5 ms·

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 benefi

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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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?
    - dotancohen 6mo ago
      > So when you kicked them out of school at 15, what is the state supposed to do with them? That becomes the parents' problem. Let them find a school willing to take their abusive kid - or have the state come after them for having children not in school. The threat of such should help encourage parents to actually raise decent children.
    - chr1 6mo ago
      > You mean they enroll back at a private school to get their education? I mean the money that government wastes keeping them in school while they are 15 and don't want to learn, can be given to them later when/if they decide to learn. > most likely the path is that they just stay at home doing nothing all day if their parents let them. That's up to the parent to decide: leave them at home, convince them to find a job, go to special school or a class for misbehaving children, go to trade school etc. Those who turn to vagrancy/crime do it anyway, as they have enough time outside of school too. > child has to be in education until they turn 18. > employing 15 year olds is [not] legal These are not physical laws given to us from above, these are rather misguided attempts by politicians to look good, and are harmful to the society. Imagine that instead of prisons we were forcing criminals to go spend time sitting in offices and disrupting normal work. What we do with children now is equally effective.
      - gambiting 6mo ago
        >>I mean the money that government wastes keeping them in school while they are 15 and don't want to learn, can be given to them later when/if they decide to learn. So you want to financially incentivize kids to drop out of school? "Drop out now, we'll give you a bunch of money later". >> these are rather misguided attempts by politicians to look good, and are harmful to the society. Saying that keeping 15 year olds out of a job is harmful to the society is....certainly a take, for sure. >>What we do with children now is equally effective. Well, thank you for editing this sentence from what you wrote originally, but just to be clear - I'm not advocating that misbehaving kids should be forced to sit in normal classrooms and disrupt everyone else - rather that schools should be given the resources to deal with it - the school I went to had special classes for unruly kids which were much smaller and where you basically had to meet up with specialists every week and your grades were severely impacted. It does work in most cases. Sure there will be ones that are truly beyond any kind of help - but that is very very rare. Most of the time you just have kids who could get on the straight path if someone helped them, but public schools are usually so underfunded they can't help even if they want to.
- armchairhacker 6mo ago
  Put them in work programs. If they can’t be productive, put them in mental institutions. To be clear, abuse in these programs should be prevented as much as feasible, and there should be an opportunity for any kid who demonstrates redemption to get back in school. It’s a bad solution, but I don’t know any which is better. Keeping them in society is worse for innocent people (and doesn’t seem to usually benefit them either, misbehaving kids usually seem miserable). And yes, the state pays to take care of them. Otherwise it’s paying for the damage they cause outside.
  - gambiting 6mo ago
    >>Put them in work programs. If they can’t be productive, put them in mental institution ....what kind of work programs can you put 12 year olds into? I'm really curious. And I'm sure it's clear that putting anyone into a mental institution costs the state far more than providing resources to a school to deal with this would cost? Psychologists, separate classes, teachers specialized in this. We struggle to put people with actual mental problems into mental health insititutions(because there are so few and they cost a fortune to run) but we'd start putting misbehaving kids in them?
    - dotancohen 6mo ago
      12 year olds? My son was hammering nails into wood and drilling into masonry at 8. The Bedouin children are in the fields unsupervised with the goats at age 6. 12 year olds are not babies. Both my daughters were skydiving at 9. Kids can do a lot.
      - gambiting 6mo ago
        >>My son was hammering nails into wood and drilling into masonry at 8 And was he doing that 8 hours a day, 5 days a week? Like you know...he would do at work? Or was it just a nice thing he did with his parents helping out with some construction projects you had going on? >>12 year olds are not babies. Of course not, but then again I have to ask the same question once more - if you were in charge of national policy, what kind of work program would you establish for 12 year olds that misbehave at school? What would you have them do, exactly?
- verve_rat 6mo ago
  So other kids should just be their victims? How is that better? We should do whatever we can to help kids with problems, but that doesn't include victimising people. Remove the bullies and deal with them elsewhere.
  - gambiting 6mo ago
    >>Remove the bullies and deal with them elsewhere Everyone agrees on this, no one agrees on what "elsewhere" should be. Like I said in my post - do you just send them to one special school for unruly children, which is just basically on fire all the time? Or prison? Or like other commenters have said - just send them to work programs, let them work at mcdonalds, or send them to a mental institution? Like, we're not the first people on earth to come to this stunning conclusion that it would be better if bullies were taken away from the rest of the class - the question is where and how and if that is really the best solution for us, for them, for the victims and for the society at large.
    - verve_rat 6mo ago
      Yes, that is a hard problem that society in general doesn't like dealing with, but the solution doesn't involve letting kids be abused. That's the point I'm making. Don't let kids get abused. I honestly didn't think that was very controversial.
      - gambiting 6mo ago
        And I completely agree with you.
- TheOtherHobbes 6mo ago
  Some dysfunctional kids are there because of trauma, others because of opportunism and poor impulse control they'll eventually grow out of, and some are fundamentally defective and no amount of support will make them less destructive or dangerous to themselves and others. Psychopathy and narcissism are psychological/emotional disabilities. They're the emotional equivalent of being born without a limb - or in congenital cases, without the brain structures needed for empathy and adult risk management. I don't know what to do with these people. No one does. I do know they're the single biggest threat to our future as a species, because if they get into positions of power they wreak havoc on unimaginable scales. And even if they don't, they reliably leave a trail of wreckage behind them, because their relationships are defined by lies, gaslighting, and emotional and physical violence. Unfortunately we have limited tools for diagnosis, so there's no way to know for sure if a problem teen can be rescued, or if they're guaranteed to become a problem adult.
  - cvwright 6mo ago
    It’s been said that the British executed about 1% of their population each year for a few hundred years, and that a similar number died in prison. The claim is that this made Britain a much safer country in later centuries.
    - hirvi74 6mo ago
      One would be trading a chance of being murdered by psychopaths on the street for a chance of being murdered by psychopaths in the government.
  - theoeifjf 6mo ago
    > They're the emotional equivalent of being born without a limb For start we could stop cutting part of their limbs shortly after birth. Doing this to dogs is considered too cruel and banned, but somehow it is ok for little boys? > some are fundamentally defective and no amount of support No need for support, just stop harming them!
  - brnaftr361 6mo ago
    They need real, tangible, meaningful threats. Corporal or social. Doling out talkings-to, ISS, OSS, bad grades and repeat courses are a relative joke. I spent uncountable hours in ISS for truancy, was made to walk miles to school, kicked off the bus and walk miles home, served community service, and had many talkings-to. None of it was effective. Expulsion is treated as far too extreme and should be far more regular as both an incentive to the student and to the parents. For many of these kids school is an impediment and a detractor and they would do far better for themselves in the work environment gaining experience over the course of the 3-4 years anyways. There are far more permissive environments in workplaces than there are in school that are better suited for the nature of certain inclinations and measures than that of school. There's also the possibility of restarting vocational education, which frankly, is a good compromise. But the current system is bullshit. And the bar is so low that diplomas are given out to nearly 90% of students which is flatly wrong as from what I've seen there are a lot more people who are either academically or behaviorally unsuited for employment or voting by any reasonable standard. Setting up clear failure modes are the guidelines by which many of these people would derive structure and meaning in their education, instead they're allowed a de minimis exception and passed into the world as acceptably educated and competent when the opposite is true. And that totally erodes the meaning of the accomplishment.
- sagarm 6mo ago
  This is the mentality that turns public schools into zoos and drives families with means to private.
  - gambiting 6mo ago
    ...the mentality that says schools should be given the resources to deal with it, instead of (like some other commenter suggested) sending kids to mental institutions?
    - sagarm 6mo ago
      The facts on the ground are that schools are not being given the resources to deal with it, leading to a death spiral of reduced enrollment and funding -- at least for SFUSD. I imagine the story is similar elsewhere.
      - gambiting 6mo ago
        >>The facts on the ground are that schools are not being given the resources to deal with it Which is why I'm advocating for the schools to be given the resources to deal with it.
throwthrowuknow 6mo ago
If corporal punishment is effective then we don’t have to terminate anyone’s education. For some kids it may just take one painful lesson to turn them around so why forgo that and ruin their lives? Certainly, if they also don’t care about physical punishment then expel them as a hopeless case but don’t do it reflexively as a cop out.
- armchairhacker 6mo ago
  If it’s effective, yes. I think corporal punishment is fine as a last resort before expulsion. Not before, because I’m worried some kids would be traumatized, but those expelled or misbehaving indefinitely without consequence will otherwise find trauma and/or ruin other’s lives.
close04 6mo ago
The moment you abandon any attempt to correct the behavior you guarantee they are “lost” to society.
- scarmig 6mo ago
  The other kids will have to suffer so the misbehaving kids can be saved, but that's a sacrifice we're willing to make!
  - close04 6mo ago
    The cases where the bully is truly irredeemable are few and far between. Most of the time the adults just abandon too quickly. Especially in school where teachers are stretched thin and have no “blood duty” to the child. But more importantly, children who are abandoned “to save others’ suffering” grow up to be adults who can and will cause even more suffering. Education and care are like a debt, if you don’t service it early eventually everyone pays with interest.
  - lucketone 6mo ago
    Emotionally I’m all-in on painful punishments for bullies. But when I stop, and think slower, and more rationally: That bully is a human being who will grow up and he will be a neighbour to somebody (some will die, some will go to prisons, but most of them will be somebodies neibhours). If we show him only more and more cruelty, he will be a terrible neighbour to somebody (so indirectly, the system made that somebodies life worse). One anecdote of creative solutioning: to reduce vadalisations of waste bins in the village, teacher somehow convinced(maybe by promising bad grade if they don’t) several bully’ish kids to make baskets, to be used as waste bins. Idea was that makers will feel some ownership for it, so they won’t damage it later and maybe even prevent lower ranking bullies as well.
- armchairhacker 6mo ago
  Yes, which is why it’s a last resort, because some kids are lost either way. And kicking them out of school isn’t yet abandoning them. They can be put into a vocational school: maybe some kids misbehave because they can’t sit still, but would behave and be happier following a simple job that involves moving.
nephihaha 6mo ago
You expel them and they become another person's problem. I heard recently of a local problem child aged seven. He's already been expelled from a private school but has entered a state school where he seriously injured another pupil and attempted to strangle one of the teachers. Expulsion isn't going to reform them, it will just move it on elsewhere.
- 21asdffdsa12 6mo ago
  So directly to prison. Or must they succeed first?
  - frereubu 6mo ago
    I can't tell if you're being deliberately obtuse / sarcastic, but even aside from the ethical considerations here, prison is an insanely expensive way of dealing with the issue. In the US in 2010, cost per inmate per year in a state prison ranges between $14,603 (Kentucky) and $60,076 (New York), and averages at $31,286. That's 16 years ago, so it'll be higher now. In the UK it was an average of £32,315 in 2020-21. You might as well employ an individual case worker, and the societal outcomes would be a hell of lot better.
    - nephihaha 6mo ago
      I was quoted a figure of approx. £200,000 per year for each patient at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital by someone who works there but I can't vouch for it. I know someone who has been in there a year. :( Carstairs, where violent psychiatric patients go, is probably even more.
      - frereubu 6mo ago
        Sorry to hear that - I knew someone who was sectioned in the Royal Edinburgh about 30 years ago now. A really difficult place to visit emotionally. I can believe it's expensive given the kinds of difficulties the patients are experiencing.
aleph_minus_one 6mo ago
> Expel the kid I guess (from my experience) the expelled kid is actually not that unhappy ;-) about being expelled, since very commonly it actually would prefer not having to go to school. :-)
- bluefirebrand 6mo ago
  At that point it's not about punishing the expelled kid, it's about stopping them from ruining the other kids education
  - vablings 6mo ago
    It's a hard line to balance. In my younger years I should have absolutely been kicked out of school, but as I grew older and my hormones calmed me down, I then was a good student. I really think I would have benefited from not having schooling for around a year though

gambiting 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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?
  - dotancohen 6mo ago
    > So when you kicked them out of school at 15, what is the state supposed to do with them? That becomes the parents' problem. Let them find a school willing to take their abusive kid - or have the state come after them for having children not in school. The threat of such should help encourage parents to actually raise decent children.
  - chr1 6mo ago
    > You mean they enroll back at a private school to get their education? I mean the money that government wastes keeping them in school while they are 15 and don't want to learn, can be given to them later when/if they decide to learn. > most likely the path is that they just stay at home doing nothing all day if their parents let them. That's up to the parent to decide: leave them at home, convince them to find a job, go to special school or a class for misbehaving children, go to trade school etc. Those who turn to vagrancy/crime do it anyway, as they have enough time outside of school too. > child has to be in education until they turn 18. > employing 15 year olds is [not] legal These are not physical laws given to us from above, these are rather misguided attempts by politicians to look good, and are harmful to the society. Imagine that instead of prisons we were forcing criminals to go spend time sitting in offices and disrupting normal work. What we do with children now is equally effective.
    - gambiting 6mo ago
      >>I mean the money that government wastes keeping them in school while they are 15 and don't want to learn, can be given to them later when/if they decide to learn. So you want to financially incentivize kids to drop out of school? "Drop out now, we'll give you a bunch of money later". >> these are rather misguided attempts by politicians to look good, and are harmful to the society. Saying that keeping 15 year olds out of a job is harmful to the society is....certainly a take, for sure. >>What we do with children now is equally effective. Well, thank you for editing this sentence from what you wrote originally, but just to be clear - I'm not advocating that misbehaving kids should be forced to sit in normal classrooms and disrupt everyone else - rather that schools should be given the resources to deal with it - the school I went to had special classes for unruly kids which were much smaller and where you basically had to meet up with specialists every week and your grades were severely impacted. It does work in most cases. Sure there will be ones that are truly beyond any kind of help - but that is very very rare. Most of the time you just have kids who could get on the straight path if someone helped them, but public schools are usually so underfunded they can't help even if they want to.
armchairhacker 6mo ago
Put them in work programs. If they can’t be productive, put them in mental institutions. To be clear, abuse in these programs should be prevented as much as feasible, and there should be an opportunity for any kid who demonstrates redemption to get back in school. It’s a bad solution, but I don’t know any which is better. Keeping them in society is worse for innocent people (and doesn’t seem to usually benefit them either, misbehaving kids usually seem miserable). And yes, the state pays to take care of them. Otherwise it’s paying for the damage they cause outside.
- gambiting 6mo ago
  >>Put them in work programs. If they can’t be productive, put them in mental institution ....what kind of work programs can you put 12 year olds into? I'm really curious. And I'm sure it's clear that putting anyone into a mental institution costs the state far more than providing resources to a school to deal with this would cost? Psychologists, separate classes, teachers specialized in this. We struggle to put people with actual mental problems into mental health insititutions(because there are so few and they cost a fortune to run) but we'd start putting misbehaving kids in them?
  - dotancohen 6mo ago
    12 year olds? My son was hammering nails into wood and drilling into masonry at 8. The Bedouin children are in the fields unsupervised with the goats at age 6. 12 year olds are not babies. Both my daughters were skydiving at 9. Kids can do a lot.
    - gambiting 6mo ago
      >>My son was hammering nails into wood and drilling into masonry at 8 And was he doing that 8 hours a day, 5 days a week? Like you know...he would do at work? Or was it just a nice thing he did with his parents helping out with some construction projects you had going on? >>12 year olds are not babies. Of course not, but then again I have to ask the same question once more - if you were in charge of national policy, what kind of work program would you establish for 12 year olds that misbehave at school? What would you have them do, exactly?
verve_rat 6mo ago
So other kids should just be their victims? How is that better? We should do whatever we can to help kids with problems, but that doesn't include victimising people. Remove the bullies and deal with them elsewhere.
- gambiting 6mo ago
  >>Remove the bullies and deal with them elsewhere Everyone agrees on this, no one agrees on what "elsewhere" should be. Like I said in my post - do you just send them to one special school for unruly children, which is just basically on fire all the time? Or prison? Or like other commenters have said - just send them to work programs, let them work at mcdonalds, or send them to a mental institution? Like, we're not the first people on earth to come to this stunning conclusion that it would be better if bullies were taken away from the rest of the class - the question is where and how and if that is really the best solution for us, for them, for the victims and for the society at large.
  - verve_rat 6mo ago
    Yes, that is a hard problem that society in general doesn't like dealing with, but the solution doesn't involve letting kids be abused. That's the point I'm making. Don't let kids get abused. I honestly didn't think that was very controversial.
    - gambiting 6mo ago
      And I completely agree with you.
TheOtherHobbes 6mo ago
Some dysfunctional kids are there because of trauma, others because of opportunism and poor impulse control they'll eventually grow out of, and some are fundamentally defective and no amount of support will make them less destructive or dangerous to themselves and others. Psychopathy and narcissism are psychological/emotional disabilities. They're the emotional equivalent of being born without a limb - or in congenital cases, without the brain structures needed for empathy and adult risk management. I don't know what to do with these people. No one does. I do know they're the single biggest threat to our future as a species, because if they get into positions of power they wreak havoc on unimaginable scales. And even if they don't, they reliably leave a trail of wreckage behind them, because their relationships are defined by lies, gaslighting, and emotional and physical violence. Unfortunately we have limited tools for diagnosis, so there's no way to know for sure if a problem teen can be rescued, or if they're guaranteed to become a problem adult.
- cvwright 6mo ago
  It’s been said that the British executed about 1% of their population each year for a few hundred years, and that a similar number died in prison. The claim is that this made Britain a much safer country in later centuries.
  - hirvi74 6mo ago
    One would be trading a chance of being murdered by psychopaths on the street for a chance of being murdered by psychopaths in the government.
- theoeifjf 6mo ago
  > They're the emotional equivalent of being born without a limb For start we could stop cutting part of their limbs shortly after birth. Doing this to dogs is considered too cruel and banned, but somehow it is ok for little boys? > some are fundamentally defective and no amount of support No need for support, just stop harming them!
- brnaftr361 6mo ago
  They need real, tangible, meaningful threats. Corporal or social. Doling out talkings-to, ISS, OSS, bad grades and repeat courses are a relative joke. I spent uncountable hours in ISS for truancy, was made to walk miles to school, kicked off the bus and walk miles home, served community service, and had many talkings-to. None of it was effective. Expulsion is treated as far too extreme and should be far more regular as both an incentive to the student and to the parents. For many of these kids school is an impediment and a detractor and they would do far better for themselves in the work environment gaining experience over the course of the 3-4 years anyways. There are far more permissive environments in workplaces than there are in school that are better suited for the nature of certain inclinations and measures than that of school. There's also the possibility of restarting vocational education, which frankly, is a good compromise. But the current system is bullshit. And the bar is so low that diplomas are given out to nearly 90% of students which is flatly wrong as from what I've seen there are a lot more people who are either academically or behaviorally unsuited for employment or voting by any reasonable standard. Setting up clear failure modes are the guidelines by which many of these people would derive structure and meaning in their education, instead they're allowed a de minimis exception and passed into the world as acceptably educated and competent when the opposite is true. And that totally erodes the meaning of the accomplishment.
sagarm 6mo ago
This is the mentality that turns public schools into zoos and drives families with means to private.
- gambiting 6mo ago
  ...the mentality that says schools should be given the resources to deal with it, instead of (like some other commenter suggested) sending kids to mental institutions?
  - sagarm 6mo ago
    The facts on the ground are that schools are not being given the resources to deal with it, leading to a death spiral of reduced enrollment and funding -- at least for SFUSD. I imagine the story is similar elsewhere.
    - gambiting 6mo ago
      >>The facts on the ground are that schools are not being given the resources to deal with it Which is why I'm advocating for the schools to be given the resources to deal with it.

throwthrowuknow 6mo ago

If corporal punishment is effective then we don’t have to terminate anyone’s education. For some kids it may just take one painful lesson to turn them around so why forgo that and ruin their lives? Certainly, if they also don’t care about physical punishment then expel them as a hopeless case but don’t do it reflexively as a cop out.

armchairhacker 6mo ago
If it’s effective, yes. I think corporal punishment is fine as a last resort before expulsion. Not before, because I’m worried some kids would be traumatized, but those expelled or misbehaving indefinitely without consequence will otherwise find trauma and/or ruin other’s lives.

close04 6mo ago

The moment you abandon any attempt to correct the behavior you guarantee they are “lost” to society.

scarmig 6mo ago
The other kids will have to suffer so the misbehaving kids can be saved, but that's a sacrifice we're willing to make!
- close04 6mo ago
  The cases where the bully is truly irredeemable are few and far between. Most of the time the adults just abandon too quickly. Especially in school where teachers are stretched thin and have no “blood duty” to the child. But more importantly, children who are abandoned “to save others’ suffering” grow up to be adults who can and will cause even more suffering. Education and care are like a debt, if you don’t service it early eventually everyone pays with interest.
- lucketone 6mo ago
  Emotionally I’m all-in on painful punishments for bullies. But when I stop, and think slower, and more rationally: That bully is a human being who will grow up and he will be a neighbour to somebody (some will die, some will go to prisons, but most of them will be somebodies neibhours). If we show him only more and more cruelty, he will be a terrible neighbour to somebody (so indirectly, the system made that somebodies life worse). One anecdote of creative solutioning: to reduce vadalisations of waste bins in the village, teacher somehow convinced(maybe by promising bad grade if they don’t) several bully’ish kids to make baskets, to be used as waste bins. Idea was that makers will feel some ownership for it, so they won’t damage it later and maybe even prevent lower ranking bullies as well.
armchairhacker 6mo ago
Yes, which is why it’s a last resort, because some kids are lost either way. And kicking them out of school isn’t yet abandoning them. They can be put into a vocational school: maybe some kids misbehave because they can’t sit still, but would behave and be happier following a simple job that involves moving.

nephihaha 6mo ago

You expel them and they become another person's problem. I heard recently of a local problem child aged seven. He's already been expelled from a private school but has entered a state school where he seriously injured another pupil and attempted to strangle one of the teachers. Expulsion isn't going to reform them, it will just move it on elsewhere.

21asdffdsa12 6mo ago
So directly to prison. Or must they succeed first?
- frereubu 6mo ago
  I can't tell if you're being deliberately obtuse / sarcastic, but even aside from the ethical considerations here, prison is an insanely expensive way of dealing with the issue. In the US in 2010, cost per inmate per year in a state prison ranges between $14,603 (Kentucky) and $60,076 (New York), and averages at $31,286. That's 16 years ago, so it'll be higher now. In the UK it was an average of £32,315 in 2020-21. You might as well employ an individual case worker, and the societal outcomes would be a hell of lot better.
  - nephihaha 6mo ago
    I was quoted a figure of approx. £200,000 per year for each patient at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital by someone who works there but I can't vouch for it. I know someone who has been in there a year. :( Carstairs, where violent psychiatric patients go, is probably even more.
    - frereubu 6mo ago
      Sorry to hear that - I knew someone who was sectioned in the Royal Edinburgh about 30 years ago now. A really difficult place to visit emotionally. I can believe it's expensive given the kinds of difficulties the patients are experiencing.

aleph_minus_one 6mo ago

> Expel the kid I guess (from my experience) the expelled kid is actually not that unhappy ;-) about being expelled, since very commonly it actually would prefer not having to go to school. :-)

bluefirebrand 6mo ago
At that point it's not about punishing the expelled kid, it's about stopping them from ruining the other kids education
- vablings 6mo ago
  It's a hard line to balance. In my younger years I should have absolutely been kicked out of school, but as I grew older and my hormones calmed me down, I then was a good student. I really think I would have benefited from not having schooling for around a year though