Young Students Hiding Academic Talent To Avoid Bullying 684
jones_supa writes "The recent anti-bullying survey conducted by ABA brings up some interesting findings. According to it, more than 90% of the 1,000 11-16 year-olds surveyed said they had been bullied or seen someone bullied for being too intelligent or talented. Almost half of children and young people (49.5%) have played down a talent for fear of being bullied, rising to 53% among girls. One in 10 (12%) said they had played down their ability in science and almost one in five girls (18.8%) and more than one in 10 boys (11.4%) are deliberately underachieving in maths – to evade bullying. Worryingly, this means our children and young people are shying away from academic achievement for fear of victimization."
So Sad (Score:5, Insightful)
That people feel they need to hide their abilities because they would do better than others.
Re:So Sad (Score:5, Insightful)
Sad, true.
As a shy person I might have gone this route, but no amount of bullying would have been worse than my parents' reactions to a low grade.
As my father once said "what the hell is this B doing on your report card?!"
Re: (Score:3)
As my father once said "what the hell is this B doing on your report card?!"
Sounds as if he was quite concerned about the fact that you didn't complete enough pointless busywork or memorize enough useless information for a test. Grades are all-important, clearly.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Just exactly how many professional adults have to hide their abilities and intelligence? I bet it's the same percentage cited in the article. Bullying just doesn't happen to the intelligent in grade school, but throughout their life and in the workplace.
Re:So Sad (Score:5, Funny)
I usually have quite high karma in Slashdot, but I've started playing my comments down to avoid bullies. (At least that's what I tell people, am actually really pretty stupid and lazy, but I like the bullying excuse more.)
Re:So Sad (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:As Nietzsche so adroitly put it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:As Nietzsche so adroitly put it (Score:4, Interesting)
I will say this, I definitely received less bullying at a private school than I believe I would've at the local public school. I never felt like I should underperform in order to fit in better or to avoid bullying.
It might be interesting to read about a comparative study of bullying in private vs. public schools. I've had friends who went to both, and from that small sample, I'd guess that there's not a lot of significance to the public/private labels. It depends on the people running the school.
I got sent entirely to public schools. But I also learned at an early age to make friends with the school's authorities, and mention the bullying topic to them when there were opportunities. There were usually adults around who were interested, and wanted to help protect the kids. On several occasions, I and a few other kids worked with the cooperative adults to "entrap" some of the bullies, by enticing them into physical attacks when there were adult witnesses in a position to watch. There were interesting effects when they then reported the incidents to the bullies' parents and to the local legal authorities.
But this doesn't always work. As others have mentioned, sometimes there are no adults in a school who care, and sometimes they're even bullies and/or molesters themselves. It can be sorta difficult for a child to handle such situations successfully.
I did have one friend who ran into this in a private academy, where the local legal authorities were even unwilling to get involved with the school. After a couple of years, his parents understood the problem, pulled him out, and he did a lot better in the local public school.
(British readers should swap the terms "public" and "private" in this discussion. It's an interesting different between the dialects of English. ;-)
Re:As Nietzsche so adroitly put it (Score:5, Insightful)
I will say this, I definitely received less bullying at a private school than I believe I would've at the local public school. I never felt like I should underperform in order to fit in better or to avoid bullying.
Then you were lucky. I was terrorized at private school. Once I switched to public school, the bullying didn't actually stop, but it got down to a level I could deal with and eventually learn to defend myself against. As someone further up the thread noted, it's a whole lot harder to get the administration to deal with problem students when their parents are writing the checks. There's a class issue at work here too--my parents were sending me to schools they really couldn't afford in the (mistaken) belief that I'd get a better education that way, and being a middle-class nerd surrounded by rich juvenile delinquents is really a special kind of hell.
Re:So Sad (Score:5, Insightful)
Some people don't mind a high bar and enjoy the competition. Some people may not like the competition but are civilized enough to realize that's life. Then there's people like you.
Hold your head high ! (Score:5, Insightful)
What's so surprising is that the current crop of intelligent people have actually succumbed to the bullies by the inferiority complex sufferers.
I too, and many like me in my generation, and those before me, had gone through the gauntlet of taunts and shovings and beatings, just because we think differently.
Those that bullied us bullied us because they felt inferior. They INSTINCTIVELY KNEW that they are inferior, but their ego just won't that happened.
It's their internal struggles - ego versus instinct - that promoted some of them to act out in violence.
As I said, I too got beaten up just because I ain't one of them, but so what?
Why should I hide my own self just because someone else don't like who I am?
Hey, I am born into this world not because I am destined to follow dumbasses. I am born into this world to do what I must do - that is, to be myself.
Yes, I got beaten up, but that didn't affect my determination to be my own self, not even a bit.
I hold my head high because I know that I am not guilty of anything. The guilty party is THEM, not me.
Re:Hold your head high ! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
When really you were just an easy target in the wrong place and the wrong time; nothing more
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I hold my head high because I know that I am not guilty of anything.
Oh but you are! In a minor way. How many times did you not answer the Q because you wanted to give others a chance of answering or working it out?
Rhetorically, stuff that appears comparitively simple - like an answer regarding the comprehension of the topic (no mentation required) should be available to all members of an attentive class. Why jump in? That denies others in the cohort.
Then, when skills like interpretation, inference and other words beginning with 'i' are required to produce an answer, become
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I hold my head high because I know that I am not guilty of anything.
Oh but you are! In a minor way. How many times did you not answer the Q because you wanted to give others a chance of answering or working it out?
Look man, there's something known as "Intelligence" and there's something else which is called "Wisdom".
Be able to answer the question is nothing.
Knowing WHEN to answer the question takes real wisdom.
I did not (and still do not) blurb out answers just because I can, I will only do so _after_ everybody else (mostly from the "doh!" category) in the room were stumped.
Re:Hold your head high ! (Score:5, Interesting)
Concealing your true skill level is something different than slacking down to that level. As long as you're getting into the schools you want, it absolutely doesn't matter what your junior high grades were after you finish college/university - and most bright kids do go on to higher education. Knowing this is a temporary situation some kids may be simply showing a bit of street smarts by not provoking an inferiority complex, I don't think just among bullies but also among your social circle that consider themselves your peers. As people grow up they'll act less immature about it and they can return to their true skill level.
The only exception for that is if you're bright enough to skip classes/years, but that has its own sets of pros and cons. I've met a few that were clearly math wizards, at 10-12 they were dealing with math for 15-20 year olds and had accelerated classes with much older students. And they were all kind of odd and I don't mean because they were obviously bright and skilled, but they'd been hanging around older people so much they were like awkwardly premature adults. They saw kids their own age much like an older teen would see a bunch of brats and at the same time they didn't really fit in with the older ones either. If I knew I had a really bright kid I think I'd worry less about reaching his full genius potential and more on not raising a Sheldon.
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There were those of us who had brain and brawn, beaten up, no, the odd fight certainly, ostracised definitely, meh. Hiding intellect to fit it, a sensible adoption to a society that worships "From The Gut Thinking" and routinely publicly lambasts "Intellectual Elites", for being, 'er' 'um', well intellectual elites and knowing the difference between for profit lies and the truth.
The problem is not the schools the problem of course is in idiot shit head narcissistic fuckers like Glen Beck, Bill OReilly, R
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What's so surprising is that the current crop of intelligent people have actually succumbed to the bullies by the inferiority complex sufferers.
I too, and many like me in my generation, and those before me, had gone through the gauntlet of taunts and shovings and beatings, just because we think differently.
Those that bullied us bullied us because they felt inferior. They INSTINCTIVELY KNEW that they are inferior, but their ego just won't that happened.
It's their internal struggles - ego versus instinct - that promoted some of them to act out in violence.
As I said, I too got beaten up just because I ain't one of them, but so what?
Why should I hide my own self just because someone else don't like who I am?
Hey, I am born into this world not because I am destined to follow dumbasses. I am born into this world to do what I must do - that is, to be myself.
Yes, I got beaten up, but that didn't affect my determination to be my own self, not even a bit.
I hold my head high because I know that I am not guilty of anything. The guilty party is THEM, not me.
You got beat up because you're selfish and inconsiderate. That makes you inferior, not superior. I expect you sacrificed large aspects of the human experience in your efforts to forge yourself into a useful tool for others to use, and tell yourself constantly that your usefulness makes you better than others who didn't decide to sacrifice themselves in that way, but it doesn't. I get it because I used to be just like you, before I learned humility.
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I agree with every point here, and it's all gung-ho to say "to hell with the world!", but that makes acquiring and keeping friends quite difficult.
Never had your lines of conversation at parties shut down because 1/2 the people in the room didn't understand a word of it? "But how about that game last night! Right?!". Isn't this article essentially about the same thing?
They're not bullies in the "wedgie" sense of the word, but in the end your adult friends can also be "bullies" in more subtle ways, and then
Re:Hold your head high ! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hold your head high ! (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is showing your intelligence considered flaunting but excelling on the athletic field considered the, thing to do and celebrated?
Re:Hold your head high ! (Score:4, Interesting)
Because the guys who do well on the athletic field are better at punching people they don't like than the guys from the chess club. At least, that's how it was when I was in school.
For me, sports were not in any sense easy. I never played any kind of eye-hand coordination games or running games with my parents outside of school, so I sucked at them, and had no idea that I only sucked because I hadn't practiced. The "smart kid who plays sports" dodge is great if you can pull it off, but it's not just a matter of choice—you have to be fortunate enough to be able to actually pull it off, or it's just another reason to get punched.
The really sad thing about all this advice is that kids, whether they are jocks or geeks, are dumb shits when it comes to understanding things social. It takes years of practice to get good at it. You can fake it 'til you make it if you're at the top of the heap, but the bottom line is that I, and probably most of the kids I knew in school, even the popular kids, could _really_ have used some instruction on how to behave well in social interactions with our peers. Unfortunately, I never got any of that, and neither did they, so I learned it by trial and error over the next thirty years or so. I don't know how it worked out for them.
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I can only attribute this to unions changing work rules and salaries so that it became too costly to use these staff that way, and in addition, they gained the right to avoid duty in the halls as a bargaining point, preferring the teachers lounge or outdoors for a short trip by car using the frequent single and double period gaps introduced by the new work rules.
Not to disrupt your anti-union rant, but the issue is that they are simply not asked to. They are required to be in their classrooms, and not in the halls. If they were in the halls, they wouldn't be in the classrooms. If they are in the halls, they aren't in the bathrooms. There were always places away from others. Teachers can't be everywhere. The difference is that the parents are worse. The parents are the boomers and the boomers children, and they were raised to be poor parents. Blame the previ
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Read with more care. I am describing changes over my lifetime. When I was young, the teachers did all these things. Then you get automatic cost of living increases
called COLA, and add 2-3% annual increase and add benefits and pensions, and restrictive work rules so teachers could not do those tasks. The socialists wanted extra bodies for those, and there was not enough 44. They have broken the system, it now cannot be sustained. There is not now, nor will there ever be enough money to pay all the underfund
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We knew what we were doing, some teachers are smarter than others. Early in your career, your wages are quite low. Teachers have an incremented scale, with years of service and acquired teaching skills both allowing movement up the grid and across it. Both motions are in the direction of increased salary.
Those low on both grids are the keenest - obviously. I almost peaked out on both grids, being an engineer and having a masters - PhD would get more, but the time to get a PhD by taking a leave and returnin
Re:So Sad (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So Sad (Score:4, Interesting)
The reason they have to hide their abilities is that they set the bar too high and make everyone else look like dumbasses. Of course you are going to beat the shit out of them. They are making life more difficult for us normal people. There are consequences for that.
In that case, authorities ought to do the usual thing - make it an aggravating circumstance, just like with racially motivated crimes.
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I'm in my early 20's. ... Times have changed and I do think children are meaner than what they use to.
I think it may always appear that way. Children have always been uncivilized brutes needing direction not to be. They're dependent upon their parents to give them that direction. That's what's really lacking, especially nowadays.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
This!
I was never bullied by other kids because I was smart. I was bullied because I was awkward, poorly socialized, and I was bad at sports. I was bullied because I was bad at certain skills.
I was in the gifted and AP classes, and I always scored in the high 90% in any standardized tests I took. The other kids were more apt to ask me if they could cheat off me, then make fun of me for being smarter then them.
I learned in high school that it made my life easier if I let them cheat off me. I was invited t
This is news? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
witness the support for creationism and denial of climate change
This doesn't have anything to do with the article. The article is about bullying, not your favorite religious/political issue.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
- Creationism is, among other things, a religious issue in that religion is typically the determining factor in whether one believes it.
- Both creationism and climate change are, among other things, political issues in that politicians are elected based on their views on these issues.
- Even if I stipulate to your meaningless claim that "Creationism" and "Climate Change" are "just anti-evidence ignorance" [sic], it doesn't change my original point that these issues have no
Re:This is news? (Score:4, Insightful)
Human caused climate change disbelief is the thought that regardless of vast scientific agreement based on hard research and evidence, humans are not in fact causing any form of climate change even if it is occurring.
Call both of those "religion and politics" if you will, but that's just displaying your lack of analytic skills which in a normal studious person can quickly identify these are both just beliefs that evidence should be thrown out and ignored. Throwing out evidence and ignoring objective analysis is the greatest practice of the intellectual underachiever, which is what this article is claiming our country's culture has pressured people towards.
Re:This is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
but that's just displaying your lack of analytic skills which in a normal studious person can quickly identify
Again, you regress to Ad Hominem attacks. Why are you so quick to point out how little estimation you have for other peoples' "analytical skills"?
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The link between the two is that there will always be social pressure to conform, rather than rely on facts, hard evidence and logic. Ad hominem and appeal-to-authority/majority fallacies are just too easy to fall for.
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They rehash shit like this every 10 years or so. OMFG the poor young people... same shit has been happening since the begging of modern time. Someone has to make their position look good on paper.
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Longer ...
Being intelligent is not a felony. But most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor.
Heinlein, from the 1950's
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Civilized people behave civilized, barbaric people behave barbaric.
Guess who's most likely to start a fight and who's most likely to win that fight?
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And the assault on people that do well financially.
This also doesn't have anything to do with the article. The article is about bullying, not the "assault" on fiscal conservatism.
Would anybody else care to attempt an on-topic post?
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Actually, I think my comment and the one from 14erCleaner are 100% on topic. Children are taught very young that to be different is to be wrong. Good grades are different from the norm unfortunately, and the kid gets pummeled for it.
People who argue about the topics we just pointed out suffer the same fate (in a way). The point is that it is a learned behavior , and starts very young.
Re:This is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
This also doesn't have anything to do with the article. The article is about bullying, not the "assault" on fiscal conservatism.
Just to be clear, the right wing in the US is not advocating for fiscal conservatism. Conservatism is keeping with historical norms. Rather, they are advocating for fiscal extremism, levels of taxation progressiveness lower than anything in the last 50 years. That's the opposite of conservative.
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Conservatism is about conserving what has worked in the past.
There is simply no path back from where we are to where we were (public dept is to high, regulatory over-burden too hard to reverse). All we're left with is arguing about how to get somewhere sane. Some conservatives aren't doing it very intelligently*. Other so-called conservatives are taking advantage of the situation. Some few are trying to fix problems, but are restrained by idiots from their side and decried by extremist from the other.
Re:This is news? (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly.
Are you bullied because of your 98% score in the maths quiz? Or because you're a weirdo who picks his nose, and stands way too close when trying to have a conversation?
In my experience at school, the most bullied people weren't smart. One was smelly (he must have had constipation and some faecal leakage I guess, and his home didn't have a shower, only a bath) and would have only been about average academically - he turned out okay as an adult I remember. Another kid I remember used to insult someone randomly, then run away because he knew he'd get the bash. I remember at a school concert him sitting on his mother's knee, he would have been 15.
I remember being punched in the stomach once for no reason, but that was by an older kid who would have had no idea about my grades. Probably because I was weak looking and he didn't like my hair or something.
Sure my friends/classmates might have said something like "geek", or "schoooolaaaaar [said sarcastically]" or whatever we said in 90s, but no-one was actually bullied for being smart - just occasionally for the baggage that can come with being academically smart. Being smart was a good thing, because at least that could explain some of the weirdness and was a valued skill.
My thought is that "bullying" now means "said something mean to me once". Whereas I think of it as the daily harassment of someone with constant verbal barrage, destruction of property, deliberate ostracism, demeaning and devaluing comments about the victim, and physical violence and irritation.
Idiocracy here we come. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Idiocracy here we come. (Score:5, Funny)
WHOOSH.
That was either the joke going over your head.
Or the shotgun blast of rock salt heading towards your ass.
Re: (Score:3)
'This is not funny. This is bullying. This is wrong.'
So? What's new? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So? What's new? (Score:5, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Socrates [wikipedia.org]
Re:So? What's new? (Score:5, Funny)
Socrates' last words:
"I drank what?"
Re:So? What's new? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
The post you're replying to was an oblique reference to the movie _Real Genius_ where Val Kilmer's character invents a Socrates quote for the sake of comedy.
I did the opposite in school (Score:2)
All the kids hated and insulted me
So, I made friends with the teachers and school administration
Concentrated totally on academic excellence
Totally ignored the other kids
Hey I did that (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
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Yeah, I found out in college that you don't want to correct the teacher and then prove it mathematically. He was wrong about a crucial part of power supply design, but I quickly realized I should have kept my damned mouth shut and just gotten that question "wrong". It would have done less damage.
Both sides of the coin (Score:2, Interesting)
Talent schools do exist, a lot of them are private though.
Being in the top 10% of your math class doesn't make you a math prodigy.
Smart people who act "cool" tend to get applause for their "talents" , not bullied
Lifting weights never killed anyone in this age group (at least I don't think)
Where the f' are the parents in all this?
In life in general, sometimes it's better to fit in than be the nail that gets hammered
If the kids actually cared about excelling in their subjec
Immediate benefit of AP classes (Score:2)
Last, but not least, AP Calc has yet to help me in life
Don't knock AP Calculus.
It's a lot cheaper to take the class in high school and pay for the AP test than to pay college tuition later.
Parents (Score:4, Insightful)
Where the f' are the parents in all this?
That is a fantastic question. But... Whose parents? Note that the victims parents can't teach the bully that he's misbehaving.
When I was in junior high, I was bullied frequently and mercilessly. My parents did get involved. They were told by the school councilor that I just had a self-esteem problem (I didn't) which somehow made myself a target (blame the victim, anyone?). They were told by teachers that there was nothing they could do (not true). They were told by administrators that everything was fine. They weren't permitted to contact the other students' parents. I blame the school system (primarily) for permitting bullying.
Re: (Score:3)
How many unexplainable deaths did you have in your class before everyone realized that it's better not to bully the chem guy?
I don't know were you went to school, but the chem prodigy in our school wasn't a vindictive murderer. He was the guy who made really good meth. Real premo stuff.
Adults too. (Score:3)
In a work environment, just as in school, you get along by pretending to be like everyone else, and as dumb as everyone else, particularly your managers. Lip service is always given to tolerance, but lip service is all it is.
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Opposite of Asia (Score:5, Interesting)
In Asia, overachievers and well-studying kids are looked up to. While that still doesn't make them the 'cool' kids, they do just fine socially and have no such problems as TFA.
I suggest North American culture change its stigma of nerds, geeks, and intelligence, or face vastly deteriorating social values and social/scientific progress.
Re: (Score:3)
yes, overachievers are respected in the east. but bullying is just as strong in the east
so who is bullied?
the misfits
stupidity is the rallying cry of the western bully. conformity is the rallying cry of the eastern bully
and i will assert to you that the misfits hold more of the keys to cultural, political, social, and technological advancement in society than a mindlessly conforming unoriginal egghead
furthermore, we'll just wait for the asian eggheads to come to the west:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/01/wo [nytimes.com]
Not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
The Election is Over, and the Math Geeks Won.
Obama's data geeks have made Karl Rove and Dick Morris obsolete
The Real Election-Day Winner? Math Geeks.
Math nerds score big wins with superstorm Sandy, Obama victory
A library datebase, not just for science nerds
This is only from recent events, but the same type of headlines are repeated all the time. Why the hell would any child want to be good at something that puts them into a category that is openly disdained in our culture?
Playing down talent? (Score:2)
I prefer to think of it as hiding my secret identity.
No Child Left Alone... (Score:3)
made things a lot worse. When my oldest (who is actually good at math) went to school, he never got in trouble because he'd get some A's, a few B's and occasionally he'd even get an F... by now, math and other subjects are so dumbed down that any reasonably smart person gets straight A's - and suddenly you're being punished for being too smart... In the end, we need kids to fail more in every way.
Peter.
Good. Esp for India and China (Score:3, Interesting)
Dearies, when I was growing up in India, I was very good in academics. Yes I was good in a number of extra curricular activities too, but acads were stellar. I was fit, but except for some recreational table-tennis, I was not much into competitive sports. Oh btw, I was a small kid in stature compared to others. Anyway, I was actually respected, especially because of the acads. And thankfully the culture has not changed much at all. Kids who are talented in sciences and acads, or other stuff, get respect, and are considered cool enough to hang out with - it's not the losers who sit around and are bulky that are considered cool (well, India being India, if the losers start getting physical, rest assured there are external contractors whom your parents can hire to take care of the matter quickly - and the losers know that too).
Anyway - this is good news for India and china. At least their brainy kids would not be beaten up and turned away from studies by the idiots. No immediate worries of ending up as an idiocracy. I guess future generations of Indian and chinese kids will thank the prolific US 'cool' football and basketball stars for beating up the brainy ones and damaging them permanently.
Good show USA.
Relevant Freeman Dyson quote (Score:5, Informative)
This has been going on for a long time, and no, it isn't just public schools.
George Orwell mentioned getting mocked -- by the headmaster's wife, for cripes sake -- for being part of a group that collected insects. ("Such, Such Were the Joys.")
But the OA made me think of this Freeman Dyson quote:
"So it happened that I belonged to a small minority of boys who were lacking in physical strength and athletic prowess, interested in other things besides football, and squeezed between the twin oppressions of whip and sandpaper. We hated the headmaster with his Latin grammar and we hated even more the boys with their empty football heads. So what could the poor helpless minority of intellectuals, later and in another country to be known as nerds, do to defend ourselves? We found our refuge in a territory that was equally inaccessible to our Latin-obsessed headmaster and our football-obsessed schoolmates. We found our refuge in science. With no help from the school authorities, we founded a science society. As a persecuted minority, we kept a low profile. We held our meetings quietly and inconspicuously. We could do no real experiments. All we could do was share books and explain to each other what we didn't understand. But we learned a lot. Above all, we learned those lessons that can never be taught by formal courses of instruction; that science is a conspiracy of brains against ignorance, that science is a revenge of victims against oppressors, that science is a territory of freedom and friendship in the midst of tyranny and hatred."
-- From "To Teach or Not to Teach," 1990
Schools are the worst bullies (Score:4, Insightful)
Alternatives: http://www.educationrevolution.org/ [educationrevolution.org]
From John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm [johntaylorgatto.com]
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Our problem in understanding forced schooling stems from an inconvenient fact: that the wrong it does from a human perspective is right from a systems perspective. You can see this in the case of six-year-old Bianca, who came to my attention because an assistant principal screamed at her in front of an assembly, "BIANCA, YOU ANIMAL, SHUT UP!" Like the wail of a banshee, this sang the school doom of Bianca. Even though her body continued to shuffle around, the voodoo had poisoned her.
Do I make too much of this simple act of putting a little girl in her place? It must happen thousands of times every day in schools all over. I've seen it many times, and if I were painfully honest I'd admit to doing it many times. Schools are supposed to teach kids their place. That's why we have age-graded classes. In any case, it wasn't your own little Janey or mine.
Most of us tacitly accept the pragmatic terms of public school which allow every kind of psychic violence to be inflicted on Bianca in order to fulfill the prime directive of the system: putting children in their place. It's called "social efficiency." But I get this precognition, this flash-forward to a moment far in the future when your little girl Jane, having left her comfortable home, wakes up to a world where Bianca is her enraged meter maid, or the passport clerk Jane counts on for her emergency ticket out of the country, or the strange lady who lives next door.
I picture this animal Bianca grown large and mean, the same Bianca who didn't go to school for a month after her little friends took to whispering, "Bianca is an animal, Bianca is an animal," while Bianca, only seconds earlier a human being like themselves, sat choking back tears, struggling her way through a reading selection by guessing what the words meant.
In my dream I see Bianca as a fiend manufactured by schooling who now regards Janey as a vehicle for vengeance. In a transport of passion she:
1. Gives Jane's car a ticket before the meter runs out.
2. Throws away Jane's passport application after Jane leaves the office.
3. Plays heavy metal music through the thin partition which separates Bianca's apartment from Jane's while Jane pounds frantically on the wall for relief.
4. All the above.
You aren't compelled to loan your car to anyone who wants it, but you are compelled to surrender your school-age child to strangers who process children for a livelihood, even though one in every nine schoolchildren is terrified of physical harm happening to them in school, terrified with good cause; about thirty-three are murdered there every year. From 1992 through 1999, 262 children were murdered in school in the United States. Your great-great-grandmother didn't have to surrender her children. What happened?
If I demanded you give up your television to an anonymous, itinerant repairman who needed work you'd think I was crazy; if I came with a policeman who forced you to pay that repairman even after he broke your set, you would be outraged. Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?
I want to open up concealed aspects of modern schooling such as the deterioration it forces in the morality of parenting. You have no say at all in choosing your teachers. You know nothing about their backgrounds or families. And the state knows little more than you do. This is as radical a piece of social engineering as the human imagination can conceive. What does it mean?
One thing you do know is how unlikely it will be for any teacher to understand the personality of your particular child or anything significant about yo
To quote Chemisor (97276) (Score:5, Insightful)
To a nerd, acquiring social skills merely means learning that he can never mention anything he really cares about, and that he must learn to politely endure other people's boring rants without showing it. And then people wonder why he dislikes socializing.
People don't get bullied for being good at soccer or for being good at art.
the social violence of little angels (Score:5, Insightful)
There was a girl in my class in middle school who was first rate at figure skating, and never got picked on at all. There were kids who were good at art and other things ... no hassles. Precious athletes, for the most part, exempt from the social tax on excellence.
There was a girl hideously deformed in the jaw and neck who showed up one day. No one said a word for two months, then the dam burst. I'd been in a children's hospital down the hall from a burn unit. I wasn't having any of it. Most of the adults who came to visit were so green around the gills to step onto that ward you almost needed a bucket in the hallway.
Sam Harris says we grant religious beliefs too much automatic deference. I think this also extends to our little rotters. There's something terribly vicious in young children that we neither discuss nor study to the extent warranted by their appalling capacity for social cruelty.
Not my little angel! Well, I suspect your little angel has become adept at emulating attitudes learned at home.
The social violence of little angels should be news. Today and every day. Do people think it just goes away, or does it merely mutate into more mature forms? I'm not trying to stamp out scorn or derision. That's a fact of life, man. But I do think that the use of "gay" as a generic adjective of derision should get the little rotters shuffled onto a short bus for the social learning disabled.
High time "gay" went the way of DUI, where nearly everyone looks at you funny, like you're charting a life course for a wall-mounted chrome toilet with no lid.
Lack of sufficiently early segregation. (Score:2)
This problem eventually goes away as people are sorted into classes based on their achievement.
It is caused because schools are a "melting pot" for people from various social strata, personalities and intellectual levels.
As people go through life, they tend to segregate and associate with similar people.So bullying based on intelligence diminishes or goes away entirely. I mean, you're not going to be bullied by your peers for being smart if you're a grad student in engineering physics.
The fix is to identify
Am I the only one... (Score:2)
...that was bothered by them referring to 12% as "one in 10"? It's closer to one in eight (12.5%) or one in nine (11.11...%) than one in ten (10%).
Maybe if they had spent less time writing about non-newsworthy topics that have remained unchanged for decades and more time studying their math while not caring what other people said about their intelligence they'd have not made a mistake like that.
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:5, Funny)
They were just intentionally making dumb mistakes so the other authors wouldn't bully them.
What to do? (Score:2)
Pay Attention to the Messenger (Score:2)
An anti bullying organization does a study and finds alarming rates of anti-academic bullying. Oh the surprise!
I went through the UK school system in a steelworks-and-mining area. Being academically successful was not a problem. I had friends up and down the academic scale. There was a palpable mutual dislike between the sports types (rugby mostly) and the academic types. But that was not a 'problem' academically. The teachers were divided along similar lines.
It probably goes on, but 90% is a nonsense numbe
Fuck teachers (Score:4, Insightful)
If there's bullying going on in a classroom, it's the teachers fault. Period. I've always said it's a sad truth that your children are safer in a bar than they are at school. If the shit that went down in your local high-school happened anywhere else people would go to jail.
Get rid of zero tolerance for violence (Score:3)
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You don't hit back when they are all around you, you hit back later, when you catch the bully on their own, and break both his ankles. And hands. And beat his head so badly he cant see through the swelling in his eyes. Then you do the same to anyone who said anything out of turn while the initial incident was occurring. And if the school let the initial incident go they let this one go too. Or the school send the aggressor and their allies to jail for the initial incident. Either is fine by me, free for all
Studying from home (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Studying from home (Score:4, Interesting)
We're homeschooling my younger stepson. It was becoming clear that elementary school was simply a waste of his time, even when he was attending a progressive private school (with a generous tuition assistance program). He learns more efficiently on his own initiative. We live in an urban area, one in which there's a fairly substantial community of homeschoolers who coordinate activity, and of course there's the Internet. I'd say he has far more social interaction than I did at his age, both with other children and with adults.
From everything I've heard about modern educational theory, elementary school is pretty much pointless, and I'm increasingly dubious about the structure of later stages of formal education. I took classes on programming and system administration, and that prompted me to study specific topics that I wouldn't have, otherwise -- but, most of what I know about those subjects, I knew from tinkering with Linux on my own desktop, and most of the topics I studied that I wouldn't have on my own initiative, have proven to be obsolete or irrelevant to both my personal and my professional work. Meanwhile, I'm watching my ten-year-old, rapidly learning the ins and outs of package management and system administration, because of his interest in Minecraft.
The main problem with homeschooling, in general, is that I think it's relatively unusual for most people families to be able to ensure there's an adult at home to supervise a younger child. Fortunately, my wife is in graduate school, and my work schedule gives me several weekdays off, so there's always an adult around in our household; we also have adult relatives nearby, as backup. But, I think more broadly yet, our social and economic organization is grossly irrational. We work far more hours than we ought to -- real wages have been static in the US for forty years, even as productivity has more than doubled, so I think we'd all be better off in many ways if our wages were increased, we worked fewer hours, and we did less useless crap that just wastes resources to prop up an irrational economic system based on perpetual expansion.
All the 'anti bullying' efforts are bullshit (Score:3, Insightful)
The only way to deal with them is bash them. Sorry of that's not PC New York Times and soccer mommy friendly enough for you but that, fellow geeks and nerds is what you have to do.
Someone bullies you, break their arm. If they and their thug friends come back at you break their heads. If their mommies and daddies complain tell them everyone can live in a new house after their burns to the ground.
They're not human, they're animals and this is what you do with animals. You beat them until they stop.
Re:All the 'anti bullying' efforts are bullshit (Score:5, Funny)
"Someone bullies you, break their arm. If they and their thug friends come back at you break their heads. If their mommies and daddies complain tell them everyone can live in a new house after their burns to the ground."
You left out the quote attribution. Is that from Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold?
Re:All the 'anti bullying' efforts are bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
I wish it had been Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold. Littleton, CO would be better for it.
In school, I was bullied too. Here's the kicker - my dad was a cop, gunsmith, and holder of a Federal Firearms License. Yes, that means he sold guns.
My home had guns stacked like cordwood. I'm not exaggerating. I had my first rifle at age 11 and became very proficient - most of the guys on the force considered my dad the marksman of the group. Probably came from his stint in the military, but whatever. I think you get the picture. I knew my way around most guns, could hit what I wanted to, and had easy access to weapons of all sorts.
Here's the thing. I never took the bully's shit. They called me a name, I embarrassed them. They put a tack on my chair, I stabbed them in the kneecap with my automatic pencil. By the time I got to the back half of high school, I had no problems with people whatsoever.
You see, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold just sat there and took it. They tried to find an outlet for their rage - video games, violent movies, blowing stuff up in the woods - but in the end, it was never enough. Because they never learned to send the evil back where it came from.
Hate is like acid. Try to contain it, and you become the only thing that can hold it - glass. And when you do shatter, it gets really damn messy.
Eric and Dylan shattered. I never did, because I realized a long time earlier that holding it in was the path to self-destruction.
No one cared about grades when I was at school (Score:3)
I graduated in the early 2000's, and no one ever cared about any one else's grades or smarts. The people who got low grades didn't care about grades, or just joked about how low they could get their GPA. Those with a high GPA never caught flak for it. The low achievers didn't care; they were focused on their own little world.
Not to say no one ever got picked on. I distinctly remember the guy who almost lit me on fire with a zippo on the school bus, but that was because I was a small and easy target.
Narcissism, thy name is Mensa (Score:3, Insightful)
There are a LOT of smart people out there that nobody hates. Perhaps it says more about you and your ego, than about "society" that they don't like you.
I had a chat after a Cub Scout outing once, with one kid who was crying that "all the other kids hate me because I'm so much smarter than them".
Obviously, I couldn't say it to the kid, who just needed a sympathetic shoulder at the moment, but the fact is: any kid whose parents have taught him that he's such a special snowflake that he could even HAVE such an egotistical, obnoxious thought, is in for trouble.
And it's NOT because "he's so much smarter than everyone else". Not by a long shot.
The problem is this (Score:5, Informative)
A word has been invented and used to label what is essentially assault, simply because it is minors assaulting minors. Can we PLEASE call it what it is and DEAL WITH IT as ASSAULT? As in, treat it as a CRIMINAL OFFENCE instead of just saying "kids will be kids" ::rolleyes::? Let's make examples of these so-called "bullies", criminalise their activities and maybe the incidence will go DOWN.
I wasn't "bullied" at school. I was ASSAULTED. My overachievement in all fields of study suffered, so by the time I got to college age I just couldn't be arsed any more. I went from straight-A to C/D/E/F in my GCSEs, and scraped by in A-level physics and biology and completely failed advanced math. Fortunately I managed to beat that stigma and went on to run several successful businesses, all of which I parted company with reputation intact and no creditors.
As an aside, schools don't like it when you send them Cease & Desist notices to get them to address problems of targetted assaults on their students which they're doing nothing about. They like it even less when you pull your own kids from their institutions citing "multiple assaults by students and teaching staff" with dates and times. They go all out to perjure themselves in sudden and unexpected parallel care proceedings when you file suit against the local education authority for failure to perform to expectations as Corporate Parents in ensuring student safety.
So it's not just a culture of "bullying" that schools are neglecting until it's thrown into the limelight by pissed off parents who are having to take their kids to the hospital every two weeks, it's a culture of perpetuation of the problem on the part of the institutions, whose staff themselves are PART OF THE PROBLEM. Let's have this all out in the open so we can DEAL WITH IT, before more kids die at the hands of these "bullies" through terminal attacks or suicides!
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I totally agree.
My experience of early elementary school was that the bullies were actually encouraged by many of the teachers and administrators, and I was explicitly blamed for "inciting" them.
We live in a cruelly hierarchical society, in which victim-blaming is extremely common.
Re:So what else is new? (Score:5, Insightful)
and 90s and 00s but the response shouldn't be to toughen up. it should be to take the fucking bullies and remove them.
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I read the classics alot. I liked it before all this multiverse stuff.
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No, it frightens "grownups" too. It's just that later in life you're segregated away from those people by your education, career, and your income: where you live, where you shop, where you go for fun and so on.
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They'd get nailed to the wall and whatever video games they play would be excoriated in Congress. I got in more trouble defending myself than my attackers ever got in for attacking me.
Was the main reason I got into some light theft and break and enter when I was in my teens. I'd realized that I'd never seen the school administration blame the right person for anything, so I started doing things to get back something for the times I'd been punished. Never got caught for anything I did.
Re:Some kids are bully magents (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm, let's apply this logic to a few other scenarios:
- An abusive husband likes to call his wife a 'stupid f-cking c-nt' and beat her, and you know what she needs to do (according to snsh), she needs to "keep her cool or joke at it, then he'll show her respect -- it all comes down to how she handles herself in those moments", you know.
- Here's another one: An abusive boss likes to push and spit on some of the employees and call them stupid useless idiots. What they need to do, is keep their cool or joke at it, then the boss will show them respect. It all comes down to how they handle themselves.
Does this seem stupid yet? It's bad enough when the victim is an adult, now you think a five year old should put up with it? Really? These actions are criminal when adults do them.
Re:Some kids are bully magents (Score:4, Interesting)
Holy fucking shit, how did you get a single positive mod, let alone 2 or more?
How was I, weighing 95 pounds my first day of high school*, supposed to react when the fat tub of shit asshole in my gym class decided to tackle me INDOORS onto the hard gym floor for no reason and knock the wind out of me? Fuck you and fuck him.
What if I come to your house with a gun, and you're unarmed? If you act afraid, does that make it OK? And what if you stand your ground and I STILL shoot you? How would you like that?
Tell me exactly what defensive options I had at 12 years old (or any age, really) against someone who is literally 50% larger than me. With friends present. Not ALL bullies fall into the bullshit movie-of-the-week "if you stand your ground, he'll respect you and leave you alone" category. In fact, I've never met one like that in my life. All the bullies I've ever known were just fucked-up cliquish assholes who never let anyone into their club.
Typical scenario: bully comes up to you and decides to fuck with you. Option a: Act scared, get beat up. Option b: stand your ground, get beat up. I've seen it happen.
Yes, kids need confidence, but thinking that being meek in ANY way makes you deserving of ANY amount of bad treatment is so totally beyond belief I don't even know where to start.
What you're talking about applies to literally maybe 1/2 of 1% of bullies. Sure, bullies might be insecure assholes who need to make others feel bad in order for themselves to feel good, but they also usually have the size, the strength, and the friends (and, later in life, the political skills) to make your life miserable no matter what you do.
* Private college-prep high school, by the way. Just because some kid's parents have money and send him to a private school doesn't mean he's a great guy. My school was roughly evenly divided: half the kids were pretty bright and their parents wanted them to go somewhere "better" than a regular high school, and the other half were bright kids that maybe didn't work so hard, or average kids that the parents were hoping to make smarter, thanks to tougher classes and stronger discipline. That is to say, it wasn't just full of super-bright kids who chose to be there and never bullied each other. And the ones who were assholes on the first day were still assholes at graduation.
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One thing that might work is to try to kill the bully in the next fight. You'll get beaten up no matter what, but if you can hurt the bully you might be placed into the crazy people to avoid category, and that's a win in this case. You won't succeed in killing the guy, of course, and you don't really want to, but make a serious attempt at it. Failing that, do anything you can to hurt the bully. If beating you up has a risk attached to it, you'll be a less attractive target.
This isn't the sort of advi
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In a world where people truly respected the personal rights of others, your hypothetical woman should be able to dance through the park stark naked and not fear sexual assault.
Sadly however we know that isn't a low risk activity. But apparently, neither is sleeping in your own bed at home behind a locked door - there was an incident in my home town last week of a woman suffering an aggravated sexual assault at home in her own bed. It certainly wasn't the first news report I'd heard of similar assaults.
Blami