Quote:
Originally Posted by Pretty Little Flower
But I don't think we want to go back to a place where police refused to intervene in household violence situations because it is a "family matter." And if there has been a similar shift in attitudes about bullying, and if people are no longer content with a "kids will be kids" attitude, and if, as Thurgreed notes, cyberbullying has made the problem more acute, then I don't think it makes sense to throw up our hands and say "This is too hard, and it really sucks for school districts caught in the middle, and the tricky jurisdictional issues make my head hurt, so we'll soon realize what we learned the hard way before, which is that there is nothing to be done but allow the passage of time."
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Whoa whoa whoa. I want to be clear about the real estate I'm defending. I am not suggesting that we must
tolerate bullying, verbal or physical. I am saying that we cannot
prevent it with the tools we have in our society. The fact that this distinction is so quickly lost is evidence of my argument that the modern American mind cannot be satisfied with the punishment of evil. Evil has to be disempowered.
Also, I think this is an area where our anecdotal experience of school days interferes with clear thinking about the experience of kids in school today. It's easy to remember the parent or coach who said "boys will be boys" and declare that the prior age accepted violence and other miscellaneous inhumanity. The fact is, it probably didn't, really, but as with today, people are getting away with stuff and the crimes that went unpunished loom larger in our imagination. When I was in school if you were a dick to someone there was a consequence, usually adult-imposed, when an adult knew about it. I'm not seeing a huge attitudinal Great Leap Forward on whether kids "should" be assholes to each other because it toughened them up. Put aside the John Hughes films you saw and try to remember the hundreds of times an adult corrected the behavior rather than the 20 times they did not.
