When I grew up in the UK and went to school from ages 4-7 there was a big focus on fights and I had developed into being a bit of bully. I have great parents and did not have any personal issues, it was merely a cultural driven mentality. When I moved to South Africa at age 7 and started school again, I was still very focused on fighting and was very aggressive. I grew up and became more accustomed to the South African life style, the aggressive and bullying nature that I had picked up from being in the UK ended. By the age of 13 it had stopped and by high school i would avoid fights with peers entirely.
Interestingly I did go from a public school in the UK to a private school in South Africa. Although I there are bullies in private schools and I would blame the frequency of bullying within public schools on cultural differences, rather than it being public.
But i think adults make too much of a big deal about bullying and turn the children in to victims, this is also exasperated by movies. In reality children would make a joke about someone in the class and the child would take it too seriously and would label himself as being bullied. When another child might look at the joke differently and not think much of it. But there are instances of severe bullying but I think adults are far too quick to jump to that conclusion when it is just normal children behaviour.
I always like everything Thomas Sowell writes, and I agree with him on this too.
In the present climate educators literally fear taking actions because of, you guessed it, lawsuits. Even a well deserved suspension is often seen as an “act of discrimination” or “abuse of power” and as such may lead to lawsuits. I am not saying that giving some disciplinary power to educators would instantly turn schools into a paradise but it would make life a lot easier for other students, the ones who just want to serve their sentence be done with it. When you read about a 12 year old who hanged himself because he had been driven insane by bullying or you heard of a young girl who slashed her wrists because she was daily harassed by schoolmates while the teachers turned the other way what can you say? We didn’t hear this kind of **** thirty years ago. Sure, schools weren’t paradises but at least teachers were allowed a minimum of control over their own students’ behavior. Bullies were suspended or given extra homework: if they failed to produce that that was a bad grade and if they piled enough by June they failed the grade. It wasn’t perfect but still a million times better than the complete chaos we witness today.
By the way, Sowell and his friend Walter Williams often talk about black-on-Asian violence.
Both say that as far as much violence in US goes, black-on-black is very common, white-on-white is very common, black-on-white is rare, white-on-black is rare, but black-on-Asian is surprisingly much more common than the previous two.
The point is that bullying, almost by definition, is low-key enough to fly under the radar of school authorities, while fighting back is more certain to get kids in trouble. I’m not saying that this is categorically so, but agreeing that there is a tendency to enforce rules against violence above a certain threshold regardless of the circumstances, it would be hard to disagree that the rules in part discourage kids from “standing up for themselves” and thus in effect protect the bullies.
It’s not really a question of either or. If a police state keeps the weak from protecting themselves, how do you think that will show itself in society? By them being too insecure, broken and vulnerable to stand up for themselves. An observer will conclude, “ha! it’s all because of insecurity”. But that the proximate cause is insecurity does not really contradict my story. Victims are insecure because they can’t effectively stand up for themselves. It isn’t really about the laws themselves, but about insecure kids having the expectation that they should depend on the authorities instead of dealing with problems themselves. That’s what I call ‘police state mentality’.
Yes, usually the kids who get bullied will be the insecure ones, and that might be because of parenting or genetics. But the question here is not so much why some kids are generally insecure, but why they feel helpless specifically in the face of bullying. And that question can to a large degree be answered by: Because of stupid authoritarian policy. I mean, it isn’t some accident that compulsory schools are the one place in society where bullying mainly takes place. If it was just about certain people being insecure it would be a more of a societal problem and more of a historic problem (see below).
Well, then you agree that you’re not as such contradicting me. The laws do not have to be the proximate cause to be at fault. Lack of personal responsibility is precisely how a police state can be expected to express itself in society. I mean, that’s the main lesson it teaches: Don’t deal with stuff yourself, wait for the government to help you out.
No direct evidence. Do you disagree that bullying in this magnitude didn’t exist in, say, the fifties?
Private schools I believe would have solved this problem. If you are a bully in a private school, you just get expelled. Very few parents want to send their children to schools in which their children are constantly being picked on. Today the education system is controlled by the left, and they look at this completely different than most of us, so it is not surprising that they set rules that prohibit kids to defend themselves. They have all this pacifist + "root cause’ agenda going on there. I don’t think we will ever understand what are they trying to achieve, but I’m pretty confident that if there were no regulations, and private schools were allowed, the vast majority of private schools wouldn’t have so much bullying.
Some of you guys need to do a search at the LewRockwell.com/blog under bullying. Like Kinsella said: “I must say the pro-bullying comments are baffling. They seem either confused or unlibertarian to me.” As to Student’s comment above Kinsella writes here:
"I don’t disagree that being the victim of violence can help shape one’s character; however, I don’t think this excuses the aggression. Some women survive rape too and become stronger, or other people survive muggings etc. But that does not excuse rape nor do we say we want just a little bit of rape in society to keep us on our toes. The ideal is the elimination of all aggression, even if this might make us more docile or something. It might be a good problem to have, to learn how to adapt to a violence-free world.
But in any event, if ‘adult’ crimes like rape, theft, murder, etc. are condemned, why in the world is bullying excused? I agree, people need to be stronger, but bullying is not only wrong, and intolerable, it is aggression, pure and simple.
To me, the key to libertarianism is a paramount concern for the victims of aggression. I don’t have any sympathy for aggressors, even if they have psychological reasons for being thugs, and even if their acts of aggression end up helping their victims–the ones who survive, anyway–to ‘forge strong characters.’ Bullies are nothing but thugs and should be physically beaten and imprisoned.
Therefore, I don’t see that it is childish to defend your children, or to hold people accountable for their violent, aggressive actions. Probably the best aproach would be to go to the dad of the bully. If he didn’t see reason and give his son a good, vigorous talking to and appropriate discipline–then, since corporal punishment or imprisonment or ejection from civil society is probably not possible, I would sue, yes, and also try to get the thug expelled from my kid’s school."
Bullies are mostly meatheads and “a well deserved suspension” to them translates into “a well deserved vacation.” After which, they will beat you more severely as “payback.” And more homework? Oohhhh scary! Like they care about their grades. You didn’t hear about this 30 years ago for these reasons stated by Jacob Huebert in Libertarianism Today:
“Children in government schools are placed in a highly unnatural situation—they are forced into a room all day every day, exclusively with children their own age, and as a result, their values are strongly influenced by other children rather than by interaction with adults. Homeschooled students, in contrast, interact with adults and children of varying ages, get more ‘hands on’ experience, and view adults, not peers, as their role models. (Indeed, studies show that homeschooled students are less susceptible to peer pressure than non-homeschoolers.)”
Therefore, as time goes on government schools create a constantly immaturing society, that gets more decivilized and infantile with each passing generation.
DeCoster: "Being part of an overly litigious society, even if to an infantile degree, does not mean we allow others to perpetuate what constitutes actual aggression against the person or property of another. The ‘infantileness’ comes from all of the illegitimate cases being taken into the court systems. This ‘it’s no big deal’ attitude says to us: ‘Oh, your ADD 13-year-old beat the crap out of my bookish 13-year-old for kicks, but I’d really hate to contribute to an already-packed court system, so I’ll let it be.’
There was a mention about a bully taking your kids lunch money, as if there is nothing wrong with this sort of theft. If a child’s lunch money is taken, whether it’s $5 or $20 or $100, you go get it back, however that is. If your child is beaten up by a bully (ie, his person is aggressed against), that is aggression, pure and simple. And aggression against the person of another is a crime, and the victim should take action against the perpetrator. And if the crime is serious enough, where restitution cannot be worked out between the parties, then it goes to a court (or hopefully, an arbitrator), where a third party decides the case."
Petty bullying occurs in only two places: prisons and schools. The reason that it occurs in schools is because schools are essentially prisons. Nobody may leave to get away from it and nobody may be kicked out to stop them from dishing it out.
Well, public school should be abolished, as well as the rest of the majority of the executive branch, and why stop there? The federal government is the biggest bully in the U.S.
As for solving bullying, well, violence is the only practical response to violence. To hell with anyone that wants to initiate infringing upon my liberty. I say give him the means to defend himself, with whatever he needs to prevent the onslaught of liberty. That’s my opinion, but it’ll never happen.
On a practical note, the best solution for people experiencing problems in school is to take a blunt object, sneak up behind the culprit at opportunity and start wailing on him. In appreciation of his own life he’ll never bully anyone again. Ideally you want do it when no witnesses are around and make sure he is too mangled to see who did it. He’ll know what it was for. You have to speak to animals in their own language.
Seems that the consensus here is that schools should be reduced to a dog eat dog world, built on fear, where mini gang wars take place unrestricted. I cant agree with that at all.
I completely understand your response. Makes the most sense. People are constantly on the side of the victims these days, and I don’t understand it. Infringing one’s innocense warrants the option of an immediate retaliation of a sufficient, equivalent degree.
I agree with those two arguments, but I dont agree that restrictions on school violence should be lifted, that’s madness in my opinion. Where I went to school there was someone who repeatedly bullied others, one time he went too far and the school expelled him; problem solved. Intolerance to violence on the part of the school is a far more effective way of dealing with bullying than just turning a blind eye to it.