Teaching pilots to rely on Air Traffic Control promotes sloppy flying.
If the people in authority are consistently wrong, this is a provocation to either retrain them or remove them from the position and replace them with people who will be more consistently right. I donn’t think it’s quite so often a provocation to reject the notion of useful authority.
Well now, I’m not saying if someone starts kicking your ass, you shouldn’t at least try to defend yourself. If you can try to find a way to keep yourself from being hurt, that’s definetly what you should do.
HOWEVER, it doesn’t always work out that way in real life. I had a few bullies who were much bigger than me. Had I tried to “defend myself”, I would have been stomped into the ground.
And fighting back isn’t going to work if the abuse isn’t physical. Not to mention, again, if the kid being bullied is disabled or something like that.
True. And as you said in the other thread there should be zero tolerance for bullies which is often the case. I was wondering something reading the other thread. If a child is being bullied and they go to the authorities and nothing is done, is there any legal recourse? Could a parent get a restraining order against a child?
I’m not advocating doing that, I’m just wondering if it’s legally possible?
The exact thing that happens if they don’t fight back. They might as well try.
And relying on the teachers/school assumes that they care, or that they aren’t on the bully’s side. The problem isn’t authority in general; it’s the school’s indifference towards or partisanship for the bullies. That’s why people don’t beat you up at the water cooler; the cops, unlike the teachers, are neither indifferent nor pro-bully. Except when they are the bullies, but that’s a different problem.
That’s why it good to have older brothers or sisters.
That’s because it’s not a binary proposition.
The problem here that I have with authority in this case is that it is impersonal. We send people to education factories staffed largely by an incompetent workforce, and then we are telling people to rely on a system that is clearly defective. If we as a society valued making the education system into something that was actually good, then I might change my tune. The poor teachers are overemployed and the good teachers and underpaid. Even the good teachers cannot care terribly much about individual students. I think it was one of the most heartbreaking things for me when I learned that most of the teachers didn’t really value me that much. I saw my art teacher at the graduation of what were Freshmen when I was a Senior and she didn’t even remember me. These are the sorts of people we are teaching our children to put implicit trust in.
In a way it’s almost a superhuman expectation to expect a teacher to give personal care to every student, but that’s the nature of the system. I am not putting forth unrealistic expectations, but neither do I feel I or my child should be expected to put their faith in a person who might not remember them three years later.
I agree that then OP has a valid point, we are told not to depend on ourselves and to call on the authorities, and yes there is a time and place for them, but we have to be somewhat responsible.
There was a email going around at the time when Katrnia hit New Orleans comparing the dependency of the people of the city of NO to other places that have disasters - the difference is if you can take care of yourself you will be far better off then waiting for authorities, for when the shit hits the fan the authorities can’t help you.
That would depend on the laws of one’s jurisdiction. Where I am, in Canada, the answer is yes if the bully is 12 or over.
Bully attacks victim. Victim reports to police. Police arrest bully. Bully goes before Youth Criminal Judge for an interim judicial release (bail) hearing. If released (which is the norm except for the most serious of incidents), the court will order terms, usually requiring that the bully keep clear from the victim.
If the police will not arrest the bully, the victim’s parents can prosecute privately, but I have never seen this done with a young offender.
In Canada in the year bridging 1998-1999, 10,545 youths were charged for minor assaults, totalling about 10% of all the charges against youths. Violent crimes, including these minor assaults, totalled 22% of all charges. http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/85-002-XIE/0020085-002-XIE.pdf
For bullies under 12, a Children’s Aid Society (or whatever an area’s child protective services organization is called) steps in to put together a voluntary supervision plan for the bully’s parents to follow. If the parents do not follow it, the child gets put into foster care where the child should receive appropriate supervision and treatment, but this is only in serious cases. Unfortunately, there is no recourse for a victim to force the CAS to act, and if the bully’s parents are doing everything they can, then the CAS will not act. That’s when a civil action must be commenced against the school for not providing adequate protection.
This is only for Canada. YMMV.
My worry, which I expressed in the other thread, is that we are breeding a culture of passivity. Yes, if a child fights back, the bully may fight harder and win. But if children in general had a habit of fighting back when attacked, there wouldn’t be as much bullying in the first place. Bullies prey on the weak, the helpless, and the passive.
But I think it goes deeper than that. When I was a kid, there was a cultural ethic that said you have every right to punch a kid if he punched you first. And as an adult, if you saw someone being mugged, you were expected to go to their aid, regardless of the danger.
Today, by the time you reach adulthood you’ll have had it drilled into you over and over again that reacting to violence with violence is wrong. That the correct action in the face of threats or violence is to wait for the authorities. That interfering in a violent situation is stupid and just likely to get you hurt.
When Marc Lepine walked into a classroom in Montreal with a rifle, he ordered the men to get up and leave the room. They did so, leaving the women alone and defenseless. They stood in the hallway and did nothing even as shots rang out. And when Lepine walked out of the room, they let him walk right on by.
During the shootings at Virginia Tech, only one person resisted - an 80 year old holocaust survivor. It cost him his life, but he saved a bunch of lives of the kids in his class. All the young, athletic men in those classrooms did nothing. It took an old man to stand up to the shooter.
30 years ago, the men who let Marc Lepine shoot those women would have been considered cowards. If a man starts shooting women, you were expected to die trying to stop him. That kind of moral censure is tough, and sometimes unfair. But it’s a social force that pushes the strong into protecting the weak.
Teaching that code started in grade school. If you came home bruised and bloodied, and dad asked you what happened and you said, “A bully was picking on a kid, and I tried to stop him and got beat up”, Dad wasn’t about to give you a lecture about minding your own business or waiting for the teachers to do something. More likely, Dad would have said, “I’m proud of you, son. You did the right thing. Now let’s go out back and I’ll teach you what I know about how to fight. Next time that bully tries something, he might have a surprise in store for him.”
But that was the right decision. A bunch of unarmed, untrained parents trying to rush gunmen is just going to result in a bunch of dead unarmed, untrained parents.
Well, thanks, I guess… I do think you misunderstand my position, and if you think I’m a person who promotes passivity and taking a lot of crap without fighting back, then you haven’t seen me in the Pit. 
Well, that’s just not what I said. Defend yourself. There are degrees of self-defense, some of which do not involve bloodying the other person. If you do choose to do harm, there will be consequences. The school is responsible in loco parentis for ALL the children, not just the nice ones. If someone gets hurt in school, there are liability issues whether the kid is a bully or not (which I cannot emphasize enough is often a matter of POV and not rock-solid fact). The school has to take action or risk legal problems. If the victim goes all vigilante and decides to hurt the other kid, he has to expect consequences. That bully is someone’s kid too, for god’s sake, and has his own story to tell about what happened, expects justice for his own harm. My mind boggles that people expect something different to happen, that you think such situations are black and white, victim and bully, and that only the cluelessness or callousness of the authorities prevents real justice from being done.
School authorities have to try to be objective about things. If a kid goes to a teacher, usually it’ll be one he trusts, or one who has witnessed the bullying. He is more likely to get targeted action against his tormentor and NOT get in trouble himself this way. He will also get support and raise awareness that bad behavior is going on, which makes it more possible for the bully to be caught in the act. If you feel you are being abused, it’s common sense and self-preservation to get someone with enforcement power to intervene before it comes to hitting. Violence is the LAST resort because you will probably not come out of it unscathed, either because you are punished or because the other kid beat the crap out of you. The other person is going to defend himself just like you did, and feel just as justified as you do. And who’s to say he isn’t? That’s your word against his, whereas if you’ve documented an ongoing problem, and the shit hits the fan, you are in a much better position to get your desired outcome than if you were silent and then lashed out. This seems logical as hell to me.
Just what do you think the school is like? There are exactly 2 administrators in my school who mete out discipline, and they conduct rather lengthy investigations when fights happen or when kids file complaints about bullying. Teachers know all their own students and can expedite the process. It’s not some faceless group of robots using a slide chart to deal with these issues. You do not have a realistic idea of how schools run if this is how you think it is. Often here is arbitration between kids, and an actual conflict resolution approach with face-to-face confrontations and negotiation. This is not bureaucracy in action but social intervention. When you have a problem with someone, you should try to resolve it rationally, and if you can’t, you are on record as having tried, which is to your advantage. This is a life skill, don’t you think? And it’s not weak or passive, it’s just… not violence.
I could not disagree more, obviously. Teaching people to deal with the bad behavior of others without allowing it to cause you to respond by behaving badly is teaching strength of character. Dealing with cruel or violent people with cruelty or violence is allowing yourself to be demeaned. You become that which you despise. I am a small person, and over the course of my life, many people have tried to bully me. I have never had to hit any of them to get them to back off me. There are ways to deal with aggressive, mean people that deters them just as effectively as physical violence. THAT is what I want to teach kids-- inner strength-- not craven appeal to authority.If they come to me with it, I can intervene and make it a teaching opportunity. Breaking up a fight ain’t that. It means everyone has failed.
I don’t see what this has to do with anything.
Yes, I was in a thread about how schools work, so I was talking about a school environment, something which I think the majority of posters know precious little about except from a very limited and biased perspective. If people reading the other thread attempted to see things from an objective view point, which is what the school must do, then much of the objections would have been groundless. I also will not concede that the schools or parents should ever teach their kids that violence is a valid way to resolve a conflict if there are alternatives… and there usually are. If we taught children about better ways to resolve conflict, which is NOT passivity or weakness IMO, wouldn’t the world be a better place? Beat your enemy til he’s bloody isn’t doing that and is irresponsible as social policy, in school and in the world. And I ain’t no hippy, just someone who’d like to see less blood spilled.
All of those people who watched Marc Lepine shoot those women grew up in the culture of 30 years ago.
There are ways to fight back that do not involve physical violence.
I find this statement completely false and rather offensive and inflammatory. Schools are indifferent towards or actually partisan in favor of bullies? I’d like to see a cite beyond personal anecdotal. Aside from the fact that there are concrete legal liabilities involved, your claim here is painting teachers and administrators as being morally reprehensible and flat-out advocating the harm of their students. I don’t know why you think this, but you keep saying it and it’s just a vile and false accusation. I wish you’d stop.
People don’t beat each other up at the water cooler because cops are objective and not indifferent or partisan? There is ample evidence that your assertion about the police is often not the case, so much so that if you ask me to offer cites I will have to open a separate thread on the many ways that police officers are alleged to be biased in their actions so as not to derail this one. That you would assert THIS as the primary reason asses don’t get beat at the water cooler is laughable, absurd, and just plain WRONG. It’s probably because adults have superior conflict resolution skills to kids, and that most child bullies learn that it’s not OK to act that way, somehow or other, over the course of their lives. Probably by parents and teachers. It’s not because cops have a loftier sense of objectivity than teachers do.
I have found teaching as a profession to be comprised, generally, of people who like and care about kids. No one wants anyone to get hurt. For you to assert otherwise shows that you have some anti-teacher agenda here that says more about your bias in this argument than about anything based in reality.
That’s a very fair point.
I believe this may be the first time in my (admittedly short) history of posting here that I’ve agreed with either, much less both, of you two.
In fact, I’d like to expand on mswas’s quoted sentence: these days everybody is trained into helplessness. It’s not that I’d advocate vigilante justice, or retaliation outside of reason… but it seems in every situation our culture, starting with the Helicopter Parents on to the people who won’t keep score in children’s sports, is teaching our kids to grow up expecting to be helpless, and automatically cared for. The Nanny State fails miserably in training people to think critically, be able to respond to new situations by themselves and, well, act AT ALL without some form of authority. It’s pitiful how we’re being taught as a first reflex to run to “authority” when in so many cases situations can be resolved and disputes rendered meaningless, other than to be exercises in learning independence and to think for oneself and engage with their peers.
I often wonder what kind of world it will be fifteen years from now when a generation of people who are the trained helpless become the authorities they’ve so often appealed to.
I agree with your first clause but not your second. The effect of getting out of the way and letting toddlers figure it out for themselves is a period of more whacking, not less, and then a period of almost no whacking because the pecking order has been established. However, I am not willing to have a reign of the bigger and/or more violent. This is also the effect of getting out of the way and letting middle schoolers figure it out for themselves. And adults.
The reason there is less fighting with less intervention is that less intervention cuts down on the number of fights amoung toddlers and early school age kids which occur with reference to an adult – that is, a certain number of fights (verbal and not) occur because of the adults, not in spite of them. If there is no adult response, these fights will end – but it remains to be seen whether this is really a good thing. By wyay of illustration, if you do not respond to the crying of a young child, the child will indeed stop crying. Whether this is a good thing or not is subject to question, as it can leave a child with attachment problems of various kinds.
I agree that teaching conflict resolution is better done earlier and not later and that a minimum of sorting out quarrels and a maximim of asking, “so how can we sort this out” is better. But developmentally, many small children have a fairly tenuous grasp of the notion that other children are not just meat puppets. I think it is beyond naive to think toddlers and young children will spontaneously come to notions of social justice without assistance.
BUT, perhaps the bullying isn’t physical, and throwing the first punch will get the victim in trouble. My point is, fighting back without first trying to get the authorities on your side might not work.
And AGAIN, I’m not saying someone shouldn’t TRY to fight back, if attacked. But, if you get your ass kicked, and the bullying continues, not much changes.
However, I don’t think it’s that the teachers don’t care-it’s that so many won’t tell, because they’re afraid of being branded a snitch. A lot of the crap that goes on in schools would be enough to get one fired from a job, and possibly harassment suits filed.
Schools SHOULD get involved. It’s their JOB to be involved. That doesn’t prevent kids from defending themselves, but it shouldn’t be up to them alone.
“Fighting back” doesn’t have to be physical. As long as we’re teaching kids the proper way to put down attackers physically, we should also teach them how to do so emotionally. It’s not hard; you just listen for a while to determine what insults or insinuations Aren’t Cool with your target (making a few insinuations about their athletic ability, parental status, academic ability, etc.), and when they attempt to harass you non-physically, you harass them right back.
Or a bunch of dead unarmed untrained parents and a dead shooter and more alive children. Neither of us know for sure. My point it that being a dead or wounded parent didn’t always used to be the worst thing ever. My grandmother never took a bullet for me because it never came up, but she did step in front of a few out of control baseballs and angry dogs. We’ve made Pain and Death the ultimate boogeymen, and Lawsuit their close cousin.
I can’t really speak to Canadian culture, not being from that country. Any attempt to do so would turn them into America-light and be wholly offensive and inaccurate. But in America, the cult of self-esteem, extreme pacifism, fear of pain and helicopter parenting started long before 1990. There were very few merry-go-rounds in playgrounds by the time I was using them in the late '70s.
Marienee, I don’t think you’re disagreeing with me. I even gave a number to the amount of time the average toddler dyad needs intervention and modeling in my experience - roughly 20% of the time. Admittedly, that’s not based on hard data on my part, just a lot of experience with a lot of toddlers. The rest of the time they need to practice those skills on their own while a very attentive grown up observes them. What sort of numbers would you propose if not those? Thank you for your thoughts, though. I think the main thrust of my point may have been a little lost in my zeal, and you made it better, which was that middle school is too late to teach kids how to get along - this stuff needs to be addressed in toddlerhood.