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?