I want everyone to succeed as much as possible, I feel bad for such kids. But at that point, the kid won’t learn, won’t launch, there’s no benefit to keeping them in school and massive consequences for the good kids.
Certainly, if they also don’t care about physical punishment then expel them as a hopeless case but don’t do it reflexively as a cop out.
I think corporal punishment is fine as a last resort before expulsion. Not before, because I’m worried some kids would be traumatized, but those expelled or misbehaving indefinitely without consequence will otherwise find trauma and/or ruin other’s lives.
1) school education is mandatory until 16-18 in most countries, so what do you do with them once they get expelled. They have to be in education somewhere - so do you just put them in one school for all the expelled students, which is just constantly on fire? You made the problem much worse for yourself(as in - the state).
2) " there’s no benefit to keeping them in school and massive consequences for the good kids" - the massive consequences for kicking them out and not dealing with the problem are then on us, the society, because you get dysfunctional kids that got no help and just got kicked out instead. What kind of adults do you think they will grow into? Or is the answer "I don't care"?
15 year old who decides that he doesn't want to learn would be much better off if he gets expelled, goes to work at macdonalds, and comes back later, than the current situation where he gets to go to school and do nothing.
Also the mere possibility of being expelled and having to go to work will help many more children to keep studying.
Well of course not, because schools don't have the support they need to help those students in turn.
>>goes to work at macdonalds
I don't know where you live where employing 15 year olds is legal, but even if we assume some kind of state where it's allowed, what mcdolands would employ a 15 year old that was expelled from school?
>>and comes back later,
How would that even work? You mean they enroll back at a private school to get their education? With what money?
The path isn't "well they get expelled so they just go to work" - most likely the path is that they just stay at home doing nothing all day if their parents let them, or they just turn to vagrancy/crime. No 15 year old is going to go "well I got kicked out of school so I better look for the most basic job" - it's some kind of unrealistic pipe dream of how society works.
But either way - you haven't really answered my question. In most places a child has to be in education until they turn 18. So when you kicked them out of school at 15, what is the state supposed to do with them?
I mean the money that government wastes keeping them in school while they are 15 and don't want to learn, can be given to them later when/if they decide to learn.
> most likely the path is that they just stay at home doing nothing all day if their parents let them.
That's up to the parent to decide: leave them at home, convince them to find a job, go to special school or a class for misbehaving children, go to trade school etc.
Those who turn to vagrancy/crime do it anyway, as they have enough time outside of school too.
> child has to be in education until they turn 18.
> employing 15 year olds is [not] legal
These are not physical laws given to us from above, these are rather misguided attempts by politicians to look good, and are harmful to the society.
Imagine that instead of prisons we were forcing criminals to go spend time sitting in offices and disrupting normal work. What we do with children now is equally effective.
So you want to financially incentivize kids to drop out of school? "Drop out now, we'll give you a bunch of money later".
>> these are rather misguided attempts by politicians to look good, and are harmful to the society.
Saying that keeping 15 year olds out of a job is harmful to the society is....certainly a take, for sure.
>>What we do with children now is equally effective.
Well, thank you for editing this sentence from what you wrote originally, but just to be clear - I'm not advocating that misbehaving kids should be forced to sit in normal classrooms and disrupt everyone else - rather that schools should be given the resources to deal with it - the school I went to had special classes for unruly kids which were much smaller and where you basically had to meet up with specialists every week and your grades were severely impacted. It does work in most cases. Sure there will be ones that are truly beyond any kind of help - but that is very very rare. Most of the time you just have kids who could get on the straight path if someone helped them, but public schools are usually so underfunded they can't help even if they want to.
I have to ask, what public school would accept adults taking classes along the rest of 15 year olds?
>> In any case people should be allowed to make choices by themselves not be forced by the government.
I'm sorry, but kids/teenagers are generally not allowed to make these choices, for good reasons. If you're an adult, then sure, do whatever. But kids should be in school, whether they like it or not - it's really not their choice to make. We can argue that maybe 15-16 year olds are at the cusp of being able to do this - but I'd say the cut off should stay at 18. You're under 18, you go to school. There's no other option. The question is how does the state manage this.
>>The problem is that most schools are simply opposed to the idea of splitting students based on their ability and willingness to study.
And I agree that it's an awful thing(that the schools are unwilling to do this)
20 year old who wants to study is not going to cause any problem for the public school either, it will even be beneficial for the class as children will see that studying is useful.
> teenagers are generally not allowed to make these choices, for good reasons
When they are not allowed to make choices, the parents are supposed to make choices for them, not corrupt politicians and bureaucrats.
Parents don't have any choice in this either. A child under 18 should be in full time education - there is nothing to choose, maybe except for the school they can be in.
>>20 year old being around 16-17 year olds did not cause any catastrophe.
I like that you shifted "adults with 15 year olds" to 20 year olds with 16-17 year olds.
That's a very fucked up thing to say, governments or random strangers from internet do not have a right to decide how parent raises his child. Do you even have a child?
> I like that you shifted "adults with 15 year olds" to 20 year olds with 16-17 year olds
It was just my own experience, if you want another example in early years of Soviet Union there were 40 year olds learning to read with 6 year olds.
And in general i don't see why any combination of ages should be a problem?
I do. And like I said, you as a parent have a choice about the kind of school you send your child into. You don't have a choice whether they are in education or not.
>>And in general i don't see why any combination of ages should be a problem?
When you were at school were there many adult students in your classes?
>>you want another example in early years of Soviet Union there were 40 year olds learning to read with 6 year olds.
Yes, 100 years ago in the early days of the soviet union the classes were offered to everyone to increase literacy rates. I can assure you that throughout the rest of history of the soviet union you didn't have adults attending primary/secondary school, gymnasiums or other types of schools for children. Soviet union had schools for adults from very early on.
If you decide to break the law of "do not steal" in large extent you get millions dead like it have happened in communist Russia or Maoist China. If you break it in smaller extent (e.g. by very high tax) you get stagnant economy like in EU.
In contrast to that, the laws banning children to work were adopted at the point when children did not need to work, so they are largely irrelevant. If these laws existed in 18th century London or Paris they would cause many deaths too, since there was no other way to feed these children.
So not all laws are given by politicians.
> So when you kicked them out of school at 15, what is the state supposed to do with them?
The threat of such should help encourage parents to actually raise decent children.
I live stateside, and I've seen adverts saying they hire 14 year olds
To be clear, abuse in these programs should be prevented as much as feasible, and there should be an opportunity for any kid who demonstrates redemption to get back in school.
It’s a bad solution, but I don’t know any which is better. Keeping them in society is worse for innocent people (and doesn’t seem to usually benefit them either, misbehaving kids usually seem miserable).
And yes, the state pays to take care of them. Otherwise it’s paying for the damage they cause outside.
....what kind of work programs can you put 12 year olds into? I'm really curious.
And I'm sure it's clear that putting anyone into a mental institution costs the state far more than providing resources to a school to deal with this would cost? Psychologists, separate classes, teachers specialized in this. We struggle to put people with actual mental problems into mental health insititutions(because there are so few and they cost a fortune to run) but we'd start putting misbehaving kids in them?
Both my daughters were skydiving at 9. Kids can do a lot.
And was he doing that 8 hours a day, 5 days a week? Like you know...he would do at work? Or was it just a nice thing he did with his parents helping out with some construction projects you had going on?
>>12 year olds are not babies.
Of course not, but then again I have to ask the same question once more - if you were in charge of national policy, what kind of work program would you establish for 12 year olds that misbehave at school? What would you have them do, exactly?
> And was he doing that 8 hours a day, 5 days a week? Like you know...he would do at work?
> if you were in charge of national policy, what kind of work program would you establish for 12 year olds that misbehave at school?
Btw. I am not advocating for work programs as a particularly good solution, expelling and letting the parents to figure out what to do with their misbehaving child is a good solution too. School is a privilege for smart children to study, not a prison for those who do not want to learn.
It's actually neither of those things, because we discovered hundreds of years ago that having an educated population is good for everyone. No, it's not a prison, but it's not a privilege either - you have to be in school until certain age. Work is not substitute for education.
And schools have been able to deal with "brats" for over a century without kicking them out of school.
People with this mentality should never, ever be given any semblance of power. In almost every one of your comments you went to the extreme but "forced labor" and "committed to mental asylum" really take the cake.
> but I don’t know any which is better.
Are you genuinely wondering what's better, investing in prisons or in education? As far as I can tell your solutions involve making the problem worse by cutting the access to the only thing that could fix it (education), then building forced work camps and asylums to contain the now exploding problem.
The US stands proof that building more prisons doesn't lead to having fewer criminals. Education does. The first thing you thought of axing.
That was how NAZI-Germany and USSR (communist) governments 'solved' their problems.
In the USA, we had this president named Ronald Reagan who solved the mental institution problem: he closed all the mental institutions and expelled the patients so the patients live on the streets. That's really gave us a new influx of homeless people on a national scale, and it hasn't improved.
We should do whatever we can to help kids with problems, but that doesn't include victimising people. Remove the bullies and deal with them elsewhere.
Everyone agrees on this, no one agrees on what "elsewhere" should be. Like I said in my post - do you just send them to one special school for unruly children, which is just basically on fire all the time? Or prison? Or like other commenters have said - just send them to work programs, let them work at mcdonalds, or send them to a mental institution? Like, we're not the first people on earth to come to this stunning conclusion that it would be better if bullies were taken away from the rest of the class - the question is where and how and if that is really the best solution for us, for them, for the victims and for the society at large.
Psychopathy and narcissism are psychological/emotional disabilities. They're the emotional equivalent of being born without a limb - or in congenital cases, without the brain structures needed for empathy and adult risk management.
I don't know what to do with these people. No one does.
I do know they're the single biggest threat to our future as a species, because if they get into positions of power they wreak havoc on unimaginable scales.
And even if they don't, they reliably leave a trail of wreckage behind them, because their relationships are defined by lies, gaslighting, and emotional and physical violence.
Unfortunately we have limited tools for diagnosis, so there's no way to know for sure if a problem teen can be rescued, or if they're guaranteed to become a problem adult.
The claim is that this made Britain a much safer country in later centuries.
For start we could stop cutting part of their limbs shortly after birth. Doing this to dogs is considered too cruel and banned, but somehow it is ok for little boys?
> some are fundamentally defective and no amount of support
No need for support, just stop harming them!
Doling out talkings-to, ISS, OSS, bad grades and repeat courses are a relative joke. I spent uncountable hours in ISS for truancy, was made to walk miles to school, kicked off the bus and walk miles home, served community service, and had many talkings-to. None of it was effective.
Expulsion is treated as far too extreme and should be far more regular as both an incentive to the student and to the parents. For many of these kids school is an impediment and a detractor and they would do far better for themselves in the work environment gaining experience over the course of the 3-4 years anyways. There are far more permissive environments in workplaces than there are in school that are better suited for the nature of certain inclinations and measures than that of school. There's also the possibility of restarting vocational education, which frankly, is a good compromise. But the current system is bullshit. And the bar is so low that diplomas are given out to nearly 90% of students which is flatly wrong as from what I've seen there are a lot more people who are either academically or behaviorally unsuited for employment or voting by any reasonable standard. Setting up clear failure modes are the guidelines by which many of these people would derive structure and meaning in their education, instead they're allowed a de minimis exception and passed into the world as acceptably educated and competent when the opposite is true. And that totally erodes the meaning of the accomplishment.
Which is why I'm advocating for the schools to be given the resources to deal with it.
But more importantly, children who are abandoned “to save others’ suffering” grow up to be adults who can and will cause even more suffering. Education and care are like a debt, if you don’t service it early eventually everyone pays with interest.
But when I stop, and think slower, and more rationally:
That bully is a human being who will grow up and he will be a neighbour to somebody (some will die, some will go to prisons, but most of them will be somebodies neibhours).
If we show him only more and more cruelty, he will be a terrible neighbour to somebody (so indirectly, the system made that somebodies life worse).
One anecdote of creative solutioning: to reduce vadalisations of waste bins in the village, teacher somehow convinced(maybe by promising bad grade if they don’t) several bully’ish kids to make baskets, to be used as waste bins.
Idea was that makers will feel some ownership for it, so they won’t damage it later and maybe even prevent lower ranking bullies as well.
And kicking them out of school isn’t yet abandoning them. They can be put into a vocational school: maybe some kids misbehave because they can’t sit still, but would behave and be happier following a simple job that involves moving.
I still live in my hometown, and while I was never bullied, a bully a year or so above me killed himself in his late 20s.
lol lmao was my reaction xD
Expulsion isn't going to reform them, it will just move it on elsewhere.
In the US in 2010, cost per inmate per year in a state prison ranges between $14,603 (Kentucky) and $60,076 (New York), and averages at $31,286. That's 16 years ago, so it'll be higher now. In the UK it was an average of £32,315 in 2020-21. You might as well employ an individual case worker, and the societal outcomes would be a hell of lot better.
As one of my friends remarked to me it's not a healing environment. The staff there, in my limited experience, vary a lot in their attitude. Some of them are great. Some not so much. It depends who you are dealing with.
True, but we have institutions dedicated to dealing with people like that.
A school isn't that kind of institution and will fail in its mission (to protect and educate) if it tries to fill the role of controlling violent people.
It's similar to how prison is a deterrent to crime. But it doesn't change the fact that there are people who still do crimes and get into prison.
They may be bullies themselves because of an ongoing toxic culture in the school. That can include the teachers in some cases, who are some of the worst bullies in there. I had one who persecuted me for a speech impediment and humiliated me in front of an entire class of children by making me say tongue twisters.
None of what you said contradicts the above.
I guess (from my experience) the expelled kid is actually not that unhappy ;-) about being expelled, since very commonly it actually would prefer not having to go to school. :-)
I really think I would have benefited from not having schooling for around a year though
Not that I claim it is super easy to find an alternative on a large scale, but I think societies need to think hard about how to enable involving parents to be as much involved as possible in the kid's day. (For parents working full time shifts + commuting in a major city, this is very hard).
It should also be pointed out that children and teens especially benefit from a range of role models and mentors. Having the parent(s) provide 100% of the (life and academic) lessons is not actually ideal.
You say outsourcing, I say providing a range of different people to learn from. (It takes a village to raise a child…).
Not saying the current school system is perfect (it’s a rather dystopian “village”!), but keeping the teens locked up at home isn’t going to help.
I took my kids out of school when they were eight or nine and up to 16 (the end of compulsory school age in the UK) my experience was that they met a wider range of people, and had a lot more freedom. Instead of being locked up at school they were free to do more on their own or with friends and to go to a wide range of classes and activities. They have done well academically (conditional offer from Oxford for one, the other starting a PhD later this year) and I was complimented regularly on their social skills when they were children, and this seems to be continuing as adults (and my older daughter now has work responsibilities that require soft skills - I would assume she would not have them if her managers had not observed her as having the skills).
The problem is not the involvement of other people, it is the outsourcing of responsibility and decision making and the main part of parenting. Parents are frequently little involved.
It's a sad state of affairs if there's nothing at school a child cares about, and rules prohibiting using those things as leverage may make sense in some way at a population level (to prevent misuse), but are clearly a bad idea in most individual cases.
Would be annoying for both the kid and the parents, more so than just detention at school I would think, and if parents are also annoyed will hopefully further incentivise socially appropriate behaviour of the child.
Of course if the parents manage to convince the principal or someone else to not enforce, then the problem is with the school.
I went to a school decades ago that was both small, and highly effective at explusion. I can't say that this successfully led to improved academic outcomes however.
In my experience - it's the reverse. Expensive private schools were quick to expel students because as much as they liked the money they liked having good academic results they could boast about much more. It's the basic run of the mill public schools that can't expel anyone because the student has to be in education somewhere and they might be the only school in the catchment area, so there are no good alternatives.
Of course, none of this addresses why there are behavioural problems in the first place. A shrink alone may not cut it, especially if there is a wider toxic culture in the school which helps create bullying.
At least in some places, school systems have "special" schools or other programs for the kids who they'd rather keep out of contact with the general student population.
He is only seven and has just been expelled from another school.
Now you only have to deal with that group of bullies who slowly build up resentments, and might end up paying your school one last visit.
> "The problem is that most schools don't do that, [...] and also probably spend a fair amount of resources and time on relatively ineffective bullying prevention."
There's also the civil litigation-heavy system to keep in mind, where teachers and lower-ranked admin workers get burned by superiors who have to please parents.
Seems like a slippery slope fallacy? Who says the person who got bullied relentlessly doesn't show up to pay one last visit? What an odd argument.
Seems like a decent approach to me tbh.
Exactly! In both (the bully/the bully who once was bullied) cases, you'd still have to deal with these threats, as evidenced by relevant case histories. People are just a little too comfortable to jump to conclusions or create false dichotomies.
Someone that decided to shoot up a school, because they got kicked off the football team, when they could’ve just improved their behavior (and maybe demonstrated effort to improve their grades) - that kid’s reasoning is deeply flawed (even for a kid). Such kids are probably (hopefully) very rare, and I suspect they would’ve found some other reason to shoot up the school.
> There's also the civil litigation-heavy system to keep in mind, where teachers and lower-ranked admin workers get burned by superiors who have to please parents.
There should be more civil litigation for schools that allow bullying, and generally allow misbehaving students to disrupt others. If behaving kids aren’t learning because the teacher isn’t running the lesson because they’re dealing with a misbehaving kid whose parent threatened lawsuits, the behaving kids’ parents should team up and threaten the school (and maybe the misbehaving kid’s parent) with their own lawsuit.
Then maybe states can intervene and make frivolous lawsuits harder. Alternatively, they can effectively pay the parents (because they own the public schools who lose the lawsuits) to enroll their kids in private schools.
Very american concern, albeit not completely unique to that place. With that kind of logic, nothing ever gets done because of endless stream of what-ifs.
This "endless stream of what-ifs" often enough translates to systemic "peculiarities" (e. g. ineffective bureaucracy, accountability diffusion, symptom-focus, political gaming, etc.) that result in exactly that: "nothing", let alone positive, ever gets done.
It had zero impact. I saw having to go and queue at the headmaster’s study in the morning for six of the best as a cost of doing business. Short, sharp, sore palms for the morning, over and done with.
Now, satisfecit was much more of a threat - having to report every half hour all day every day, having teachers report on every lesson, every meal, every everything, having to go to the head man every morning - was an absolute embuggerance.
Still, that said, the latter also didn’t make me change my ways - it just made me get better at not being caught.
So, what would have changed my mind? Fuck, some human kindness or compassion? Growing up in an inescapable institution, run by retired submariners and optimised for control, did not make for healthy balanced people.
> Have you ever thought about or identified what could have changed your ways
An ADHD diagnosis and treatment.
We also got punished collectively for things we didn't do. Happened to me on many occasions and I'm still bitter about it. It never flushed out the perps as it was supposed to. I despise the notion of mass punishment for someone else's misdemeanours.
Sounds like you went to the posh place. LOL. Either on a scholarship or family money.
What are you saying?
Sorry if that’s a controversial stance these days.
Anyway. In the early 90’s, in the U.K.? They were coming over for one reason only. The Afrikaner masters were always racist, always fans of collective punishment and bizarre corporal punishments.
We tended to hear a lot about black-white relations in South Africa, and even fighting between different black African groups... But much less so about the split among whites. I'm told by white South African English speakers that certain Afrikaans speakers were very resentful of them. Some of them didn't like the rugby and cricket boycotts of the 1970s and 1980s either.
It is perfectly possible that some of what you experienced from that teacher came from all this.
I do not agree with this statement though "They were coming over for one reason only." Many South Africans came to the UK for economic reasons, or cultural ties much like Aussie and Kiwis. I had a white South African drama teacher at school and while I could criticise many of my other teachers, I always found him to be pretty easy going. Except in one area. Some of the children used to make fun of his accent and he didn't like that, which I can understand. He came over years before apartheid was dismantled by the way, but never gave any indication of supporting it.
If you are not saying this, then it's unclear how this is related to your previous comment.
You could write a comment that makes sense by saying "Afrikaners usually believed in weird corporal punishments because that was normal in their culture" or something and that would be perfectly acceptable.
Or perhaps, you have some specific knowledge that this guy was actually a proponent of apartheid, which you should share.
It’s because most schools are industrial age conformism and propaganda machine extensions of centralized government power and control.
I suspect that those here who really care about education and learning know the extremely dark background and history of government schools in America, but, but I encourage everyone confused by me saying “extremely dark background and history” to do some independent investigation into how Rockefeller shaped what so many today defend tooth and nail as if the whole education system weren’t an industrialized human cog machine…still.
Here’s a little dip of the toe into that dark water for the naive uninitiated… but it’s way worse than this post even brushes up against:
https://medium.com/@sofialherani/the-dark-truth-of-the-educa...
The medium author has this in their bio: "healing, self-improvement, meditation, manifestation". Well, does not seem like the best source to me.
Aside from that, next you're probably going to post the protocols? Because that's where this line of thinking usually seems to take people. It's really nonsensical to focus on individual people, it's much more important to talk about systems and incentives. And, especially, compare to how it works in other countries.
Did they get to a similar place without person x? Then person x is probably not the primary issue here, but rather something on the system level.
Just like how the story of epstein is not the story of one evil person, it's the story of a part of society which deliberately enabled him and a system with no real safeguards in place.
There are lots of reasons this stuff happens, but one of them is definitely that some kids aren't acting out for school reasons but for attention from their parents.
Classical stereotypical case is that the bully himself has an abusive/alcoholic father. There's a lot of complexity in what's involved here, but society is only equipped to deal with the "immaturity" case which is real but not the only story.
While it is possible to stamp out physical bullying, psychological and verbal bullying are near impossible to eliminate, and so any sizable school which denies having it is lying. It is a matter of degree, and how they handle it.
I once got detention for getting punched in the arm. I was much taller than any of the school bullies, so they mostly didn't start anything with me. But every now and then, they would try. The punch barely hurt and I didn't really care, but another student saw it and reported it. The staff knew what happened, understood that I was the only one that got hit, and then gave us both detention. I couldn't believe it. That angered me 100x more than the bully. Looking back, I assume this policy was intended to deal with cases where it's unclear who hit who or who started it. But I became fixated on how unfair it was. If they wanted to create another troublemaker, they almost succeeded.
Wouldn't want a kid who is being bullied to think about retaliating.
Also, because the bully can time the bullying, the initial event is often missed, but the victim is caught retaliating.
It sounds fair on paper, but punishing everybody involved does not work.
To who!? It doesn't sound fair at all. It sounds like an "authority" being embarrassed their precious system wasn't able to catch the perceived issue. "I can't see everything so, until I can (ominous foreshadowing camera angle), every suspect is guilty."
There is no tolerance for violence. The kid is involved in a violent situation, and the kid is punished for it. That is a fairly logical set of steps until you realize how vague "involved" is.
Play the victim, they can't allow that, now the other kid is in trouble for nothing.
Start a fight knowing you'll both get into trouble, laugh at the other kid who is in trouble because of your choices.
it was a large luxury of privilege.
Absolutely. The more of a victim you're perceived the more attention and the more punishment the bully gets. If the system overreacts, bullies would be stupid not to use the over-reaction in their favor. One of the kids at my daughter's school figured it out and was getting others in trouble by falling down then telling the teacher so and so pushed her and that was like 2nd grade. They can also team up together to accumulate these reports against student they don't like and just let the state come down on them and ruin their life.
And if that's the case "zero tolerance" would on the face of it seem to discourage this kind of fakery by punishing the faker too.
Even the comment before doesn't sound that relevant to the normal complaint because again, the two parties aren't both being punished, just the one reported to the system as a potential threat.
So we are complaining:
1. The victim and the perpetrator are equally punished (because it's hard to figure out who started it when a physical fight starts)
2. People shouldn't always believe reports of kids being potential school shooters, because they might be liars doing a mini-(or indeed literal) SWATing by weaponizing the institutional response.
3. People shouldn't always believe people who complain about bullies generally, because they might be liars being "cry-bullies"
These individually sounds like hard problems to solve. Combined they have further complexities and solutions for one seen to make others worse.
The tone of these complaints often make it seem like there is an obvious better way, but that may in fact just reflect the strong feeling that they were the victim, and that the other person should have been punished, not them (or their child).
Which is understandable but not really a great basis to make policy on.
The implication is that the system overreacts one way only, taking the word of the victim at face value and then applying "zero tolerance" towards the perceived bully.
Like I mentioned "if the system overreacts, bullies would be stupid not to use the over-reaction in their favor". Think of it like a tree that's unbalanced and leaning heavily one way, well you can make it fall on someone by pushing it in the way it leans, it won't take much effort to do that, it's already leaning as opposed taking tree standing tall and trying to topple that down on someone.
René Girard
I'm 100% for the retaliation. If I'm going to get kicked out for fighting, I'm not going to do it without hitting the other guy.
One time I was almost kicked out for a "serious fight" I never threw a punch in. Was a friend who was having a rough time and I knew I just needed to give him a minute. Arm up to keep some space, stepping back. Caught and detained for it. Couldn't figure out what else I was supposed to do. Didn't matter because I was involved.
> bully would just have another reason to do it, to get me in trouble without any additional consequences
This is exactly how it plays out other times.
victims shouldn't be accountable for contributing to the problem.
As it is, I guess you learned a valuable lesson about what sort of person seeks the profound authority granted to school administration.
Your 2nd one is kind of nonsensical.
In either case, the people at the top tend to know very little about education and they're often the source of really stupid policies that sound decent only if you know nothing about schools and/or are incapable of seeing second order effects, such as with zero tolerance.
In any case, the admins there probably wished the OP would have punched the bully back. That's what stops bullying, and oddly enough often even results in friends being made. At least among boys - girls that get physical with each other will hold a death grudge til the end of time, but also get physical far less often as a balance to that.
There don't actually exist so many things that you need to know so that you can at least make decent decisions:
For this particular case, it suffices to know the trivial fact that if children are in half-time jail ("compulsory school attendance"). From this, one can easily conclude that thus structures that one knows from prisons will develop on the schoolyard.
I hope from this episode you learned your lesson that if any form of enforcement authority is given to any person or institution, this entity will sooner or later abuse it.
If you "got" this lesson, you learned something insanely important for your life: to deeply distrust every authority with (enforcement) power - something much more valuable than basically everything else that school teaches you.
These days I pin a lot of this kind of thing down to the psychology of teachers, which seems to skew hard towards an unmet desire for respect/authority coupled with a relatively dull intellect. Most just aren't equipped to take charge of children.
You can see data for this by looking at GRE or SAT scores across intended majors. It made me sad to see education majors generally do very poorly compared to the rest.
When I learned I'd be punished the same as the attacker, or if I had hit back, I told the school, "Next time, I will knock him out."
I don't recall if the policy was changed, but I was not punished, and no one bullied me when they realized I would defend myself and was prepared to fight back. Don't pick on the quiet fat kid.
I have no clue how they come up with this stuff.
I was an obsessively good kid, my parents took me everywhere with them and treated me like a peer, within reason. I was well behaved for my age. At the end of the day in kindergarten class, if you didn't cause problems, you received a stamp on your hand. The stamp was everything. A brand that I had ACCOMPLISHED that day.
Nap time was a post lunch, thirty minute time when we turned the lights out and laid down. Some kid near to me was making faces and making weird noises behind the teacher's back during nap time. Of course, he's five, maybe six, so this is not going undetected by our teacher. She storms over and asks "who is making all this noise?". I, being a total narc at 5 simply point. Assuming of course, this means I will receive a daily stamp, maybe even more, for my quick and wonderful detective work.
Then the unthinkable happens. His name goes on the board. MY name goes on the board. A wave of confusion sweeps over me. This is a massive blow to my tiny ego, only bad kids get their name on the board, surely there is a mistake!
It's nap time. I cannot make any noise, else I will risk A CHECKMARK NEXT TO MY NAME, which will only escalate the punishment in 198x to TIME OUT. Bad kids are always in time out. I am NOT a bad kid.
I am crushed. My small brain cannot process the enormity of what has happened. My name is on the board. I am smart enough to know what's not coming.
2pm comes, we're sitting on the square rug, and we're all putting our hands on our heads to receive our daily benediction: the stamp. I desperately keep my hand on my head, hoping I might trick our assistant teacher into giving me what I know is very far away.
She passes right by. I look left and right and realize, there is no mistake.
I held immediately held back a flood of tears, feeling deep failure. I stood up, and slowly gathered my things. I slogged my way to the bus and remember staring out the window thinking, what if the same thing happens tomorrow? I will never receive another stamp under this system, how could they do this to me?! The stamp continued the next day, but a different mark was made.
I had a short villain era after this, realizing a true injustice of the world: no matter how good you are sometimes things will not go your way.
a school being a government entity, cant be doing that malarchy.
often the school is in a tough spot because the only reason some jocks are there is for their sport ability, that the school needs.
Were your high school sports games televised and commentated?
One year I was there, the football team made it to the state championship, and got to play in one of the big 70K-seat stadiums the NFL teams use. About half of our small town bought tickets and went to it.
I just checked, looks like mine is one of many schools that streams games live on here: https://www.nfhsnetwork.com/
If you're in an urban school in a big city, maaayyybe some of the basketball games depending on the specific school. E.g. if your school has people who everyone knows are going into the NBA draft, sometimes the more important games get put on television with commentators.
If you're in a suburban/rural school and it's (American) football or maybe baseball, quite possibly yes as a regular thing. Especially if you're at one of the 50++ high schools that has a 10,000+ capacity stadium.
Edit: yea and as other replier mentioned, there's some regional tendencies too.
Absolutely, there are three high school football stadiums with capacities over twenty thousand, in Ohio and Texas.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised given a lot of college stadiums are 50k+ capacity.
That said, I know school sports is a way bigger deal in the US than most other countries so YMMV.
Oh common, threatening to take something a kid loves away is the most bland/generic policy there is, there is exactly zero "understanding" required, though some care would be required to actually trying to do anything
Or actively don't want to do that. There have been cases in Ohio where football players have done things that should have them suspended or expelled (or more) and the school has literally gone on record that "we didn't remove him from the team as that would be unfair to the other players on his team, who are having a great season".
Caning is no joke.
There was one though, small kid that probably had a harder life at home than us, he wasn't fazed by the caning, didn't even flinch. Even him avoided getting in trouble too frequently, so caning still kind of worked.
Edit: I think the most terrifying thing wasn't the pain, but the sharp SLAP!.
Obviously that isn’t a universal solution. It’s worth evaluating the option, though.
About junior year the kid was having some issues at home. Dad didn't know what to do. I said email the coach. He's like what will that do. I was like coach can make him run (corporal punishment) and take away things. Emailed the coach. Coach was like "I'll have a chat with him".
Next day he said son came home and apologized to him. Cleaned up amazingly instantly (great kid). Pretty sure it was literally just a talk from another respected figure (who likely said maybe you should play less or miss practice while you sort this out.
in boarding school - if I know where you sleep & I have always access it incentivizes you to behave better.
one system - where all the aggression is channeled through. you can't bully - a bully ie drill instructors.
Most schools just care more about their sports teams are doing, so they'd have no interest in a punishment that involved removing a player who otherwise was good enough to make the cut. Look at how many people looked the other way for stuff way worse than bullying at Penn State.
It was highly effective because it was a bigger punishment than those used for not doing your homework, and because it was highly relevant to him specifically. It worked because we had 16 students to a class (I was very privileged to be there) and teachers who gave a crap and put the time in to understand the problem and think of potential solutions, rather than just apply generic policy.
The problem is that most schools don't do that, would likely argue they don't have time to do that, and also probably spend a fair amount of resources and time on relatively ineffective bullying prevention.