I recall a lot of that, except they tended to crack down on the kid that fought back harder, not the same. That’s when they weren’t outright encouraging bullying, or bullying themselves.
That sounds like something people tell themselves to justify bullying or ignoring bullying, not reality. I’d certainly never regard someone who hit me as anything but an enemy for the rest of their lives. To this day, I’d cheerfully see all the people who bullied me die.
I think if you were in an older era and in a rural area, maybe a lot more fighting was tolerated. And it was more law of the jungle. hell, I had a shop teacher that was missing the middle two fingers of his right hand. If you got “out of line” in class, he would pick you up by the neck with just his index and pinky and pin you to the wall on your tippy toes to slowly almost asphixiate. Of course a cro magnon (sp?) like that now wouldn’t be tolerated.
I also remember teachers not getting overly excited if no one was likely to get too hurt. I do remember the gym teacher in 11th grade seperate 2 big jocks that would have really caused some damage if they were allowed to fight. And the wrestling coach, who was a big old bull of a man, would not tolerate jack shit. In fact, he made a point of telling all the freshmen in his classes to come see him if there was any bullying or if they were afraid of hazing. This was the mid 70’s.
I also remember that the hazing that was tolerated in 1976 ("don’t worry, you’ll get your turn to haze when you’re a senior), was absolutely not tolerated in 1979.
that’s a lot of rambling. I think in the rural 1970’s, there was a lot more tolerance by the whole staff to let kid’s sort it out themselves. But I saw that change by 1979 with much less tolerance.
There’s a Margaret Atwood quote I think about a lot: “Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.”
The harm done to a child by another child may not seem like much, but it can make a huge psychological impact. For this reason, I as an educator come down like a ton of bricks on anyone fighting or bullying. I tell my kids that part of my job is making school a safe place for everyone. I can’t control what their home is like, and it breaks my heart that some of them live in unsafe homes (except for FERPA the stories I could tell would make you cry), but what I can do is make school a place where everyone feels safe. And I do that by making your life profoundly unpleasant if you make school unsafe for other kids. My impression is that this is the current default for most schools in the US.
Play fighting is different: I just call the participants over and remind them of the rules. No harm no foul as long as everyone’s having fun (and as long as they’re not chronic offenders): just play in a way that I can tell from 50’ is not a fight. And if what you’re doing is a running gun battle with zombies, knock yourself out, kid.
I can back you up on the first part there, Der Trihs. I was shocked when I fought back against a bully (easily twice my size) and I was only sent home for the day. School policy usually cracked down hard on the bullied and the bully. It helped that the bully was a budding criminal and I was a star student, I suspect.
But what really destroyed my faith in humanity was that after months of constant, daily physical abuse from this much bigger kid, when I finally fought back, several teachers congratulated me on doing so. This meant two things to me at the time:
The teachers KNEW I was getting my head slammed into the locker every. single. day. and didn’t do a goddamn thing about it.
The teachers (who included the bully’s football coach) were just going to wait until someone went to the hospital (presumably) or I fought back.
Having to fight was devastating to me as a strongly pacifist 7th grader. Never mind having to fight someone so much bigger and stronger than me. I cried and threw up for a week before finally decicing to solve my problem with violence.
Picture this skinny, gangly kid, in his underwear, getting into a Tae Kwon Do back stance (I was a yellow belt at the time-look out!) and calling the bully out. It was hilarious to everyone. Amazingly, I started and finished the fight with an incredibly lucky kick to the hip. I later found out it was an old football injury. How 7th graders have old football injuries still mystifies me. Hoisted into the air by my underwear as he staggered in front of me, I realized I had won.
Oddly enough, the bully and I met again years later and became, while not friends exactly, at least fairly polite acquaintances. So I wouldn’t say I wish death upon him or anything. I’m fairly certain he’s in jail now in any case.
Each parent (and educational institution) has to find the golden mean between a totally uncontrolled laissez-faire approach and a totally controlled helicopter approach to parenting. I think current trends have parents failing much more by the latter than the first.
Preventing boys from playing rough and fighting and sometimes getting a bloody nose or a broken arm will only lead to stunted boys and Ritalin nation.
:rolleyes: Yeah, beatings are so very ennobling.
You think so? Personally I’d probably draw the line a little before a fair fight becomes a beating. The thing is of course, if the boys don’t learn the rules of a fair fight, then they don’t learn when to stop before it comes to a beating. Like so much other, fighting is a game that has to be learned through experience. And in any case, I’d take a few boys having a little beating, if the alternative is medicating half the classroom with Ritalin, which seems to be where we are heading.
Only idiots fight fair, outside of a sport. If someone attacks you, you should do whatever is necessary to escape or stop them with as little danger to yourself as possible, and screw “fair”.
And anything involving broken bones is definitely a beating.
No. Boys should learn that there are rules and limits to a fight. Many of them to do with concepts of what is fair, and stopping when the other boys is bested, and making up afterwards. I think many of today’s society’s problems stems from boys having not learned those lessons when they were young.
Yes of course, but I was referring more to letting boys being physical in general. Some boys will climb trees and fall down and break their arm. The wrong conclusion to draw from this is to ban all tree climbing.
Yeah. “Don’t have one if you can avoid it, and if you can’t avoid it fight to win.”
No, you should never make up with someone who attacks you. They are your enemy, pure and simple.
Do you remember being in school? It’s never a fair fight. The type that are likely to bully, or start fights, pick on the weak. They choose smaller, less developed, or just plain younger kids as a target - not their peers. Or, it’s several kids against one isolated kid.
Let me tell you, as a bullied kid, I wasn’t afraid of a fair fight - be it a physical one or otherwise. That’s just never how it shakes out in reality, and the lessons you learn aren’t positive ones and really don’t apply in the adult world.
This is a false dilemma. And it’s not just boys.
The place for physical roughhousing and learning controlled fighting is in the sports dojo or playing field, during sports.
Not during recess.
Kids should be toughened up in the sense that they should learn to rely on their own resources and decisions and solve their own problems, and not rely on parents or other authorities to sort out their problems.
No. That’s not true. I have been in school fights as a kid but never bullied anyone. Most were just fun-fight, which could be just as physical damaging as the real ones. Sometimes, I’m sure, it is difficult to see one from the other. But as far as bullying goes, perhaps part of the solution is to teach the boys how to fight correctly, rather than to clamp down on all fighting. For instance, that starting a fight with girls or those smaller than yourself, or being several against one, etc. that this is how cowards and losers fight. That being strong and protective of the weak, that is part of what makes a man. etc.
Yes I think they do. For instance in bar-fights. Sometimes you get these ridiculous one-sided fights where the strongest man doesn’t stop when the other guys is on the floor, but insist on jumping on his head, or whatever. Perhaps if he had learned in the school-yard that a fight stops when the other boy is lying on the floor, or no longer resists, then the damage would have been much less severe. But more generally, physical games and sometimes fighting is part of what boys are. It’s in our nature. Setting up conditions where it is impossible to play such games, will not produce better men.
It’s part of the same trend. An overvaluation of traditional feminine values and undervaluation of traditional masculine values. And, without looking up the stats, I’m pretty sure considerable more boys than girls are medicated with Ritalin and similar drugs.
:rolleyes: Nonsense. As an adult, relying on the authorities to handle that sort of problem is exactly what you are supposed to do. It’s also more likely to work.
Brawling drunken thugs are not “better men”.
Some traditional male values are simply stupid, and willingly getting into fights is one of them. Fighting fair is another.
Jesus. When I think of the “adult world,” bar fights are pretty far from what I think of. When I think of the “pathetic man-child world,” however, bar fights come to mind pretty quickly. If you’re over the age of 20 and still getting in fights, you are a failure as an adult: you didn’t learn the things as a child that you needed to learn.
And don’t tell me it’s in our nature, either: a very small percentage of adult males get into fistfights. Most of us adult males can control our baboon natures.
There are plenty of ways to teach fairness and self-control that don’t end up with broken bones.
It doesn’t really matter who you consider to be sub-human failures. Fact is fights still happens, in bars and otherwhere. Perhaps if these people had learned how to behave themselves properly in such fights, it would result in less damage. Perhaps not.
I don’t mean that it is in the nature of grown men, but in boys.
Apparently you did not read the other post where I referred to this. However I’m mostly concerned with how one goes about preventing the children getting into fights. That it should not result in more control, supervision or micromanagement and in general that children, especially boys, with risk-adverse parents obsessed with control are harmed by too many restrictions on the children’s opportunity to participate in physical games and to play without adult supervision.
I never said subhuman, but perhaps that’s only because I don’t have particularly rosy associations with “human.” Being a pathetic man-child who can’t control his aggressive urges is entirely a human state of being. Failure? Sure.
And yes, perhaps if people had learned how to behave themselves properly in such fights, there would be less damage. But if, y’know, they had learned not to make idiots of themselves by getting into fights in the first place, there’d be even less damage.
Sure, aggression is in our nature. Part of the job of parents and teachers is to civilize the little savages (and I say that as a dad of a daughter: this isn’t a gender-specific civilizing).
To some degree I agree with you. A minor scuffle isn’t the end of the world; rather, it’s a learning opportunity. Where we disagree is that you put emphasis on teaching kids how to comport themselves during the scuffle, whereas I emphasize skills that result in avoiding the scuffle entirely. I have less than no interest in teaching kids the rules for fair fighting.
Rune - fights are rarely if ever fair. Sure maybe your experience was a good kinda escalated play fighting thing. Maybe you were a bully but just don’t want to admit it. Yes, I fought in school too, and my brother was bullied.
The thing is that any fight, be on the school yard or in a bar, can end in one person being permanently hurt.
I’m a lot older and more mature than my fighting days and so I’ll likely never have an incident escalate to a fight. But if it does, I sure as hell ain’t going to fight fair. Watch your knees, groin, neck and eyes as my karate instructor said “I’d rather be judged by 12 than carried by 6.”
In terms of academic problems or social issues (e.g. “Why won’t Johnny play with me”), okay. But if the kid’s answer to either is “I’ll start a fight”, then the answer is hell no.
I’m a perfectly mature adult. If I got jumped by 3 people who beat me up and took my money, do I attempt to ‘sort out my own problems’? No, I call the fucking police. I’m not a vigilante. If I’m fighting someone it’s because I have no choice and I’m in extreme danger. I would hope very much that this is not the type of situation that you’re trying to duplicate while allowing kids to fight.
Even if I concede that a very significant number of fights aren’t “fair”, as you claimed… so what? What does teaching children that it’s OK to fight get us?
If I had two people fight in my workplace, it wouldn’t matter if it were fair or not. They would be fired. Period.
You know, girls fight too. I’m speaking from my own experience: I’m a girl. You’re ignoring half the kids in your whole argument here. Notice that the title of the thread says “children”, not “little boys”.
Even assuming that, you seem to want to tell little boys to man up and learn how to fistfight through… well, unmonitored fighting where kids can get genuinely hurt. Are school officials supposed to say “Well, this looks like a fair fight, this is OK. But it wasn’t okay for little Timmy to beat up little Jimmy because it’s not a fair fight.” Come on dude. That isn’t what school is about.
If you want to teach your kid to fight and teach them about fighting honorably, great – teach them to box, or let them take martial arts classes, or self defense classes. Fine. But just plain brawling at school doesn’t make sense. Lots of kids don’t want to get randomly attacked and there’s nothing about hand-to-hand combat that makes you a “man”.
This is incredibly naive at best.
First of all, as several other people have pointed out, if you’re getting into barfights as an adult, I have serious problems with you as a human being. Guess what – the only fights I’ve ever had in my life were in school, because (shockingly) I don’t like to fight people. Beating someone up is a shitty way to win an argument and doesn’t prove anything. I like to go through my life without using violence as a way of settling disputes. If you choose to do otherwise then you can, and should, be prosecuted under the law for assault.
Secondly, if your kid needs to participate in schoolyard fights to not realize that it’s not a good idea to kick a downed man repeatedly in the head, then maybe that kid/man-child should be on medication.
Teaching kids to fight to resolve their problems does not produce better men, either. I’m not arguing against physical games or even combat-type sports like boxing, wrestling, or martial arts. I took martial arts for years as a kid and I got a lot out of the experience. In a properly adult-supervised environment, there is nothing wrong with teaching a kid to defend him- or herself at all, and there are many good lessons that can be taught through physical activity.
That’s all not relevant to the subject of the thread. I’m saying schoolyard brawls aren’t OK and typically have nothing to do with some honorable code about not picking on the weak, and so forth. If you had an idyllic experience where nobody fought anyone who was weaker than they were, well, that’s lovely for you. For the rest of us, they see what children do in a Lord of the Flies situation that an unmonitored schoolyard can be - they choose the fights they can win.
I think many men on this board would disagree that being beaten on a schoolyard (or participating in bar fights) constitutes a ‘traditional masculine value’.
If you want to fight other people, great. Bully for you. Do so with willing participants in a proper context like a boxing ring. Many, many kids who are attacked and forced to fight are not willing participants and it’s unfair to expect them to endure physical assault as some sort of rite of passage.