wrong? Do you have the moral authority to force it on them?

They should learn by being subjected to the effects of their dysfunction? I honestly don't grasp this strategy. It's like saying that we should learn that some people are psychopaths by going to live with them..

Never dealt with them again once I left high school. Not even any close calls.

That shit's like living in a war zone. No one sends their kids to a war zone so they can "learn to survive". No good lessons exist in a war zone, not even in between people stepping on landmines or getting pulverized by airstrikes.

All that exists in such a place is a bunch of trauma, and yes, debilitating/mutilative injuries, for those that somehow manage to get sneak back out of them.

Bullying is like this too, though obviously to a lesser degree.

I strongly suspect that most people get their ideas about what bullying is from the same half-dozen made-for-tv movies and other narrative fragments thereof on the subject.

It's not just the constant picking and poking that bullies do, it's the way they make the entire school environment like a prison yard. You never know when someone is going to do something to you, or how a teacher (guard) would react. Teachers exacerbating the problem because, while powerless, they mostly threw up their hands because they were not allowed to send the student out of the class.

Public school in America is, in a word, prison.

It wasn't the only way that schools were like prisons, just the most uncomfortable of those. We can be honest now, we're well distance from it at this point.

> You never know when someone is going to do something to you, or how a teacher (guard) would react.

Did you ever have any of the teachers join in? Not just decide that it was your fault, but to actually pick up on the name-calling and contempt? When it happens during class, that's the cue for everyone else to join in too, even those who'd always be too timid.

But pretty much the whole administration does this in more subtle ways, you know? For me, this happened on the school bus more than anywhere else. I was in second grade, they were in highschool. An hour's bus ride to school every morning, an hour home each afternoon. Bus driver was an old asshole of a curmudgeon and from his driving I doubt he could see 6ft in front of his face (let along 14ft back through a mirror). When my mama went to the administration to try to have a stop put to it... they threatened her with me being thrown off the school bus. We lived in a rural area, she didn't have a car at the time. The implication was that if/when I missed school, it'd be truancy. She'd be arrested, I'd be put in foster care.

You know, me. The second-grader who is a troublemaker just provoking the 16 yr olds into beatings, into having my clothes torn and stained with god knows what, into having my hair snipped off whenever my head was turned.

I can't even tell anyone about this shit. No one believes me. I don't believe it myself. My memories seem like lies to me.

> Teachers exacerbating the problem because, while powerless,

Sounds alot more like "only following orders" to me.

As to how 18 years of being forced into a small room with them helps prepare you for that, I hope you'll enlighten me.

No, all it does is make sure that any child with a bad home life has no future. Sure, it solves the "problem" of making one teacher manage 30 kids meaning one kid can DDoS the system but it does that by ignoring it all together.

Mom's a teacher, and "bad" kids LOVE her because she's extremely good at her job. Those bad kids pretty much universally just need attention because they get none in normal life. There are still occasionally young psychopaths but they generally do get expelled at some point. Otherwise most bad kids would come do their homework in her class because she was basically the only adult in the building they respected. She was literally "just" a french teacher but because she understands what it means to be a teacher she was an intervention for many a "bad" kid.

You want one bad kid to not spoil the bunch? Stop making undertrained, underpaid "teachers" without even an education degree oversee a class of 30 kids. How good could one person possibly manage 30 adults, let alone kids. Stop hiring glorified baby sitters because that's all you can get for $30k a year in salary. Stop treating teaching like a disposable profession.

Teachers can be bad and do have the capability to pick on children. Having these kinds of outcomes totally allows a teacher to single out a child they don't like and wreck their whole life.

Adults are intentionally victimizing the majority of students to cater to their own shallow virtue signaling.

There are scenarios in life where we're all in this together and excising people for their inconvenience isn't what's best for society.

You don't just cast off disabled people into the void, for example. Unless you have a solution for where to put these problem public school kids that isn't juvenile detention, I don't want to hear it.

We're talking about children here. They don't know how to behave like adults yet. Cutting them out of society where they fail to meet expectations is cruelty.

I think you misunderstand what a zero-tolerance policy is and how it's applied. There literally is no tolerance. There is no nuance to them. If an incident is reported they are required to take action. There isn't a decision-making process past the point of the incident being reported. Everyone involved and any witnesses literally have to keep their mouths shut.

You say children should learn this, and then you say that this is because they will have some new capacity for empathy they wouldn't otherwise have.

I see no reason to believe this proposition is true. What if instead, when they learn this, it just makes them more vulnerable to various kinds of dysfunction themselves? What if, even if learning about this is a good thing, it's only a good thing when they're well on their way to adulthood?

You have no real evidence of cause and effect here. Just a lazy asumption. "But when I learned of this, I immediately had intense feelings of empathy!" doesn't mean much because you're not even a single data point, but an anecdote. Self-reported. And not a young child.

> or caffeine abuse with any weight whatsoever

This is coming from someone who would legalize heroin, cocaine, and meth and sell it from liquor stores: no one ever sucked cock in the alley behind the pawn shop for a hit of caffeine. It's not in the same category.

Public education is like Lord of the Flies. There is no room for empathy, only survival.

We need to have structures that can address this behavior in a way that fosters societal integration. This "spillover" might not be a problem given proper staffing... but a 1:25 ratio is never enough to handle problems and never will be.

Is that really possible in the US? IIRC, the government has a mandate to educate every child, including those that are extremely developmentally disabled (which is why special education is such a huge item in school budgets). If a kid is expelled from school, wouldn't the district be legally required to find some alternative arrangement?

Despite being treated as such, schools are not day cares, and parents still have some responsibility for the upbringing of their children. If the kid misbehaves enough, it is on the parent.

In places with mandatory public education, parents suing the district for not providing education for their expelled child are likely to win.

Home life should be addressed by child services, etc. Granted in reality they are often as understaffed or as incompetent and corrupt as any other government service, but at least that's their mission. School teachers should not be doubling as social workers.

But underfunding is a big problem whichever way it's structured, and I of course agree with you that it's not something you can just say "this is the responsibility of the teachers to do on top of their existing responsibilities".