So that's n=2, not quite n=1, still anecdata but maybe it will help someone who thinks that all schools are equal and good.

I’d be livid and frothing with vitriol.

With that said --

Wha... your and my reads are so different... I hear that as: One lived in the real world that most normal unchosen people experience, and the other had means to avoid said world?

"Abuse" feels strong, bc putting the select (usually wealthy) kids in the safest place and not choosing responsibility/stake in remediating the larger shared experience, that feels like the larger "condemnation to abuse" to me.

I'm a pretty hardcore collectivist though, and I understand that's not everyone's value system *shrug*

North Americans (esp Americans) tend to not see it that way. Collectivist cultures kinda assume it's a no-brainer, in my experience. Your attempt at painting this as "obvious" and worthy of satirising, that feels kinda misdirected

i disagree that one must be subject to the rotten institutions in order to care about or fix them. but this is a disagreement of method, not of result.

i agree that seeking only the "best" can be a status-treadmill coordination trap. i turn away from this as well.

i have a strong distaste when "cooperation" is imposed from without. it is unstable. (does your collectivism rely on shared goals and reflective understanding? or is it enforced by artificially raising the cost of defection?)

agreed that i responded not quite to your comment as written. apologies.

Having a kid myself, I think life is much worse now. There is the constant unconscious fear of getting filmed, etc. It was much easier for my generation to just experiment, do stupid stuff, etc., you know being a child/teenager, without the fear of repercussions.

I don't know what generation you belong to, but I was still in school when mobile phones that could record video became "good enough" that most of my peers in school had them, today I'm ~33. But we were also thinking about that sort of stuff, especially when we were doing stuff you kind of don't want to be public, and there was a few cases of embarrassing things "leaking" which obviously suck.

But I'm not sure how different it is today? Maybe it's more acceptable to film people straight in their faces, and less accepted to slap the phone out of people's hand if they're obnoxious about it? In the end, it doesn't feel like a "new" problem anymore, as it seems like this all started more than 15 years ago and we had fears about being filmed already then.

Ten years older. I'm from West-Europe and most people only got dumbphones around the time I was 18-19 (~2000 and mostly adults or 17-18 year olds). Phones with cameras became widespread quite a few years later. Even when I got an iPhone in 2009, most people were still using good old dumbphone/feature phone Nokias. After 2009 it changed very quickly. I think that aligns with you being 10 years younger + adoption in the US (assuming that you are in the US) being earlier.

Phones were simply not a factor when I was in high school. If you had to call someone on-the-go, you would use one of the many public phone booths and a pre-charged card (there were always rumors that you could spay them with hairspray to get unlimited credit :D). But that almost never happened, you'd mostly just meet people IRL if you wanted to socialize.

It's just not comparable to how it is today with phones with HD cameras that are constantly online.

I'm basically the last generation that didn't have this always-online social media in high school, and "going online" was an intentional thing, you logged in to MSN messenger and logged out a bit later. You saw a friend logged in, you said hi, chatted some, then said bye, and you or they logged off.

It was uncommon (and lame) to film EVERYTHING and put it on YouTube or whatever. Embarrassing (or yes, tragic) things leaked sometimes, but now it feels like something being made public is the norm, not the exception. And that sucks.

When it was OK to beat somebody up (for pleasure or social status), they did that. Now, violence is being painted as the greatest evil. So instead they get pleasure and gain social status by less visible kinds of aggression, such as verbal, social and online abuse.

And, worse, the victims have a harder time fighting back because

- Fewer people notice the abuse - fighting is visible but veiled insinuations or in-jokes at the victim's expense are hard to notice and understand by onlookers.

- Responding to verbal abuse with physical retaliation would be seen as an escalation.

I am old enough to remember that bullying victims were blamed back then. The victim blaming was not a term yet, they were blamed for not fighting back. But if they fought back they were also blamed for the resulting ruckus.

The primary reason was that dealing with bully is hard. Blaming victim is easy.