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Is the public school system an unnatural social environment?

Is the public school system an unnatural social environment?


  • Total voters
    14
This poll is biased in your favor.

It centers around the concepts you posted in the thread on bullying. There is no choice here.
 
The fact that children spend 6 hours a day in school interacting with other children isn't the problem. It's the social networking that's the problem, in my opinion. Back in the day, I went to school, then came home and played with a few kids in the neighborhood that my parents knew and approved of -- after homework/after dinner in the summertime. The rest of the time I was interacting with my parents and our extended family -- adults and children alike.

Today, parents buy their kids cellphones in the 4th grade. They're never out of touch with "the tribe." Think "Lord of the Flies." Ha! That's the danger, in my opinion. Social networking on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube; incessant texting. They're getting immersed in a social world that's warped. Warped by immature minds gone wild, if you will.

Parents have no time. Take no time. Even "good parents" involve their kids in so many activities that they become taxi drivers, driving the kids to games/events three or four nights a week. What the hell? What happened to family time? I know of families so damned busy that they don't even eat together. They'll stand at the counter and wolf down cereal for dinner. Separately. Yeah, that makes for a well-adjusted child.

It's not schools. It's parents. They have the ultimate control over their children lives as they grow up and choose not to exercise it. "Everybody does it, Mom!!!!" Well, my mom would have said, "Well, that's just fine. But our house isn't everybody."

I quite agree. I told a student yesterday my solution was to off the technology and go spend time elsewhere: Family, friends not connected, or even alone time.
 
It's not just social media, though it can often make these things worse. These problems were still major issues before the internet was even created.
 
Peter Grimm said:
In my opinion, the social learning environment created by the public school system is artificial, unnatural, and potentially harmful.

Here's what I mean. The knee-jerk reaction people have to this story is to blame the bullies. But the reality is, those bullies are ALSO CHILDREN. The problem is the system, not the bullies.

The problem is that we have 40 kids to every teacher, that teachers aren't always the best examples of how an adult should behave, and that children are robbed en-masse of the opportunity to socialize with people with a higher level of maturity than themselves.

Our brains are NOT WIRED for the public school system.

Look at the way primates do it. They have "social groups" that include apes of all ages. You never see all the young monkeys in a corner while the adults hunt for ants. The young ones are around the mature ones all the time, learning by osmosis.

Look at the way hunter-gatherer tribes do it.

Young people are PROGRAMMED to learn from adults and older children. From interacting, seeing, imitating.

**We are not evolutionarily programmed to spend our formative years learning from OTHER immature people. This type of suicide is EXACTLY what happens when you have the blind learning from the blind, so to speak.

The bullies didn't know any better, and this poor girl was lost and didn't know her place in the world.

She should have had people in her life of all ages and maturity levels. She should have had people in her life in their early teens, late teens, twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, and older. This is how we are meant to learn and adjust to the world around us. Instead, her entire peer group, the people she learned about herself from, were no more mature than she. That is simply not the way it was meant to be.

Thoughts?

1. Kids are not in school every waking moment. They have plenty of time on their own to interact and socialize with whomever they want, of any age bracket they want.

2. I can't see a relationship between class size and teen suicide.

3. If she couldn't handle the simple problems of teenaged years, then she's better off now, because it doesn't get any easier. Think of it as Darwin's good work. She was weak. Good riddance. If she stuck around, she would've been equally, if not more, miserable as an adult - and just as maladjusted.
 
If she couldn't handle the simple problems of teenaged years, then she's better off now, because it doesn't get any easier. Think of it as Darwin's good work. She was weak. Good riddance. If she stuck around, she would've been equally, if not more, miserable as an adult - and just as maladjusted.

You calling that young girl "maladjusted" is the pot calling the kettle black.

"Good riddance" she's dead? Really?

I just got done debating a neo-nazi on another thread, and I think he was more well-adjusted than you seem to be.
 
1. Kids are not in school every waking moment. They have plenty of time on their own to interact and socialize with whomever they want, of any age bracket they want.

2. I can't see a relationship between class size and teen suicide.

3. If she couldn't handle the simple problems of teenaged years, then she's better off now, because it doesn't get any easier. Think of it as Darwin's good work. She was weak. Good riddance. If she stuck around, she would've been equally, if not more, miserable as an adult - and just as maladjusted.

You calling that young girl "maladjusted" is the pot calling the kettle black.

"Good riddance" she's dead? Really?

I just got done debating a neo-nazi on another thread, and I think he was more well-adjusted than you seem to be.

Posts that inflammatory deserve some profile-mining, don't you think?

Gipper's Top Areas Of Posting

Polls -- 809
Sex and Sexuality -- 613
Sports talk -- 579
Dating and Relationships -- 522​

User title: "I Respect Women."

Profile Picture: Naked woman.

Signature: "I think I need a couple more inches." - Josie​


Perhaps that offers context for the source of the inflammatory remarks.
 
Last edited:
Finally the thread gets interesting.

Okay, Freud. Break out the glasses and psychoanalyze me. I'm ready.

And to prepare for what to expect of you, I offer this clip:

 
This is a reaction to this story: Bullied Canadian teen leaves behind chilling YouTube video - CNN.com

---

In my opinion, the social learning environment created by the public school system is artificial, unnatural, and potentially harmful.

Here's what I mean. The knee-jerk reaction people have to this story is to blame the bullies. But the reality is, those bullies are ALSO CHILDREN. The problem is the system, not the bullies.

The problem is that we have 40 kids to every teacher, that teachers aren't always the best examples of how an adult should behave, and that children are robbed en-masse of the opportunity to socialize with people with a higher level of maturity than themselves.

Our brains are NOT WIRED for the public school system.

Look at the way primates do it. They have "social groups" that include apes of all ages. You never see all the young monkeys in a corner while the adults hunt for ants. The young ones are around the mature ones all the time, learning by osmosis.

Look at the way hunter-gatherer tribes do it.

Young people are PROGRAMMED to learn from adults and older children. From interacting, seeing, imitating.

**We are not evolutionarily programmed to spend our formative years learning from OTHER immature people. This type of suicide is EXACTLY what happens when you have the blind learning from the blind, so to speak.

The bullies didn't know any better, and this poor girl was lost and didn't know her place in the world.

She should have had people in her life of all ages and maturity levels. She should have had people in her life in their early teens, late teens, twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, and older. This is how we are meant to learn and adjust to the world around us. Instead, her entire peer group, the people she learned about herself from, were no more mature than she. That is simply not the way it was meant to be.

Thoughts?

It would totally suck to have kids hanging around the office all day, learning by osmosis. I would hardly get any work done and probably get fired. Plus most kids would find my job boring as I am in conference calls for more than half of my typical day and they wouldn't hear the whole conversation.

If I was a blacksmith in some village workshop, sure, its pretty easy to explain what I am doing and its easy for he kid to see and understand what I am doing. But managing a skilled workforce and projects world wide is probably not so easy to explain, as it takes at least high school math just to understand some of the simpler concepts I deal with on a regular basis. This would mean the kids would need at least some basic schooling.

Lastly, I am a crappy teacher. I do almost everything academically by intuition and can never explain how I arrived at the correct answer, but I almost always do. I would have a hell of a time teaching my kids anything academic. Especially math, heck, half the time when I look at a problem, something in the back of my mind just tells me the answer almost immediately and I have to manually verify it by going through the equation since I don't trust it, but its right at least 90% of the time. Also teaching tries my patience more than most things.
 
Your apathy about these sorts of things rubs me the wrong way, and then I noticed your signature (which I hadn't noticed before).
Ok


In another thread I asked if youth's burgeoning access to internet and social media (including mobile broadband, webcams, etc.), which all directly relate to this story, is a good thing or a bad thing (and offered balanced options to say "mixed"), and you insouciantly say "It's a good thing" and offer no explanation.
Felt i did not have to give an explanation.

And here you are with a different question on the same topic and your answer to this really upsetting story is basically, "Meh, **** happens. That's life."
Its called reality.

Clearly you don't have kids, nor do you apparently give much thought to the type of society we're going to leave for them. "Enjoy it to the full, life is beautiful," you say. "Let the future generations figure it out."
Uhh bullying and suicide has been going on forever. Its one of those things no matter what we do its still going to happen. Now im no way saying we shouldnt do anything about it im simply saying its a problem that we have had forever and there is nothing we can do to make this problem 0
 
The fact that children spend 6 hours a day in school interacting with other children isn't the problem. It's the social networking that's the problem, in my opinion. Back in the day, I went to school, then came home and played with a few kids in the neighborhood that my parents knew and approved of -- after homework/after dinner in the summertime. The rest of the time I was interacting with my parents and our extended family -- adults and children alike.

Today, parents buy their kids cellphones in the 4th grade. They're never out of touch with "the tribe." Think "Lord of the Flies." Ha! That's the danger, in my opinion. Social networking on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube; incessant texting. They're getting immersed in a social world that's warped. Warped by immature minds gone wild, if you will.

Parents have no time. Take no time. Even "good parents" involve their kids in so many activities that they become taxi drivers, driving the kids to games/events three or four nights a week. What the hell? What happened to family time? I know of families so damned busy that they don't even eat together. They'll stand at the counter and wolf down cereal for dinner. Separately. Yeah, that makes for a well-adjusted child.

It's not schools. It's parents. They have the ultimate control over their children lives as they grow up and choose not to exercise it. "Everybody does it, Mom!!!!" Well, my mom would have said, "Well, that's just fine. But our house isn't everybody."
It started in the 50s, when parents starting to park their kids in front of TV and ignoring them. But the parents also were insensitive to the social pressures kids went through from their peers. When I made the mistake of finally getting high grades in school, I was suddenly treated like a weirdo by my classmates. My parents just laughed at my persecution, saying that in adulthood I'll be making far more money than the nerdbashers, as if I could easily put up with that for 10 years more just because I would have the last laugh.

And they were hypocritical too. At 14, I asked them to quit calling me by the little boy's version of my name, which they thought was silly of me, but my own uncle had asked the same thing about being called "Sonny" and they immediately complied. Finally, at 18, I got sick of being treated like a child, recognizing that going to college was another childish thing I'm not supposed to be sensitive about. So I joined the Marine Corps and wound up in Vietnam where half my company got killed. That's not much different from the Canadian girl's suicide. I was so sick of being treated like a little boy far into my teenage
and young-adult years that I didn't care to live if I couldn't live independently and like a man.
 
This is a reaction to this story: Bullied Canadian teen leaves behind chilling YouTube video - CNN.com

---

In my opinion, the social learning environment created by the public school system is artificial, unnatural, and potentially harmful.

Here's what I mean. The knee-jerk reaction people have to this story is to blame the bullies. But the reality is, those bullies are ALSO CHILDREN. The problem is the system, not the bullies.

The problem is that we have 40 kids to every teacher, that teachers aren't always the best examples of how an adult should behave, and that children are robbed en-masse of the opportunity to socialize with people with a higher level of maturity than themselves.

Our brains are NOT WIRED for the public school system.

Look at the way primates do it. They have "social groups" that include apes of all ages. You never see all the young monkeys in a corner while the adults hunt for ants. The young ones are around the mature ones all the time, learning by osmosis.

Look at the way hunter-gatherer tribes do it.

Young people are PROGRAMMED to learn from adults and older children. From interacting, seeing, imitating.

**We are not evolutionarily programmed to spend our formative years learning from OTHER immature people. This type of suicide is EXACTLY what happens when you have the blind learning from the blind, so to speak.

The bullies didn't know any better, and this poor girl was lost and didn't know her place in the world.

She should have had people in her life of all ages and maturity levels. She should have had people in her life in their early teens, late teens, twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, and older. This is how we are meant to learn and adjust to the world around us. Instead, her entire peer group, the people she learned about herself from, were no more mature than she. That is simply not the way it was meant to be.

Thoughts?
It is in our animalistic, darwinian nature to gain power by bullying others. Eventually, though, through school or church or good parenting or whatever, we learn to be adults and achieve success and respect through our own hard work and good deeds, rather than through violence and ridicule of others.

Bullying would not happen near as often if kids were taught to disrespect it when it occurs. The problem is, in primary school through high school, it is still "cool" to make fun of others. When kids (and their immature parents) stop finding it funny to laugh at the fat girl, bullying will no longer be effective, and bullies will stop doing it.

IMO, the idea that fat kids/nerds/etc. are fun to tease does not originate with kids. It comes from adults. So I don't think the way the school system is organized is the origin of the problem.
 
This is a reaction to this story: Bullied Canadian teen leaves behind chilling YouTube video - CNN.com

---

In my opinion, the social learning environment created by the public school system is artificial, unnatural, and potentially harmful.

Here's what I mean. The knee-jerk reaction people have to this story is to blame the bullies. But the reality is, those bullies are ALSO CHILDREN. The problem is the system, not the bullies.

The problem is that we have 40 kids to every teacher, that teachers aren't always the best examples of how an adult should behave, and that children are robbed en-masse of the opportunity to socialize with people with a higher level of maturity than themselves.

Our brains are NOT WIRED for the public school system.

Look at the way primates do it. They have "social groups" that include apes of all ages. You never see all the young monkeys in a corner while the adults hunt for ants. The young ones are around the mature ones all the time, learning by osmosis.

Look at the way hunter-gatherer tribes do it.

Young people are PROGRAMMED to learn from adults and older children. From interacting, seeing, imitating.

**We are not evolutionarily programmed to spend our formative years learning from OTHER immature people. This type of suicide is EXACTLY what happens when you have the blind learning from the blind, so to speak.

The bullies didn't know any better, and this poor girl was lost and didn't know her place in the world.

She should have had people in her life of all ages and maturity levels. She should have had people in her life in their early teens, late teens, twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, and older. This is how we are meant to learn and adjust to the world around us. Instead, her entire peer group, the people she learned about herself from, were no more mature than she. That is simply not the way it was meant to be.

Thoughts?

The public school social environment is similar to that of a prison.
That's why you see "clicks" develop.

It's for social protection.
 
The fact that children spend 6 hours a day in school interacting with other children isn't the problem. It's the social networking that's the problem, in my opinion. Back in the day, I went to school, then came home and played with a few kids in the neighborhood that my parents knew and approved of -- after homework/after dinner in the summertime. The rest of the time I was interacting with my parents and our extended family -- adults and children alike.

Today, parents buy their kids cellphones in the 4th grade. They're never out of touch with "the tribe." Think "Lord of the Flies." Ha! That's the danger, in my opinion. Social networking on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube; incessant texting. They're getting immersed in a social world that's warped. Warped by immature minds gone wild, if you will.

Parents have no time. Take no time. Even "good parents" involve their kids in so many activities that they become taxi drivers, driving the kids to games/events three or four nights a week. What the hell? What happened to family time? I know of families so damned busy that they don't even eat together. They'll stand at the counter and wolf down cereal for dinner. Separately. Yeah, that makes for a well-adjusted child.

It's not schools. It's parents. They have the ultimate control over their children lives as they grow up and choose not to exercise it. "Everybody does it, Mom!!!!" Well, my mom would have said, "Well, that's just fine. But our house isn't everybody."

Severe bullying existed before the internet.
It's just more visible now.

Put 1000 kids in a school, were the child to adult ratio is more than 30/1 and it will happen.
Kids do not have the completely faculties for compassion and will be torment one another.
 
The public school social environment is similar to that of a prison.
That's why you see "clicks" develop.

It's for social protection.


"Clicks" develop in private schools.
 
"Clicks" develop in private schools.

this isn't a debate about private vs public schools. any school that lumps kids together in classrooms based on their age has these problems.

And it's spelled cliques.
 
I know how it's spelled.
 
this isn't a debate about private vs public schools. any school that lumps kids together in classrooms based on their age has these problems.

And it's spelled cliques.

 
It is in our animalistic, darwinian nature to gain power by bullying others. Eventually, though, through school or church or good parenting or whatever, we learn to be adults and achieve success and respect through our own hard work and good deeds, rather than through violence and ridicule of others.

Bullying would not happen near as often if kids were taught to disrespect it when it occurs. The problem is, in primary school through high school, it is still "cool" to make fun of others. When kids (and their immature parents) stop finding it funny to laugh at the fat girl, bullying will no longer be effective, and bullies will stop doing it.

IMO, the idea that fat kids/nerds/etc. are fun to tease does not originate with kids. It comes from adults. So I don't think the way the school system is organized is the origin of the problem.
Darwinism would point out that man survived through teamwork, which bullying would interfere with. It is the school system that separates students into individualist cells, encouraging this disorder. But what is suspiciously not suggested in this debate is encouraging students to fight back, even justifying the unfairness of the victims ganging up on a bully or having a victim's older brother teach him a lesson. Ironically, the excuse the educationists use is that fighting back would disturb the class as a group. This hypocrisy is explained by the fact that the educationists themselves are cowards. An even deeper explanation is that their job is to create cowardly economic cannon fodder for the plutocrats.

In order to have a productive instead of a class-biased economy, the schools should imitate the successful development of athletic talent. Classes should be divided into teams. The team with the highest quiz scores will get Friday off, the losing team will have to come in on Saturday.
 
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