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I'm baffled that people are (or pretend to be) surprised by this. This should be completely obvious to anyone who's ever seen the inside of a high school. What

by rsp1984 6y ago

I'm baffled that people are (or pretend to be) surprised by this. This should be completely obvious to anyone who's ever seen the inside of a high school. What's actually going on is that rather than taking the uncomfortable step and questioning our current day school system where we send our kids to prisons (in anything but name), give them BS tasks for years and call it "education", the people in charge prefer to make the bullying problem one of the "socially disadvantaged" fringe groups, which allows them to throw public money at "anti bullying programs" and other pedagogical bullshit that target said fringe groups, so they can say "look, we're doing something!". Utterly disgusting.

jkhdigital 6y ago
It also supports another common sense observation, which is that mixed-age schooling results in much better behavioral outcomes. Kids don’t obsess over their place in the artificial Lord of the Flies hierarchy when there are younger and older kids around to provide frequent role reversals.
- sjg007 6y ago
  Has that been studied?
  - quercusa 6y ago
    Anecdota: Mixed-age groups of home-schooled kids (e.g., at co-op events) tend to just play, with the older ones typically watching out for the younger kids, whether they are siblings or not. Mixed-age groups of formally-schooled kids begin by setting up a hierarchy that usually depends on grade in school* and then is continually refined. * H-S kids in a mixed group are immediately marked as outsiders by this question. They either don't know or operate at different levels in different subjects.
    - GVIrish 6y ago
      Home schooled kids are typically in groups of far, far smaller sizes. The social dynamics of a high school with 2000 students is naturally going to be different than the dynamics of a home school of a dozen or so.
      - Footkerchief 6y ago
        I think the point is that the ingrained dynamics continue even when the context / group size evens out later.
  - fuzzfactor 6y ago
    >Has that been studied? Depends on how studious you are.
- fuzzfactor 6y ago
  One primary thing that stands out as actual humanity are behaviors which are almost never dominant in any other beings, and which further the progress of true civilization. Which is of course supposed to be civil if nothing else. Anything less is realistically a lack of human nature, often still remaining along a not-completely-civilized continuum. So _human nature_ should never be used as an excuse for uncivil behavior, and further progress can best be made by recognizing _lack of human nature_ as the problem instead. This should be obvious to behaviorists but once you go there you've got to figure lots of them would need more _common sense_, except there still remains some prevalence to _common lack of sense_ . . .
mbg721 6y ago
One of the side-effects of the current pandemic, at least in the US, is that dysfunctional educational institutions have been revealed for what they are. There's a lot of talk about a realignment of priorities at the university level where students' money is directly at stake, but hopefully this will spur some positive changes for younger students also.
- 420codebro 6y ago
  Cmon man the Alumni really needs money for that 3rd sports facility on campus.
- watwut 6y ago
  What are you talking about? The overwhelming message I hear is that people cant wait till schools open. And that includes also kids themselves.
  - mbg721 6y ago
    Everyone wants them open, but mostly to eliminate the nuisances associated with child-care while working. I think a lot of parents hadn't realized just how messed-up their kids' schools actually were until now. (Edit: So, there are two separate problems: "Get my kids out of here so I can work and keep the lights on" and "Really?? That's all they've been getting all this time?")
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      My 4th grade son can crush his entire day of actual work in 30-45 minutes. I very much value the additional hours of socialization and fun that come from traditional schools, but it’s not a very efficient mechanism of scholastic/academic achievement.
      - throwawayboise 6y ago
        > My 4th grade son can crush his entire day of actual work in 30-45 minutes. Sounds like he's ready for an office job /s
1experience 6y ago
Yes, the analogy between school and prison is spot on. In everyday life, if an environment/person bothers you, you can simply CHOOSE to deal with it if it's worth it or avoid it if it's not. Schools and prisons are closed systems where the social hierarchy inevitably gets established and constantly contested. As someone who has been on both sides of the game telling kids not to fight back is counterproductive. If the situation is handled correctly it can become an incredible opportunity for growth.
- JackFr 6y ago
  > Yes, the analogy between school and prison is spot on. In general, I don't agree with this. However, after reading a couple of prison experts argue that prison gangs, and most prison violence could be eliminated simply by reducing the size of the prisons. They argue that prison gangs are a rational response to the inability to make prisons safe for prisoners, and that inability is simply a question of prison size. I wonder if a similar effect isn't present in modern public schools. That above a certain size it. becomes impossible to maintain an environment which is physically and psychologically safe for the students.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
    - DataWorker 6y ago
      Packs behave as packs.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    I dunno about that. I went to a smaller private school (~60 kids per grade in middle school, ~100 per grade in high school), and we certainly had bullying. maybe this is already too large? I didn't simultaneously attend a large public school, so I can't say whether there was a difference in degree. we probably had more teachers per student, so more supervision, but I can't say that really helped. kids wouldn't physically attack each other in front of a teacher, but a lot of the verbal bullying was coded in a way (nicknames, in-group slang) that it wasn't obvious to an adult that it wasn't playful. the kids all knew exactly what was going on though.
telchar 6y ago
Don’t you see that you’re doing what the article describes, right now? Your shallow analysis and careless invective, somehow pointing the finger at school systems for something that is largely a result of human nature, is bullying. You’re throwing school systems under the bus for internet points. Could schools handle bullying better? Probably. But your call for “questioning” is not at all constructive or actionable. To me you demonstrate only that what the article describes works just as well on hn as it does in schools. Dunking on easy targets for social standing.
- avesi 6y ago
  Can an individual bully a nationwide organization?
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  First, "human nature" is a logical fallacy straight away: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy Second, in many existing societies outside of the US school bullying is extremely uncommon.
  - endisneigh 6y ago
    How exactly would you prove that school bullying is uncommon in schools? I highly doubt your second point is true. If you have some research it would be much appreciated.
  - Chris2048 6y ago
    The Naturalistic fallacy is if something is 'natural' it must be good/desirable I don't see that op said or implied that this was the case; They said something was 'human nature' (i.e. natural) ass opposed to the result of the school system. This doesn't imply that it is therefore desirable, but rather, that it is undesirable but not the result of the school system.
- dmingod666 6y ago
  TBH, almost all internet discourse is: Post strategies: '<statement to grab internet points from like minded folk>' Reply Strategies: '<Agree collaborate to get basked glory points>' or '<take down, by proving status difference between op and self - either by lowering op(insult /humiliate/mock/intimidate) / raising own status (showoff based on anything)>'
jancsika 6y ago
To have some significance, you'd need to link to a statement you wrote on this topic prior to the research being published. Otherwise this looks like you're just standing on the shoulders of giants to sing about how tall you are. To be clear-- even if you had published your 2nd paragraph prior to this research being published, that wouldn't qualify as something that is "completely obvious." At the very least you would have needed to give a hypothesis as to why it is you think the current anti-bullying programs cannot work. That hypothesis would have needed to at least include something like, "in my experience people end up bullying their friends most of the time." Otherwise, you can't convincingly claim the truth was obvious and people who didn't get it were likely pretending. Without the research, everyone just shrinks back to become little mice noisily speculating about the state of the world. Edit: clarification
- zepto 6y ago
  You are giving a lot of weight to the originality of academic institutions and their platforms as authorizers of knowledge. There are plenty of examples of people knowing things, or seeing things as obvious, which are only much later acknowledged by academic research. You are welcome to base your reality on what academia publishes, and accept that authority, but let’s be clear that this is what you are choosing to do. Also, it’s worth looking at the majority of comments on this post. Most of them also appear to assume that the research’s result was obvious.
- whyleyc 6y ago
  Actually it’s possible for people to have opinions on matters where they are not a published author or academic. Also “little mice noisily speculating about the state of the world” is a pretty good summary of a lot of academia.
  - pii 6y ago
    Yeah we should burn the universities down
    - linuxhiker 6y ago
plaidfuji 6y ago
Sometimes the point of behavioral psych and sociology research is to take “what’s obvious” and collect the data to put a hard number on it. That way policy makers can justify putting money behind different approaches to address the problem...
TacticalCoder 6y ago
That school is basically daycare (or a prison to some) is something I read often and there is maybe a tiny bit of truth in it. But a school is also where you learn to read, write, speak, maths, some physics, some chemistry, etc. In doubt I put my kid, from a very early age, in a top-notch private school in english (she's not a native english speaker). My thinking being that, even if it's daycare/prison where nothing is taught (which I don't think is the case but I'm at least entertaining the idea), she's at least learning to speak english fluently : )
- flycaliguy 6y ago
  Bit if a side note: One thing about the “daycare myth” that bothers me, usually when it’s used to diminish the status of teachers, is how hard daycare workers work and how important that job is.
kiba 6y ago
I'm baffled that people are (or pretend to be) surprised by this. This should be completely obvious to anyone who's ever seen the inside of a high school. Obvious how? Not everybody is socially astute. Granted, I had never been bullied in high school but I wasn't much of a social operator.
austincheney 6y ago
> What's actually going on is that rather than taking the uncomfortable step and questioning our current day school system where we send our kids to prisons The reasons for this are deliberate. 1. Parents are assholes. In poor areas many patents couldn’t give two shits about spending extra time to contribute to their child’s education. In rich areas the parents are at war with the teachers either because their little angel can do no wrong or because there is serious money on the table for scholarships. 2. Child performance is measured in numbers devised by standardized tests. The average of that performance is a primary determinate factor in state funding. 3. It would be nice if we taught children to think and to form original output. The sad reality is that most people, including adults, are utterly incapable of originality. Attempts to force that square peg into a round hole leaves many children behind while simultaneously confusing and infuriating parents.
- silvestrov 6y ago
  1. Parents are assholes. In rich areas many parents doesn't give two shits about spending time with their kids as they are only interested in their job and friends.
fullshark 6y ago
Every public school will be analogous to a prison no matter how good, because children have no choice on the matter. If you want to change the dynamic there the only solution is school choice because children simply must go to school, letting them (and their parents) choose which school is the right one is the way to improve the child's well being and make them feel like they have control over how they spend 200 days of their year.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  I grew up in a school system where families had the ability to switch schools. It did not solve any of the problems you mention. In fact, it introduced a new set of problems where some number of students (and parents) at every school would conclude that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence no matter what. Most of the students who switched schools struggled to make friends or were frustrated that the switch didn’t automatically solve their social problems. In retrospect, I realize I learned a lot about social maturity by staying one place with a semi-random group of people that I had to learn how to work with.
  - sage76 6y ago
    > Most of the students who switched schools struggled to make friends or were frustrated that the switch didn’t automatically solve their social problems. What do you think the reason was?
- Balgair 6y ago
  Denver Public Schools has a forced school choice program. In that each parent/guardian must register what school they want their student to go to; there is no default. All schools in DPS are charter schools, with many different focuses and education tactics. It may sound a bit odd, but it's been working for the ~90k students for a few years now. That said, bullying doesn't seem to be any less or more at DPS. Some quick googling seems to show a few cases of 'extreme' bullying in the local news, but nothing I can really point at to say the bullying is less or more. In the absence of really any stats or evidence, I'd assume bullying is probably the same as in other large metro districts.
fortran77 6y ago
> which allows them to throw public money at "anti bullying programs" And more employment for more teachers/guidance-counselors, etc.
ravenstine 6y ago
It's baffling and yet it's not. Most people don't remember their childhoods very vividly, and high school is still in the cusp of childhood, especially these days. Combine that with our predilection to look back on the past with rose-colored glasses, and it's no wonder the education system is so bad.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  This study isn’t even about school systems. It simply says that bullying is more common among friends than previously thought. Previous anti-bullying efforts focused on non-friend bullies, leaving a blind spot to this bullying between friends.
  - flycaliguy 6y ago
    Oh yeah, personally this insight was much closer to my time in a local music scene after high school compared to my classroom years.
lambdasquirrel 6y ago
It’d be a surprise to me. I was ethnically and culturally an outsider, and was bullied for that. It was rarely because of people I’d consider friends. When you’re different and othered, you’re targeted by the toxic masculinity crowd. It’s how the nerds ended up halfway together. High school was tame in the bullying regard. It was a magnet school full of dorks who were escaping the rest of society.
- bluefirebrand 6y ago
  > When you’re different and othered, you’re targeted by the toxic masculinity crowd Funny. The worst bullies in my schools growing up were the girls.
  - throwawayboise 6y ago
    My memory is that girls bullied by emotional tactics: mocking, scorn, ostracizing, back-stabbing. Boys were more likely physical, though name-calling was also pretty common.
  - lambdasquirrel 6y ago
    Girls can and are part of the toxic masculinity problem.
colanderman 6y ago
I've seen just as much bullying at elective academic summer camps (e.g. Space Camp, JHU CTY), as at public schools. Both as a student and as a teacher. I don't agree that it's necessarily a product of the American public school system. Particularly, in my experience, bullying tends to be exacerbated during periods of social uncertainty, such as a change in the class cohort. The bullies feel vulnerable and are looking to prove themselves, and the bullied are vulnerable, having not yet had any chance to form social support groups.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  Totally agree, which is why I think junior high is often the worst when it comes to bullying. In my school district elementary schools (up to 6th grade) had about 100 kids per class, and they all fed into one massive junior high that had about 1500 kids total in 7th and 8th grades. Plus, that is the time when kids are going through puberty (often at vastly different rates and times), trying to figure out their own bodies and hormones. Your description of "The bullies feel vulnerable and are looking to prove themselves, and the bullied are vulnerable, having not yet had any chance to form social support groups." was spot on in my experience. Frankly, I don't understand the purpose of junior high at all, seems like it would make much more sense to just have elementary schools go up to, say, 8th grade, then go to a high school (lots of private schools already do this).
  - Benjammer 6y ago
    > junior high is often the worst I worked at a summer camp for a few years. It's split into "sessions" for different age groups by grade level: 4/5, 6/7, 8/9, 10/11/12. It was staggering how bad the bullying was in the 8/9th grade session compared to all other grade levels. The rest of the groups barely ever had any issues at all other than isolated, subjective cases, while the 8th/9th grade sessions would almost all have HUGE drama with kids (boys and girls both) changing friend groups, kicking kids out of their group, and joining new groups, all within the span of one week at camp. More drama than a reality TV show, it was nuts. I agree about eliminating middle school / junior high. It's too narrow a band of ages, they aren't exposed to enough more mature kids to learn how to act, or much less mature kids to show them a reflection of what they used to be like.
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
>I'm baffled that people are (or pretend to be) surprised by this. This should be completely obvious to anyone who's ever seen the inside of a high school. I think it should be a known idea to anyone who has ever seen a movie where a previously uncool kid gets accepted in to the cool kids group.
rawland 6y ago
Yepp, most western schools are more a social ladder creation apparatus than educational institutions. The scandinavian school system takes a very different approach. It's worth to have a look.
- rgblambda 6y ago
  Could you maybe give a short explanation to how Scandinavian schools answer the bullying problem? I can't find anything that directly answers that question.
  - rawland 6y ago
    This movie captures it very well: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3215346/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3215346/ Trailer [en]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_-KrJseVUo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_-KrJseVUo It's very hard to describe shortly... maybe: They start with you as human being first. Abilities and talents to be discovered and developing a humane human who can face the world. They don't treat you like an animal in industrial livestock farming. It has many layers to it, e.g., regular teachers and kindergarden personnel have the social standing of a Professor in your country (assuming 1st world not scand). Teaching the young is understood (like REALLY understood) as one of the most important things a country can do for its future.
    - rgblambda 6y ago
      I'm still not seeing how this addresses school bullying in particular. I only watched the trailer though. I've heard all these things about the scandinavian school system before. Bullying never came up as a topic.
      - rawland 6y ago
        What follows from the movie is that there are multi-professional teams at work. That is, they don't have one teacher who decides about things and especially the fate of the individual pupil but teams containing, e.g., psychologists who decide about things in the regular day to day business. Of course bullying is an issue there, too. It is pronounced wherever you have esp. social inequality, and minimizing only works approximately. However, they are thinking about this in a progressive and especially compile-ahead-of-time way. The first research on bullying emerged in the 1970ies from these countries actually. See: https://go.gale.com/ps/anonymous?id=GALE|A75022135 https://go.gale.com/ps/anonymous?id=GALE|A75022135
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
imbnwa 6y ago
> What's actually going on is that rather than taking the uncomfortable step and questioning our current day school system where we send our kids to prisons (in anything but name) I'm surprised more people haven't read Michel Foucault's "Discipline and Punish", it sheds light on the way the prison became a blueprint for organizing labor, education, our very social fabric
wpietri 6y ago
I'm hugely critical of our industrial-age schooling system. But I think it's a mistake to suggest that bullying is only a factor in those schools. Bullying happens in families, in churches, in neighborhoods, in workplaces, in any environment where you have groups of people. Primates are big on dominance hierarchies, often violently enforced, and humans are definitely primates. Everybody needs to learn how to deal with bullying. How to recognize it, how to combat it, how to build relationships and cultures that are proof against it. And if there are things we want everybody to learn, school doesn't seem like a bad place to start.
- imbnwa 6y ago
  If you define bullying as preying on psychological and/or physical vulnerabilities, even parents, mothers included, do this. Its the quickest shortcut to addressing an anxiety or uncertainty on your part by displacing it onto the victim. Without external address, victims begin to identify with their suffering as a metaphysical certainty, something that must happen in order for the universe to keep on ticking correctly. Freud called this kind of adaptation a "secondary fixation" and can take years to peel back in order to address the core anxieties and uncertainty that's been deeply implanted. It doesn't help that American culture has a particular distaste for empathizing with "weak people". Everybody is suppose to present some narrative of being a winner however narrowly scoped. It's no wonder "Chad or Virgin" memes are ubiquitous, people will never avow publicly to it but I suspect enough teeter on perceiving reality as if that kind of toxic binary was metaphysical in nature and therefore beyond empirical reproach.
  - whearyou 6y ago
    Very insightful thank you
cafard 6y ago
"Current day school system". Well, OK. But try reading about English public schools of the 19th or 20th Century. I gather that things were not much better in continental Europe.

jkhdigital 6y ago

It also supports another common sense observation, which is that mixed-age schooling results in much better behavioral outcomes. Kids don’t obsess over their place in the artificial Lord of the Flies hierarchy when there are younger and older kids around to provide frequent role reversals.

sjg007 6y ago
Has that been studied?
- quercusa 6y ago
  Anecdota: Mixed-age groups of home-schooled kids (e.g., at co-op events) tend to just play, with the older ones typically watching out for the younger kids, whether they are siblings or not. Mixed-age groups of formally-schooled kids begin by setting up a hierarchy that usually depends on grade in school* and then is continually refined. * H-S kids in a mixed group are immediately marked as outsiders by this question. They either don't know or operate at different levels in different subjects.
  - GVIrish 6y ago
    Home schooled kids are typically in groups of far, far smaller sizes. The social dynamics of a high school with 2000 students is naturally going to be different than the dynamics of a home school of a dozen or so.
    - Footkerchief 6y ago
      I think the point is that the ingrained dynamics continue even when the context / group size evens out later.
- fuzzfactor 6y ago
  >Has that been studied? Depends on how studious you are.
fuzzfactor 6y ago
One primary thing that stands out as actual humanity are behaviors which are almost never dominant in any other beings, and which further the progress of true civilization. Which is of course supposed to be civil if nothing else. Anything less is realistically a lack of human nature, often still remaining along a not-completely-civilized continuum. So _human nature_ should never be used as an excuse for uncivil behavior, and further progress can best be made by recognizing _lack of human nature_ as the problem instead. This should be obvious to behaviorists but once you go there you've got to figure lots of them would need more _common sense_, except there still remains some prevalence to _common lack of sense_ . . .

mbg721 6y ago

One of the side-effects of the current pandemic, at least in the US, is that dysfunctional educational institutions have been revealed for what they are. There's a lot of talk about a realignment of priorities at the university level where students' money is directly at stake, but hopefully this will spur some positive changes for younger students also.

420codebro 6y ago
Cmon man the Alumni really needs money for that 3rd sports facility on campus.
watwut 6y ago
What are you talking about? The overwhelming message I hear is that people cant wait till schools open. And that includes also kids themselves.
- mbg721 6y ago
  Everyone wants them open, but mostly to eliminate the nuisances associated with child-care while working. I think a lot of parents hadn't realized just how messed-up their kids' schools actually were until now. (Edit: So, there are two separate problems: "Get my kids out of here so I can work and keep the lights on" and "Really?? That's all they've been getting all this time?")
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    My 4th grade son can crush his entire day of actual work in 30-45 minutes. I very much value the additional hours of socialization and fun that come from traditional schools, but it’s not a very efficient mechanism of scholastic/academic achievement.
    - throwawayboise 6y ago
      > My 4th grade son can crush his entire day of actual work in 30-45 minutes. Sounds like he's ready for an office job /s

1experience 6y ago

Yes, the analogy between school and prison is spot on. In everyday life, if an environment/person bothers you, you can simply CHOOSE to deal with it if it's worth it or avoid it if it's not. Schools and prisons are closed systems where the social hierarchy inevitably gets established and constantly contested. As someone who has been on both sides of the game telling kids not to fight back is counterproductive. If the situation is handled correctly it can become an incredible opportunity for growth.

JackFr 6y ago
> Yes, the analogy between school and prison is spot on. In general, I don't agree with this. However, after reading a couple of prison experts argue that prison gangs, and most prison violence could be eliminated simply by reducing the size of the prisons. They argue that prison gangs are a rational response to the inability to make prisons safe for prisoners, and that inability is simply a question of prison size. I wonder if a similar effect isn't present in modern public schools. That above a certain size it. becomes impossible to maintain an environment which is physically and psychologically safe for the students.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
  - DataWorker 6y ago
    Packs behave as packs.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  I dunno about that. I went to a smaller private school (~60 kids per grade in middle school, ~100 per grade in high school), and we certainly had bullying. maybe this is already too large? I didn't simultaneously attend a large public school, so I can't say whether there was a difference in degree. we probably had more teachers per student, so more supervision, but I can't say that really helped. kids wouldn't physically attack each other in front of a teacher, but a lot of the verbal bullying was coded in a way (nicknames, in-group slang) that it wasn't obvious to an adult that it wasn't playful. the kids all knew exactly what was going on though.

telchar 6y ago

Don’t you see that you’re doing what the article describes, right now? Your shallow analysis and careless invective, somehow pointing the finger at school systems for something that is largely a result of human nature, is bullying. You’re throwing school systems under the bus for internet points. Could schools handle bullying better? Probably. But your call for “questioning” is not at all constructive or actionable. To me you demonstrate only that what the article describes works just as well on hn as it does in schools. Dunking on easy targets for social standing.

avesi 6y ago
Can an individual bully a nationwide organization?
eeZah7Ux 6y ago
First, "human nature" is a logical fallacy straight away: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy Second, in many existing societies outside of the US school bullying is extremely uncommon.
- endisneigh 6y ago
  How exactly would you prove that school bullying is uncommon in schools? I highly doubt your second point is true. If you have some research it would be much appreciated.
- Chris2048 6y ago
  The Naturalistic fallacy is if something is 'natural' it must be good/desirable I don't see that op said or implied that this was the case; They said something was 'human nature' (i.e. natural) ass opposed to the result of the school system. This doesn't imply that it is therefore desirable, but rather, that it is undesirable but not the result of the school system.
dmingod666 6y ago
TBH, almost all internet discourse is: Post strategies: '<statement to grab internet points from like minded folk>' Reply Strategies: '<Agree collaborate to get basked glory points>' or '<take down, by proving status difference between op and self - either by lowering op(insult /humiliate/mock/intimidate) / raising own status (showoff based on anything)>'

jancsika 6y ago

To have some significance, you'd need to link to a statement you wrote on this topic prior to the research being published. Otherwise this looks like you're just standing on the shoulders of giants to sing about how tall you are. To be clear-- even if you had published your 2nd paragraph prior to this research being published, that wouldn't qualify as something that is "completely obvious." At the very least you would have needed to give a hypothesis as to why it is you think the current anti-bullying programs cannot work. That hypothesis would have needed to at least include something like, "in my experience people end up bullying their friends most of the time." Otherwise, you can't convincingly claim the truth was obvious and people who didn't get it were likely pretending. Without the research, everyone just shrinks back to become little mice noisily speculating about the state of the world. Edit: clarification

zepto 6y ago
You are giving a lot of weight to the originality of academic institutions and their platforms as authorizers of knowledge. There are plenty of examples of people knowing things, or seeing things as obvious, which are only much later acknowledged by academic research. You are welcome to base your reality on what academia publishes, and accept that authority, but let’s be clear that this is what you are choosing to do. Also, it’s worth looking at the majority of comments on this post. Most of them also appear to assume that the research’s result was obvious.
whyleyc 6y ago
Actually it’s possible for people to have opinions on matters where they are not a published author or academic. Also “little mice noisily speculating about the state of the world” is a pretty good summary of a lot of academia.
- pii 6y ago
  Yeah we should burn the universities down
  - linuxhiker 6y ago

plaidfuji 6y ago

Sometimes the point of behavioral psych and sociology research is to take “what’s obvious” and collect the data to put a hard number on it. That way policy makers can justify putting money behind different approaches to address the problem...

TacticalCoder 6y ago

That school is basically daycare (or a prison to some) is something I read often and there is maybe a tiny bit of truth in it. But a school is also where you learn to read, write, speak, maths, some physics, some chemistry, etc. In doubt I put my kid, from a very early age, in a top-notch private school in english (she's not a native english speaker). My thinking being that, even if it's daycare/prison where nothing is taught (which I don't think is the case but I'm at least entertaining the idea), she's at least learning to speak english fluently : )

flycaliguy 6y ago
Bit if a side note: One thing about the “daycare myth” that bothers me, usually when it’s used to diminish the status of teachers, is how hard daycare workers work and how important that job is.

kiba 6y ago

I'm baffled that people are (or pretend to be) surprised by this. This should be completely obvious to anyone who's ever seen the inside of a high school. Obvious how? Not everybody is socially astute. Granted, I had never been bullied in high school but I wasn't much of a social operator.

austincheney 6y ago

> What's actually going on is that rather than taking the uncomfortable step and questioning our current day school system where we send our kids to prisons The reasons for this are deliberate. 1. Parents are assholes. In poor areas many patents couldn’t give two shits about spending extra time to contribute to their child’s education. In rich areas the parents are at war with the teachers either because their little angel can do no wrong or because there is serious money on the table for scholarships. 2. Child performance is measured in numbers devised by standardized tests. The average of that performance is a primary determinate factor in state funding. 3. It would be nice if we taught children to think and to form original output. The sad reality is that most people, including adults, are utterly incapable of originality. Attempts to force that square peg into a round hole leaves many children behind while simultaneously confusing and infuriating parents.

silvestrov 6y ago
1. Parents are assholes. In rich areas many parents doesn't give two shits about spending time with their kids as they are only interested in their job and friends.

fullshark 6y ago

Every public school will be analogous to a prison no matter how good, because children have no choice on the matter. If you want to change the dynamic there the only solution is school choice because children simply must go to school, letting them (and their parents) choose which school is the right one is the way to improve the child's well being and make them feel like they have control over how they spend 200 days of their year.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago
I grew up in a school system where families had the ability to switch schools. It did not solve any of the problems you mention. In fact, it introduced a new set of problems where some number of students (and parents) at every school would conclude that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence no matter what. Most of the students who switched schools struggled to make friends or were frustrated that the switch didn’t automatically solve their social problems. In retrospect, I realize I learned a lot about social maturity by staying one place with a semi-random group of people that I had to learn how to work with.
- sage76 6y ago
  > Most of the students who switched schools struggled to make friends or were frustrated that the switch didn’t automatically solve their social problems. What do you think the reason was?
Balgair 6y ago
Denver Public Schools has a forced school choice program. In that each parent/guardian must register what school they want their student to go to; there is no default. All schools in DPS are charter schools, with many different focuses and education tactics. It may sound a bit odd, but it's been working for the ~90k students for a few years now. That said, bullying doesn't seem to be any less or more at DPS. Some quick googling seems to show a few cases of 'extreme' bullying in the local news, but nothing I can really point at to say the bullying is less or more. In the absence of really any stats or evidence, I'd assume bullying is probably the same as in other large metro districts.

fortran77 6y ago

> which allows them to throw public money at "anti bullying programs" And more employment for more teachers/guidance-counselors, etc.

ravenstine 6y ago

It's baffling and yet it's not. Most people don't remember their childhoods very vividly, and high school is still in the cusp of childhood, especially these days. Combine that with our predilection to look back on the past with rose-colored glasses, and it's no wonder the education system is so bad.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago
This study isn’t even about school systems. It simply says that bullying is more common among friends than previously thought. Previous anti-bullying efforts focused on non-friend bullies, leaving a blind spot to this bullying between friends.
- flycaliguy 6y ago
  Oh yeah, personally this insight was much closer to my time in a local music scene after high school compared to my classroom years.

lambdasquirrel 6y ago

It’d be a surprise to me. I was ethnically and culturally an outsider, and was bullied for that. It was rarely because of people I’d consider friends. When you’re different and othered, you’re targeted by the toxic masculinity crowd. It’s how the nerds ended up halfway together. High school was tame in the bullying regard. It was a magnet school full of dorks who were escaping the rest of society.

bluefirebrand 6y ago
> When you’re different and othered, you’re targeted by the toxic masculinity crowd Funny. The worst bullies in my schools growing up were the girls.
- throwawayboise 6y ago
  My memory is that girls bullied by emotional tactics: mocking, scorn, ostracizing, back-stabbing. Boys were more likely physical, though name-calling was also pretty common.
- lambdasquirrel 6y ago
  Girls can and are part of the toxic masculinity problem.

colanderman 6y ago

I've seen just as much bullying at elective academic summer camps (e.g. Space Camp, JHU CTY), as at public schools. Both as a student and as a teacher. I don't agree that it's necessarily a product of the American public school system. Particularly, in my experience, bullying tends to be exacerbated during periods of social uncertainty, such as a change in the class cohort. The bullies feel vulnerable and are looking to prove themselves, and the bullied are vulnerable, having not yet had any chance to form social support groups.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
Totally agree, which is why I think junior high is often the worst when it comes to bullying. In my school district elementary schools (up to 6th grade) had about 100 kids per class, and they all fed into one massive junior high that had about 1500 kids total in 7th and 8th grades. Plus, that is the time when kids are going through puberty (often at vastly different rates and times), trying to figure out their own bodies and hormones. Your description of "The bullies feel vulnerable and are looking to prove themselves, and the bullied are vulnerable, having not yet had any chance to form social support groups." was spot on in my experience. Frankly, I don't understand the purpose of junior high at all, seems like it would make much more sense to just have elementary schools go up to, say, 8th grade, then go to a high school (lots of private schools already do this).
- Benjammer 6y ago
  > junior high is often the worst I worked at a summer camp for a few years. It's split into "sessions" for different age groups by grade level: 4/5, 6/7, 8/9, 10/11/12. It was staggering how bad the bullying was in the 8/9th grade session compared to all other grade levels. The rest of the groups barely ever had any issues at all other than isolated, subjective cases, while the 8th/9th grade sessions would almost all have HUGE drama with kids (boys and girls both) changing friend groups, kicking kids out of their group, and joining new groups, all within the span of one week at camp. More drama than a reality TV show, it was nuts. I agree about eliminating middle school / junior high. It's too narrow a band of ages, they aren't exposed to enough more mature kids to learn how to act, or much less mature kids to show them a reflection of what they used to be like.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

>I'm baffled that people are (or pretend to be) surprised by this. This should be completely obvious to anyone who's ever seen the inside of a high school. I think it should be a known idea to anyone who has ever seen a movie where a previously uncool kid gets accepted in to the cool kids group.

rawland 6y ago

Yepp, most western schools are more a social ladder creation apparatus than educational institutions. The scandinavian school system takes a very different approach. It's worth to have a look.

rgblambda 6y ago
Could you maybe give a short explanation to how Scandinavian schools answer the bullying problem? I can't find anything that directly answers that question.
- rawland 6y ago
  This movie captures it very well: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3215346/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3215346/ Trailer [en]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_-KrJseVUo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_-KrJseVUo It's very hard to describe shortly... maybe: They start with you as human being first. Abilities and talents to be discovered and developing a humane human who can face the world. They don't treat you like an animal in industrial livestock farming. It has many layers to it, e.g., regular teachers and kindergarden personnel have the social standing of a Professor in your country (assuming 1st world not scand). Teaching the young is understood (like REALLY understood) as one of the most important things a country can do for its future.
  - rgblambda 6y ago
    I'm still not seeing how this addresses school bullying in particular. I only watched the trailer though. I've heard all these things about the scandinavian school system before. Bullying never came up as a topic.
    - rawland 6y ago
      What follows from the movie is that there are multi-professional teams at work. That is, they don't have one teacher who decides about things and especially the fate of the individual pupil but teams containing, e.g., psychologists who decide about things in the regular day to day business. Of course bullying is an issue there, too. It is pronounced wherever you have esp. social inequality, and minimizing only works approximately. However, they are thinking about this in a progressive and especially compile-ahead-of-time way. The first research on bullying emerged in the 1970ies from these countries actually. See: https://go.gale.com/ps/anonymous?id=GALE|A75022135 https://go.gale.com/ps/anonymous?id=GALE|A75022135

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imbnwa 6y ago

> What's actually going on is that rather than taking the uncomfortable step and questioning our current day school system where we send our kids to prisons (in anything but name) I'm surprised more people haven't read Michel Foucault's "Discipline and Punish", it sheds light on the way the prison became a blueprint for organizing labor, education, our very social fabric

wpietri 6y ago

I'm hugely critical of our industrial-age schooling system. But I think it's a mistake to suggest that bullying is only a factor in those schools. Bullying happens in families, in churches, in neighborhoods, in workplaces, in any environment where you have groups of people. Primates are big on dominance hierarchies, often violently enforced, and humans are definitely primates. Everybody needs to learn how to deal with bullying. How to recognize it, how to combat it, how to build relationships and cultures that are proof against it. And if there are things we want everybody to learn, school doesn't seem like a bad place to start.

imbnwa 6y ago
If you define bullying as preying on psychological and/or physical vulnerabilities, even parents, mothers included, do this. Its the quickest shortcut to addressing an anxiety or uncertainty on your part by displacing it onto the victim. Without external address, victims begin to identify with their suffering as a metaphysical certainty, something that must happen in order for the universe to keep on ticking correctly. Freud called this kind of adaptation a "secondary fixation" and can take years to peel back in order to address the core anxieties and uncertainty that's been deeply implanted. It doesn't help that American culture has a particular distaste for empathizing with "weak people". Everybody is suppose to present some narrative of being a winner however narrowly scoped. It's no wonder "Chad or Virgin" memes are ubiquitous, people will never avow publicly to it but I suspect enough teeter on perceiving reality as if that kind of toxic binary was metaphysical in nature and therefore beyond empirical reproach.
- whearyou 6y ago
  Very insightful thank you

cafard 6y ago

"Current day school system". Well, OK. But try reading about English public schools of the 19th or 20th Century. I gather that things were not much better in continental Europe.