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Re:Charter schools, social norming and zero-sum games by busterarm on Friday July 07, 2023 @08:58AM (#36631023)
Kids should learn that other people have dysfunctional lives early so that they grow up with the capability of empathy towards others. Too many people are in their own bubble about how the world works.

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.

Re:Charter schools, social norming and zero-sum games by civilized on Friday July 07, 2023 @09:05AM (#36631118)
Where does this end?

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?

Re:Charter schools, social norming and zero-sum games by busterarm on Friday July 07, 2023 @10:08AM (#36632009)
> Are people with a pattern of disruptive, dysfunctional behavior allowed to be present in your workplace?

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.

Re:Charter schools, social norming and zero-sum games by civilized on Friday July 07, 2023 @10:24AM (#36632222)
What about the second question? Is it desirable to tolerate abusive employees? Should managers who do something about it be considered problematic because they're shielding people from the real-life learning experience of being bullied?

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

Re:Charter schools, social norming and zero-sum games by busterarm on Friday July 07, 2023 @10:37AM (#36632389)
It's not desirable, no, but there are other employers to go work for.

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.

Re:Charter schools, social norming and zero-sum games by civilized on Friday July 07, 2023 @10:46AM (#36632535)
But you've defined education as learning how things are out there in the real world, including bullying which prevents children from getting what people traditionally called education.

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?

Re:Charter schools, social norming and zero-sum games by boeingUH60 on Friday July 07, 2023 @09:09AM (#36631192)
> Kids should learn that other people have dysfunctional lives early so that they grow up with the capability of empathy towards others.

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..

Re:Charter schools, social norming and zero-sum games by Simulacra on Friday July 07, 2023 @09:09AM (#36631187)
Nah, looking back on it, there was no learning about dysfunctional lives, it was just absolutely misery. Emotional and physical bullying, fear, intimidation, and misery. If a child is disruptive to other students and impinging on their opportunity to learn they should be removed from the classroom. It's not the school's job to teach discipline. Removing them from the class puts the burden on the parents and the administration, instead of the kids.
Re:Charter schools, social norming and zero-sum games by busterarm on Friday July 07, 2023 @09:12AM (#36631227)
School isn't really just there to teach you facts, it's to prepare you for life as an adult. You are going to deal with bullies your whole life and you'd better be well prepared for it before you're out on your own as an adult.
Re:Charter schools, social norming and zero-sum games by NoMoreNicksLeft on Friday July 07, 2023 @10:05AM (#36631968)
> You are going to deal with bullies your whole life

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.

Re:Charter schools, social norming and zero-sum games by Simulacra on Saturday July 08, 2023 @06:39AM (#36643140)
Cannot echo this enough. Not once in the 20 years since high school have I had to deal with with the same kind of bullies, intimidation, and violence. School was like a prison and going each day, steeling myself to deal with misbehaving kids, apathetic teachers, and an administration that thought ignoring the problem, social promoting, and punishing anyone who fights back was the best strategy.

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.

Re:Charter schools, social norming and zero-sum games by NoMoreNicksLeft on Saturday July 08, 2023 @03:54PM (#36648102)
> 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.

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.

Re:Charter schools, social norming and zero-sum games by candiodari on Friday July 07, 2023 @11:22AM (#36633096)
You're going to learn to avoid bullies entirely and live the remainder of your life without them, is what you mean.

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.

Re:Charter schools, social norming and zero-sum games by mrguyorama on Friday July 07, 2023 @10:07AM (#36632007)
>It's not the school's job to teach discipline. Removing them from the class puts the burden on the parents and the administration

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.

Re:Charter schools, social norming and zero-sum games by busterarm on Friday July 07, 2023 @10:12AM (#36632077)
Also it's not always the kid's home life that's the problem.

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.

Re:Charter schools, social norming and zero-sum games by zmgsabst on Friday July 07, 2023 @09:03AM (#36631087)
All you’re teaching is that adults lack empathy towards them:

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

Re:Charter schools, social norming and zero-sum games by busterarm on Friday July 07, 2023 @09:07AM (#36631144)
Everyone votes too. The government lacks empathy towards me by forcing me to have an equal vote with morons and criminals.

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.

Re:Charter schools, social norming and zero-sum games by vacuity on Friday July 07, 2023 @10:36AM (#36632374)
I hear you. It's no good for chronically disruptive kids to be in juvie all the time, but it's also no good for them to remain in classrooms. Any amount of pay won't salve the sheer stress of attempting to teach those who won't learn. It would be great if someone could just snap their fingers and give those kids stable homes or something. Unfortunately, I suspect the solution requires efforts on multiple fronts (ample food, housing, social support, etc.) and will be expensive, difficult, and slow.
Re:Charter schools, social norming and zero-sum games by busterarm on Friday July 07, 2023 @10:42AM (#36632460)
The callousness of the HN commentariat towards those who "don't behave according to the rules" is off the charts these days.

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.

Re:Charter schools, social norming and zero-sum games by civilized on Friday July 07, 2023 @10:52AM (#36632631)
It seems to me that you recognize one kind of cruelty but not another, forcing innocent bystanders to have their education heavily disrupted.
Re:Charter schools, social norming and zero-sum games by busterarm on Friday July 07, 2023 @03:40PM (#36637274)
No, it's just that "disruptive" is a pretty broad and subjective spectrum of behavior and a lot of kids get a raw deal from school administrators for really harmless shit. See zero-tolerance policies. Everyone in this thread is using broad weasel language with a blanket response of "expulsion" when really that should be reserved for heinous offenses.
Re:Charter schools, social norming and zero-sum games by vacuity on Friday July 07, 2023 @04:22PM (#36637801)
By "weasel language", you make it seem as if we're intentionally lumping in kids who aren't really problematic and being sneaky about it. We could all stand to be more nuanced, and there may be some people here who are just that harsh, but I think you're reading too much into our intentions. I doubt most of us support zero-tolerance policies (if informed about it). Frankly, I think administrators have to be willfully perverse to actually enforce such policies.
Re:Charter schools, social norming and zero-sum games by busterarm on Friday July 07, 2023 @08:25PM (#36640024)
> Frankly, I think administrators have to be willfully perverse to actually enforce such policies.

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.

Re:Charter schools, social norming and zero-sum games by hackinthebochs on Friday July 07, 2023 @12:35PM (#36634287)
This is sympathy ethics run amok. Being unable to protect yourself or your family from disruptive influences because of some sympathetic property of the disrupter is self-undermining. Presumably you would quarantine a kid who contracted some highly contagious and potentially deadly disease. This is really no different. One can be sympathetic to the plight of an innocent and not be willing to suffer significant hardship for their benefit. There is no contradiction here.
Re:Charter schools, social norming and zero-sum games by NoMoreNicksLeft on Friday July 07, 2023 @10:00AM (#36631887)
> Kids should learn that other people have dysfunctional lives early so that they grow up with the capability of empathy towards others.

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.

Re:Charter schools, social norming and zero-sum games by Simulacra on Saturday July 08, 2023 @06:42AM (#36643153)
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.

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