The only effective punishment/threat that I saw work on my bullies at school was the threat to remove one of them from the football team and prevent him from playing for the school. He turned it around and was ok after that.
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.
Some of the generic policies can be very strange, too.
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.
> But I became fixated on how unfair it was.
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.
That’s “zero tolerance” hard at work.
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.
Zero tolerance can lead to a new type of bullying: state sponsored. I remember a younger colleague who talked about her school experience, this was just at the start of zero tolerance because there was a belief that bullying caused school gun violence. Bullies quickly found out it was easy to just report "weird" kids as potential shooters and let the school torment them with investigations.
You can also use the school staff to help you bully other kids.
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.
I can't tell whether you are being sarcastic about it discouraging retaliating. When they had us both in the room, I said to the staff, "If you're just going to give me detention anyway, then the next time he punches me, I'm punching him back." Needless to say, they didn't like that. But I think it kept the peace. At the time, it seemed like the only logical move. Otherwise, the bully would just have another reason to do it, to get me in trouble without any additional consequences. As I saw it, half the reason to punch back would be to show the school how stupid their policy was.
That's 100% how it worked in practice. Hell, I've even heard of some parents encouraging their kids to do that if they get hit precisely because the notion of "no tolerance" is absurd
> can't tell whether you are being sarcastic about it discouraging retaliating
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.
> It sounds fair on paper
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."
It isn't sold like this though, hence it working differently on paper and in practice.
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.
If your parents didn't make a serious stink about this, they failed you.
As it is, I guess you learned a valuable lesson about what sort of person seeks the profound authority granted to school administration.
School administrators have much less power than you might think. In public type school systems they're left answering to a lengthy hierarchy which doesn't even end at the superintendent, because they in turn are often beholden to various bureaucrats. And in private schools of significant size, there are usually investors or other monetary types at the top, but well out of sight.
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.
> In either case, the people at the top tend to know very little about education
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 jails will develop on the schoolyard.
Your 1st sentence is spot on.
Your 2nd one is kind of nonsensical.
Pretty sure the second sentence was meant to be ironic.
this can only be effective if the school isn't counting on the bully to help the school win various sports competitions over the next few years.
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.
The generalized version of this is "take away something they care about". But it's not always easy to do. In many cases, schools have nothing the kids care about. If they do, rules often prohibit them from using it as leverage. And in many cases parents also are unwilling to apply any kind of consequence that would make their kid unhappy.
Expel the kid
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.
If corporal punishment is effective then we don’t have to terminate anyone’s education. For some kids it may just take one painful lesson to turn them around so why forgo that and ruin their lives?
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.
If it’s effective, yes.
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.
Two problems:
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"?
Keeping them in school like it is done now, does not help them in any way, it merely transforms school from a place to learn into a mini prison where dysfunctional kids do not allow other kids to learn too.
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.
>>Keeping them in school like it is done now, does not help them in any way
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 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?
I live stateside, and I've seen adverts saying they hire 14 year olds
> You mean they enroll back at a private school to get their education?
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.
The threat of such should help encourage parents to actually raise decent children.
Put them in work programs. If they can’t be productive, put them in mental institutions.
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.
>>Put them in work programs. If they can’t be productive, put them in mental institution
....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?
12 year olds? My son was hammering nails into wood and drilling into masonry at 8. The Bedouin children are in the fields unsupervised with the goats at age 6. 12 year olds are not babies.
Both my daughters were skydiving at 9. Kids can do a lot.
Some dysfunctional kids are there because of trauma, others because of opportunism and poor impulse control they'll eventually grow out of, and some are fundamentally defective and no amount of support will make them less destructive or dangerous to themselves and others.
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.
> They're the emotional equivalent of being born without a limb
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!
It’s been said that the British executed about 1% of their population each year for a few hundred years, and that a similar number died in prison.
The claim is that this made Britain a much safer country in later centuries.
So other kids should just be their victims? How is that better?
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.
You expel them and they become another person's problem. I heard recently of a local problem child aged seven. He's already been expelled from a private school but has entered a state school where he seriously injured another pupil and attempted to strangle one of the teachers.
Expulsion isn't going to reform them, it will just move it on elsewhere.
So directly to prison. Or must they succeed first?
I can't tell if you're being deliberately obtuse / sarcastic, but even aside from the ethical considerations here, prison is an insanely expensive way of dealing with the issue.
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.
> expel them and they become another person's problem
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.
The moment you abandon any attempt to correct the behavior you guarantee they are “lost” to society.
The other kids will have to suffer so the misbehaving kids can be saved, but that's a sacrifice we're willing to make!
Emotionally I’m all-in on painful punishments for bullies.
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.
The cases where the bully is truly irredeemable are few and far between. Most of the time the adults just abandon too quickly. Especially in school where teachers are stretched thin and have no “blood duty” to the child.
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.
Yes, which is why it’s a last resort, because some kids are lost either way.
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.
That can be just fine to me.
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
Which is probably one of the biggest problem with the outsourcing of parenting for half their awake time that is happening with our established school system.
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).
> outsourcing
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 think you misunderstand the premise - in fact I struggle to understand how you interpreted the GP that way. No one is arguing that parents should provide 100% of life and academic lessons or that kids should be locked up at home, but that they, rather than schools, should have the leading role.
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.
I think the village would be a healthy model for sure. But that is something that was pretty much killed in the modern society as well as most people, especially lower/mid-income workers in larger cities, are spending exceedingly little time of their day in their local neighborhoods.
Yeah exactly, it's hard to do and requires effort.
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.
Community service perhaps?
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 was no bully, but I was caned frequently at school for various other offences.
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.
Have you ever thought about or identified what could have changed your ways, whatever those were that I presume were inconsiderate of others or even violations of people? Or was it more that you were pushing back against the industrialized human cog factory we call education in the west?
My violations were usually of the variety of having failed to polish my shoes, or being late for a lesson, or being on a roof, or getting in fights - I was never the instigator but was always seen as the troublemaker.
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.
We called it a report card. That was a load of nonsense too. I quickly learnt how to forge signatures for it, and even getting the real signatures was a hassle... For the teachers who resented doing it themselves. Absolutely no benefit to it.
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.
Collective punishment is a war crime, I don't know why people think it would be effective on children? All it does is breed resistance and resentment, as you say.
It was de rigueur for us, but then again our housemaster was an Afrikaner. And no, it didn’t work, we’d just plot collective revenge on him, and collectively figure out how to escape the punishment.
> but then again our housemaster was an Afrikaner
What are you saying?
Bullies need to be identified as simply immature, treated as children that have not graduated to their age. That really impacts the individual. Make them wear identifying clothing as a "special case" and they will mature very fast.
As someone who was once a child and witnessed other kids getting bullied, bullies loved getting singled out. They thrived on attention. There are kids who'd punch another kid if it meant they'd get an ugly shirt that everyone would recognize and mark them as "bad"
"Bad" is a cool label, it marks you as dangerous. But the comment proposes "immature", "behind". So give then a neat, pink shirt, not a black one with a skull on it (not saying that this works either, just clarifying).
I was bullied, a lot. The only thing that really stops a bully is shaming them, treat them like they are a child that needs to be treated as younger than their age. Bullies are demanding and demonstrating dominance, and if that is turned around on them, the bullying stops.
Right?
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.
Surely expelling more effective from the school's perspective.
The school, and every other student.
That moves the problem elsewhere, it doesn't solve it.
It returns the problem to the source: the child's parents or guardian.
I've mentioned this above, but I know of a new pupil in one of my local schools who has recently seriously injured another pupil and attempted to strangle one of the teachers (she had to take time off work due to stress).
He is only seven and has just been expelled from another school.
Surprisingly hard to expel a child, particularly in the more privileged schools … far more satisfying from the perspective of an educator if they can address the issue.
>>Surprisingly hard to expel a child, particularly in the more privileged schools
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.
The public schools are loathe to expel (unless there's an agreement in the district that one school is a dumping ground) - midrange private schools are quick to expel to protect the rest, but the highest end private schools will figure out a way to not expel, because the money is sooooo good.
This very much depends on where you live, your school, and the commitment of the parent body.
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.
If it's a private school, then they expel pupils pretty rapidly.
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.
> most schools don't do that
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...
This is not about america. Not everything has to be turned into a discussion about some US internal issue.
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.
> "The only effective punishment/threat that I saw work on my bullies at school was the threat to remove one of them from the football team and prevent him from playing for the school. He turned it around and was ok after that."
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.
> 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.
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.
> "Who says the person who got bullied relentlessly doesn't show up to pay one last visit?"
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> "[...] 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.