My best friend from school days has a son who’s now in 7th grade.
Recently, when we were talking about him, we realised his school years are far less dramatic than ours. We had drama, lots of bullying, tears, fights, and mean things were done.
In contrast, his son’s school days are absolutely harmless and benign.
I know it’s n = 1 and maybe we were very unlucky back then. But it also makes me wonder if any chaotic experience is worth having.
This massively depends on where you are located and on the school itself. A 5 km difference can be a completely different world. When we moved in 2018 one of my kids could not immediately go to the school we favored. But the other one could and then in the next year the fact that he already had a brother in that school would give him preferred access. Those two schools could not have been different. The one was an endless list of tragedies, fights and other crap, the other was on a completely different level, never a problem and this seemed to hold true for different classes in that same school as well. I think the cumulative effect of that one year was such that he ended up going to a different level of secondary education, even though cognitively the two brothers are not all that different.
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’m awed that you can be so sanguine when speaking about the abuse your son suffered and the lifelong consequences.
I’d be livid and frothing with vitriol.
I am not sanguine about it, I just want to make sure that the idea that all schools are beds of roses today does not take hold because I've seen first hand that this is not the case. And if that can happen in a wealthy part of a wealthy country it can happen just about everywhere. In the meantime I've done what I could to offset the difference and am still working hard to make sure my kids get all of the chances in life that they deserve. But detours can and do happen, you won't be able to fix it by head-on confrontation so you have to fix it through other means, which usually translate into spending time and money.
First off: thanks for sharing how you experience your protective instincts. I can feel your love for your kid
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*
yes. one should raise one's kids in only the toughest most unrelenting environment. arctic tundra, perhaps, or federal prison. anything else is unfair and abusive to others.
I think it is really hard to extrapolate from single examples. My first two years were a little like that. Then I had to repeat a school year, got in the nicest class imaginable and had five incredibly fun years that I look back at with a lot of fondness.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I think where I grew up (Sweden) it started with the Sony Ericsson "Walkman" family of phones that could record 320×240 videos I think or something like that, and I think I was around 15 when they became almost ubiquitous at school, so must have been around 2006/2007.
Yes, but there was no social media, just MSN messenger on your PC at home, and you had to transfer the photos and videos from the SonyEricsson/Nokia phone via USB cable or bluetooth to the PC and then send via MSN, or send directly to a friend in person via Bluetooth or infrared which took super long for a single shitty image.
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.
I'm two years older than you, and the difference you need to key in on is how much more time kids (like everyone) spend on their phone now vs 2008 or whatever.
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.
From what I've seen, all that has happened is that aggressors ("bullies") are better at hiding it.
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.
Verbal and social abuse always went hand in hand with the physical one. Physical bullying is just one tactic bullies used. The same bully that beats a guy always mocked the same guy and badmouthed him to others.
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.