I agree with you that this is not necessarily the ideal approach. Whether or not it's a valid way to solve problems, fighting back is only effective against in

I agree with you that this is not necessarily the ideal approach. Whether or not it's a valid way to solve problems, fighting back is only effective against individual bullies, which are hardly the larger problem. I disagree that "The smart solution to bullying is to make it socially unacceptable." A solution is not a smart solution if it cannot be put into practice, and it's not as though there's any real control over what's socially acceptable among children. If there's a real solution, it's to be found among adults. Children are basically small adults. While there's a bit of a gap in reasoning capacity, the gap is much smaller than people give it credit for: children are smart. So, why do adults not "bully" each other all the time? There's a strong argument to be made that this is because we've cordoned adults who are likely to instigate violence off into their own social environments (criminal). That's a strong possibility, but it probably doesn't hide a solution to the problem: we don't give children the power to do this, and doing it for them would be a ground ripe for abuse of power. As much as I don't like it, there may be no good solution. There's also a strong argument to be made that adults don't get into fights simply because they have better things to do. That might be a good place to start: give children more and better choices about what to do. Probably the strongest argument is that adults have a perfectly good nonviolent way to signal status: money. Children don't have any such thing, so they come up with their own. Counter-intuitive though it seems, giving children a strong status-signaling mechanism other than bullying might be effective.