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Brian Dixon's avatar

Empathy fail on your part there, gato. Shame on you. Yes, you have a bit of a point about the virtue of toughness, and there certainly doesn't need to be any government commissioner against fat shaming, but your excuses for schoolyard bullying are not only cruel but fundamentally illiberal in the classical sense. The main cause of bullying at school is the harshly authoritarian nature of school. Luckily for us libertarians, the policies that really work to prevent persistent bullying are the very same policies that let kids have an early start with personal liberty. The youth rights/child lib movement may lean leftward demographically, but I see no reason philosophically why this should be so.

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la chevalerie vit's avatar

“ The main cause of bullying at school is the harshly authoritarian nature of school.”

Uh, no.

Bullying’s main caus is bullies: enabled assholes who take their angst out on weaker kids.

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The Real Mary Rose's avatar

Shitty parenting, which gets shittier every year.

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la chevalerie vit's avatar

Won’t argue that. I hold that bullying is at its core an issue of personal responsibility. Bullies need to be larned the lesson. We could do this the easy way, or the hard way.

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Brian Dixon's avatar

I must correct your factual error. Persistent bullying is indeed preventable at the institutional level: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/freedom-to-learn/201006/freedom-from-bullying-how-a-school-can-be-a-moral-community

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la chevalerie vit's avatar

Schools do not cause bullying, bullies cause bullying. That is a fact of personal responsibility that cannot be transferred to an institution. This article is a perfect example of enabling crying to be an emergency, the subject of EGM post, in the form of glorified mob rule and tyranny.

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JC's avatar

It's the environment. Disease of any sort loves a toxic environment. Schools - and social media - combined - are toxic environments in which the Bully Disease thrives.

A healthy biome ejects the bully.

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la chevalerie vit's avatar

True enough, yet we cannot release bullies from personal responsibilty.

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Brian Dixon's avatar

Is there mob rule and tyranny at the Sudbury Valley School or its many imitators? No, there isn't. Instead, there is liberal democracy and the rule of law. Mr. gato has a bit of a point on the virtue of toughness, but there is also virtue in compassion, the baby you're throwing out with the bathwater.

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la chevalerie vit's avatar

Yes there is. It is very far beyond a reasonable process. Simple, clear, written rules and policies suffice for discipline. The Sudbury “process” unnecessarily enables arbitrary, subjective control based on tyranny of a majority a.k.a. ganging up. Banning from class for a week because person A didn’t like something person B did and got a few people to agree. Extra-judicial and arbitrary. The so-called supreme court style discussions are the giveaway that novices have strayed out of bounds. Recall, democracy is not a good thing as our Founding Fathers understood. I’m so happy my kids didn’t attend a horror show like that.

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Brian Dixon's avatar

Meanwhile, in a typically authoritarian school, kids are sent to the principal's office to be punished without due process. And according to you, that's not the horror show. Wow.

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la chevalerie vit's avatar

Break the clear rules, get sent to the Principal’s office. Simple and straightforward. Your crying is not an emergency.

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JC's avatar

I was one who got punished for being in the wrong place, wrong time. I was not with the offending students (age 10?) but was punished with them. However - I lived. My crying was not an emergency.

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Brian Dixon's avatar

You lived, JC, but apparently with a kind of Stockholm syndrome that keeps you from acknowledging the political implications of what happened to you. Bite the bullet, man. Admit how outrageous it was.

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Brian Dixon's avatar

So, according to you [la chevalerie vit], all that stuff about being presumed innocent until proven guilty is for crybabies?

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la chevalerie vit's avatar

Take your strawman elsewhere. Goodbye.

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The Real Mary Rose's avatar

Bullying has been around since humans graced the earth. It's a rite of passage. It sucks, but it teaches kids a lot.

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Brian Dixon's avatar

If persistent bullying can be prevented at the institutional level—which indeed it can—then there is absolutely no excuse for not preventing it. And the good news for us freedom lovers is that, to make a long story short, freedom is what prevents persistent bullying: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/freedom-to-learn/201006/freedom-from-bullying-how-a-school-can-be-a-moral-community

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The Real Mary Rose's avatar

More utopian b.s.

If only EVERYONE did this ONE thing, the world would be perfect.

Denial of human nature as it exists. Let me know how that works out for you. We've seen what other postmodern nutty ideas have done to society already.

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Brian Dixon's avatar

I'm not the denier of reality here; you are. Free, democratic schools such as the Sudbury Valley School have been empirically proving my point for decades, whether you're willing to acknowledge it or not. Here's that link again: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/freedom-to-learn/201006/freedom-from-bullying-how-a-school-can-be-a-moral-community

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The Real Mary Rose's avatar

Do you work for Psychology Today? You are ridiculous.

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Brian Dixon's avatar

Psychology Today just happens to have the data to support my argument. Are you willing to give the data a look, so you can either change your mind or try to change mine?

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Landroll's avatar

Never been to prison, jail, or an orphanage eh?

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Brian Dixon's avatar

Thanks for making my point for me. Prisons, jails, and orphanages all demonstrate my point that persistent bullying is caused or prevented at the institutional level. "Bullying occurs regularly", explains the psychologist Peter Gray, "when people who have no political power and are ruled in top-down fashion by others are required by law or economic necessity to remain in that setting."

Quote source, not the same link as in my comment above: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/freedom-to-learn/201005/school-bullying-a-tragic-cost-of-undemocratic-schools

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Landroll's avatar

Personal experience informs my opinion. I've been to all three places in my 78 years. Authority can remove a bully from a population of potential victims but all that happens is the second bully in line steps up. What stops a bully is a victim stepping up and clocking the bully, consequences be damned. Generally the consequences are delivered by the authority in charge. Ask me how I know.

It seems your knowledge comes from an education superior to mine. Good on ya. You wantm to know how it really works get down in the mud and rassle with the hogs.

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Brian Dixon's avatar

Again, your lived experience in those places only helps demonstrate Peter Gray's point and my point about what happens in those places. I don't claim to have had "an education superior to yours"—I got plenty of bullying in government schools—but unlike you, I don't let despair keep me from acknowledging the success of the Sudbury experiment.

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