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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 pl

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.

BrenBarn 5mo ago
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.
- samuell 5mo ago
  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).
  - andyferris 5mo ago
    > 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.
    - samuell 5mo ago
      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.
    - graemep 5mo ago
      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.
- danpalmer 5mo ago
  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.
- armchairhacker 5mo ago
  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.
  - gambiting 5mo ago
    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"?
    - chr1 5mo ago
      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.
      - gambiting 5mo ago
        >>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?
- jonathanlydall 5mo ago
  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.
- danpalmer 5mo ago
  It is a sad state of affairs if there's nothing a kid cares about at school.
cherryteastain 5mo ago
Surely expelling more effective from the school's perspective.
- rusk 5mo ago
  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.
  - cik 5mo ago
    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.
  - gambiting 5mo ago
    >>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.
    - bombcar 5mo ago
      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.
  - nephihaha 5mo ago
    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.
spankibalt 5mo ago
> "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.
- tommit 5mo ago
  > 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.
  - spankibalt 5mo ago
    > "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.
- armchairhacker 5mo ago
  > 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.
madaxe_again 5mo ago
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.
- nephihaha 5mo ago
  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.
  - verve_rat 5mo ago
    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.
    - madaxe_again 5mo ago
      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.
      - andsoitis 5mo ago
        > but then again our housemaster was an Afrikaner What are you saying?
roysting 5mo ago
> 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-educational-system-shaped-by-john-d-rockefeller-77bf1b0167dd https://medium.com/@sofialherani/the-dark-truth-of-the-educa...
- lompad 5mo ago
  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.
bsenftner 5mo ago
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.
- kdheiwns 5mo ago
  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"
  - gobdovan 5mo ago
    "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).
  - bsenftner 5mo ago
    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.
  - Quarrel 5mo ago
    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.
- threethirtytwo 5mo ago
  It's not always straight up immaturity. A lot of it could be other issues related to the bullies environment/household or many other issues. 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.
sholladay 5mo ago
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.
- doubled112 5mo ago
  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.
  - sybercecurity 5mo ago
    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.
    - doubled112 5mo ago
      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.
      - 5mo ago
watchful_moose 5mo ago
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.
- triceratops 5mo ago
  American colleges I can understand. But other than bragging rights, why should a high school give enough of a shit about championships to look the other way on bullying?
  - georgeburdell 5mo ago
    Middle America peaks in High School. Local games are televised and commentated even during the regular season. The TV series Friday Night Lights is a reasonable reference as an outsider
    - joenot443 5mo ago
      Can any Americans confirm this? Were your high school sports games televised and commentated?
      - georgeburdell 5mo ago
        That's my personal experience growing up in a suburban area in the South (edit: in the 90s)
      - dmoy 5mo ago
        Really depends on where, and what sport. 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.
eviks 5mo ago
> 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. 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
FireBeyond 5mo ago
> The problem is that most schools don't do that, would likely argue they don't have time to do that 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".
novaleaf 5mo ago
I think many people who wouldn't be disincentivized by demerits/expulsion/etc would find the threat of intense physical pain highly motivating. Caning is no joke.
- ASalazarMX 5mo ago
  I went to primary school when some teachers were still allowed physical punishment, and that was even encouraged by many parents. Our version of caning was slapping your face-up palms with the yardstick, and that honestly was so terrifying most kids behaved. 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!.
bdangubic 5mo ago
the best way to deal with a bully is to punch her/his lights out. the schools should have a martial arts / mma trainer on staff. whover gets bullied has to take classes with martial arts / mma fighter until they can hit the bully hard enough for her/him to eat through a straw for a month. this is the way.
- kstrauser 5mo ago
  This worked for us. A little thug was bullying my kid until I taught my kid how to land a punch to the mouth. That was a one-shot solution to that problem. Obviously that isn’t a universal solution. It’s worth evaluating the option, though.
  - bdangubic 5mo ago
    My daughter did the same thing. She actually “lost the fight” but no one messed with her ever since
- saghm 5mo ago
  You think that a child being bullied should have to suck it up until they commit forced violence against another child? Maybe beating up a bully is something that happens when adults abdicate all responsibility, but it's insane to claim that's better than "the adults should just do their fucking jobs".
grogenaut 5mo ago
I have a peruvian (not athletic/nerdy) friend who moved to the us a while ago. (I played through college) his son randomly started playing football his sophmore year after getting beaned by a baseball and felt baseball was more dangerous. 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.
- dzonga 5mo ago
  this is why those mandatory military programs for youth work. & at times boarding schools. 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.
saghm 5mo ago
> 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. 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.

BrenBarn 5mo ago

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.

samuell 5mo ago
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).
- andyferris 5mo ago
  > 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.
  - samuell 5mo ago
    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.
  - graemep 5mo ago
    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.
danpalmer 5mo ago
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.
armchairhacker 5mo ago
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.
- gambiting 5mo ago
  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"?
  - chr1 5mo ago
    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.
    - gambiting 5mo ago
      >>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?
jonathanlydall 5mo ago
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.
danpalmer 5mo ago
It is a sad state of affairs if there's nothing a kid cares about at school.

cherryteastain 5mo ago

Surely expelling more effective from the school's perspective.

rusk 5mo ago
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.
- cik 5mo ago
  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.
- gambiting 5mo ago
  >>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.
  - bombcar 5mo ago
    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.
- nephihaha 5mo ago
  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.

spankibalt 5mo ago

> "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.

tommit 5mo ago
> 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.
- spankibalt 5mo ago
  > "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.
armchairhacker 5mo ago
> 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.

madaxe_again 5mo ago

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.

nephihaha 5mo ago
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.
- verve_rat 5mo ago
  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.
  - madaxe_again 5mo ago
    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.
    - andsoitis 5mo ago
      > but then again our housemaster was an Afrikaner What are you saying?

roysting 5mo ago

> 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-educational-system-shaped-by-john-d-rockefeller-77bf1b0167dd https://medium.com/@sofialherani/the-dark-truth-of-the-educa...

lompad 5mo ago
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.

bsenftner 5mo ago

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.

kdheiwns 5mo ago
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"
- gobdovan 5mo ago
  "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).
- bsenftner 5mo ago
  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.
- Quarrel 5mo ago
  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.
threethirtytwo 5mo ago
It's not always straight up immaturity. A lot of it could be other issues related to the bullies environment/household or many other issues. 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.

sholladay 5mo ago

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.

doubled112 5mo ago
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.
- sybercecurity 5mo ago
  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.
  - doubled112 5mo ago
    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.
    - 5mo ago

watchful_moose 5mo ago

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.

triceratops 5mo ago
American colleges I can understand. But other than bragging rights, why should a high school give enough of a shit about championships to look the other way on bullying?
- georgeburdell 5mo ago
  Middle America peaks in High School. Local games are televised and commentated even during the regular season. The TV series Friday Night Lights is a reasonable reference as an outsider
  - joenot443 5mo ago
    Can any Americans confirm this? Were your high school sports games televised and commentated?
    - georgeburdell 5mo ago
      That's my personal experience growing up in a suburban area in the South (edit: in the 90s)
    - dmoy 5mo ago
      Really depends on where, and what sport. 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.

eviks 5mo ago

> 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. 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

FireBeyond 5mo ago

> The problem is that most schools don't do that, would likely argue they don't have time to do that 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".

novaleaf 5mo ago

I think many people who wouldn't be disincentivized by demerits/expulsion/etc would find the threat of intense physical pain highly motivating. Caning is no joke.

ASalazarMX 5mo ago
I went to primary school when some teachers were still allowed physical punishment, and that was even encouraged by many parents. Our version of caning was slapping your face-up palms with the yardstick, and that honestly was so terrifying most kids behaved. 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!.

bdangubic 5mo ago

the best way to deal with a bully is to punch her/his lights out. the schools should have a martial arts / mma trainer on staff. whover gets bullied has to take classes with martial arts / mma fighter until they can hit the bully hard enough for her/him to eat through a straw for a month. this is the way.

kstrauser 5mo ago
This worked for us. A little thug was bullying my kid until I taught my kid how to land a punch to the mouth. That was a one-shot solution to that problem. Obviously that isn’t a universal solution. It’s worth evaluating the option, though.
- bdangubic 5mo ago
  My daughter did the same thing. She actually “lost the fight” but no one messed with her ever since
saghm 5mo ago
You think that a child being bullied should have to suck it up until they commit forced violence against another child? Maybe beating up a bully is something that happens when adults abdicate all responsibility, but it's insane to claim that's better than "the adults should just do their fucking jobs".

grogenaut 5mo ago

I have a peruvian (not athletic/nerdy) friend who moved to the us a while ago. (I played through college) his son randomly started playing football his sophmore year after getting beaned by a baseball and felt baseball was more dangerous. 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.

dzonga 5mo ago
this is why those mandatory military programs for youth work. & at times boarding schools. 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.

saghm 5mo ago

> 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. 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.