Nah, looking back on it, there was no learning about dysfunctional lives, it was just absolutely misery. Emotional and physical bullying, fear, intimidation, and misery. If a child is disruptive to other students and impinging on their opportunity to learn they should be removed from the classroom. It's not the school's job to teach discipline. Removing them from the class puts the burden on the parents and the administration, instead of the kids.
School isn't really just there to teach you facts, it's to prepare you for life as an adult. You are going to deal with bullies your whole life and you'd better be well prepared for it before you're out on your own as an adult.
> You are going to deal with bullies your whole life
Never dealt with them again once I left high school. Not even any close calls.
That shit's like living in a war zone. No one sends their kids to a war zone so they can "learn to survive". No good lessons exist in a war zone, not even in between people stepping on landmines or getting pulverized by airstrikes.
All that exists in such a place is a bunch of trauma, and yes, debilitating/mutilative injuries, for those that somehow manage to get sneak back out of them.
Bullying is like this too, though obviously to a lesser degree.
I strongly suspect that most people get their ideas about what bullying is from the same half-dozen made-for-tv movies and other narrative fragments thereof on the subject.
Cannot echo this enough. Not once in the 20 years since high school have I had to deal with with the same kind of bullies, intimidation, and violence. School was like a prison and going each day, steeling myself to deal with misbehaving kids, apathetic teachers, and an administration that thought ignoring the problem, social promoting, and punishing anyone who fights back was the best strategy.
It's not just the constant picking and poking that bullies do, it's the way they make the entire school environment like a prison yard. You never know when someone is going to do something to you, or how a teacher (guard) would react. Teachers exacerbating the problem because, while powerless, they mostly threw up their hands because they were not allowed to send the student out of the class.
> It's not just the constant picking and poking that bullies do, it's the way they make the entire school environment like a prison yard.
It wasn't the only way that schools were like prisons, just the most uncomfortable of those. We can be honest now, we're well distance from it at this point.
> You never know when someone is going to do something to you, or how a teacher (guard) would react.
Did you ever have any of the teachers join in? Not just decide that it was your fault, but to actually pick up on the name-calling and contempt? When it happens during class, that's the cue for everyone else to join in too, even those who'd always be too timid.
But pretty much the whole administration does this in more subtle ways, you know? For me, this happened on the school bus more than anywhere else. I was in second grade, they were in highschool. An hour's bus ride to school every morning, an hour home each afternoon. Bus driver was an old asshole of a curmudgeon and from his driving I doubt he could see 6ft in front of his face (let along 14ft back through a mirror). When my mama went to the administration to try to have a stop put to it... they threatened her with me being thrown off the school bus. We lived in a rural area, she didn't have a car at the time. The implication was that if/when I missed school, it'd be truancy. She'd be arrested, I'd be put in foster care.
You know, me. The second-grader who is a troublemaker just provoking the 16 yr olds into beatings, into having my clothes torn and stained with god knows what, into having my hair snipped off whenever my head was turned.
I can't even tell anyone about this shit. No one believes me. I don't believe it myself. My memories seem like lies to me.
> Teachers exacerbating the problem because, while powerless,
Sounds alot more like "only following orders" to me.
>It's not the school's job to teach discipline. Removing them from the class puts the burden on the parents and the administration
No, all it does is make sure that any child with a bad home life has no future. Sure, it solves the "problem" of making one teacher manage 30 kids meaning one kid can DDoS the system but it does that by ignoring it all together.
Mom's a teacher, and "bad" kids LOVE her because she's extremely good at her job. Those bad kids pretty much universally just need attention because they get none in normal life. There are still occasionally young psychopaths but they generally do get expelled at some point. Otherwise most bad kids would come do their homework in her class because she was basically the only adult in the building they respected. She was literally "just" a french teacher but because she understands what it means to be a teacher she was an intervention for many a "bad" kid.
You want one bad kid to not spoil the bunch? Stop making undertrained, underpaid "teachers" without even an education degree oversee a class of 30 kids. How good could one person possibly manage 30 adults, let alone kids. Stop hiring glorified baby sitters because that's all you can get for $30k a year in salary. Stop treating teaching like a disposable profession.
Also it's not always the kid's home life that's the problem.
Teachers can be bad and do have the capability to pick on children. Having these kinds of outcomes totally allows a teacher to single out a child they don't like and wreck their whole life.
