"Zero tolerance" policies were a complete failure because they were easily metagamed by the bullies to assist bullies in tormenting and ostracizing their own victims.

Bullying is a social phenomenon that creates hierarchies and enforces conformity. It is a reactionary impulse that exists in basically everyone, and even people who don't initiate bullying will often end up joining in as a defense mechanism to ensure that they themselves are not bullied. It is most obvious in children because they do not have fully developed social awareness and will do it extremely blatantly, but of course adults do it as well in more complex ways.

While it is a set of behaviors that I don't think will ever fully go away, I also think that reactionary society feeds into bullying impulses by teaching kids who the "acceptable targets" are and rewarding them for doing it. Getting praise and being ignored are essentially the same reward to a bully, since part of the escalation is seeing how far you can go before an adult intervenes. This intersects with another otherwise normal childlike behavior of testing boundaries, and just like when your kid says a minor curse word and then looks to see how you'll react you have to immediately shut down the behavior in question or they'll assume that what they're doing is fine.

To make it go away you need progressive social structures, unfortunately in late capitalism all social structures outside of the marketplace are either crumbling or gone. If you, your kid, their peers and their parents all met regularly in certain social contexts, the opportunities for bully hierarchies to form would be greatly reduced and those that did could be shut down by adults much more readily - but as it is everyone goes home to their separate houses and apartments and very rarely sees anyone outside of their clique and so it's easy to bully people outside of that clique because there are no social consequences for doing so.

Bullying isn't punished in school and in fact I would say it's encouraged by the lack of teachers giving a shit (or even joining in with the bullying). At least that's how it was when I was in school.

If we look at what school in imperialist countries is for (not for education, but to produce workers and people that fit into capitalist society) we can see why certain things are punished and others aren't.

Fail to complete your work in the way the boss (teacher) wanted, regardless of if you demonstrate that you understand the subject or found a better way to complete it? Punished.

Verbally abuse an unfashionable kid? Not punished.

They want to teach a social Darwinist hierarchy of domination and submission because that's how our work is structured. If a kid can't learn to fight back on their own, they are regarded as simply lesser by the system, regardless of the reality of the situation. Psychopathy is rewarded and the bullying types will go on to run businesses and become cruel bosses because fascism misperceives it as individual strength. Even though it was the result of how our current society rewards and punishes its people.

Before kids even set foot in the school, they've been segregated into different schools depending on geographic location and therefore relative wealth, ability to pay school fees etc. Then they're segregated further into age groups and in some schools gender groups.

Few years later, they'll likely be further segregated within their class into ability at academic subjects or sports as well as which of these they do.

Almost all of this they have no say in. All they do have a say in is social groups, who they hang out with and who they exclude. It's prob not that surprising they enforce this in the way they learned. Fairly brutally and with very little consideration for other people's wishes.

I mean that's obviously not everything but hell, the way we educate kids is kind of fucked in the head when you think about it.

the schoolhouse is a reflection of & means to prepare students for the society at large.

it necessarily replicates the inequities and hierarchies of a moribund capitalistic culture. the first step, as in all things is liberation. not necessarily of the whole society or community but a school with the resources and communal involvement to reduce the differences in education from factors outside the classroom goes a long way. fukin not chargin money & providing tutors & other ancillary services to all students

I figure it's a bit like with the wolves; they'd be fine and cool if they weren't all locked in, having to establish some kind of pack order while they're crammed in together...

Not saying home schooling would be the solution - but I'm pretty sure drastically smaller class sizes as well as less hours overall and maybe even less pressure to perform would reduce interpersonal aggression a huge amount.

I'm not trying to be racist but is bullying more of a white middle america thing? are you sure it's actually as universal as you think it is?

because in my black/hispanic/white elementary school I had only 1 instance which could even be called bullying, which was really this socially maybe-on-the-spectrum kid who enjoyed chasing me because he liked running, and when I stopped running away from him he stopped too

in my very Asian high school we basically had no bullies

which is a very big contrast to how I hear people constantly talking about how much they hated high school

what would it take to fix it

6:1 student ratio, literally octuple the number of teachers and classrooms.

A surprising ammount of human civilization is just renamed pack instinct. We haven't actually developed any genuine culture for the most part. Bullying is just the same jockying for rank chickens do. Calitalism is just a larger version of that. We are aware of bulling insofar as we know we should be more evolved as a species and we simply are not so.

So long as we are bound to the odl structures the old ways will be important.

Children are awful evil little monstrosities with underformed brains and no idea what the fuck they're doing, what the fuck they want to do, or what the fuck they should be doing. It's bad. Kids are bad, folks.

So most of the comments here are talking about the role of adults and society when it comes to encouraging certain behaviors. But I think that another important piece is the lack of autonomy that kids have and the lack of interaction across age groups. I think that kids need more boundaries set by people who aren't authority figures, like those who are parents, 15+ years older than them, teachers, ect. I think that if kids spent more time with each other in groups that they form themselves without input from authority figures and those groups are comprised of wide age groups kids will understand what acceptable behavior is much more.

I remember an article posted here a while back about how different kids upbringings are in remote mayan societies. The kids spent time in packs with kids of different ages and they created informal boundries based on observing each other rather than directly from an authority. I don't know how to replicate this exactly within our current school system but I do remember how much less bullying there was in the summer camps I was in.

I don't have any airtight examples on how to implement this but one idea would be to have older kids come in to help teach classes that they took the previous year. Or maybe having art or PE classes with different groups than you have your homeroom classes with.

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I work with kids and think a lot about this. I could talk about this forever but I'll just share a few thoughts.

The problem with fixing it, as I see, it is that kids at that age don't really take cues about how to act from adults, or at least the anti-social ones don't. Inter-kid culture is very strong and has an internal logic that is learned from older kids and it is very hard to dislodge ideas.

There is a certain amount of sorting out of "pecking order" that is somewhat built-in, or natural, which sucks. You are dealing with a bunch of undeveloped brains learning healthy and unhealthy ways to be social in a group that has their own hegemonic ideas about what is valuable within that group. I think in that environment it is natural for kids who are socially well-developed to end up on the top of this order, and kids who are behind socially to end up on the bottom. This doesn't mean that violence and mean-spiritedness is baked-in, but it is going to be natural that kids look up to and want to invite to their birthday party the kid who is socially mature, while the kid who really hasn't figured it out yet will probably not be invited to the birthday parties.

I think where this goes from just a natural understanding of difference (like say understanding who is fast and slow at sprinting ) to bullying is when it is combined with a drive to achieve social cache by deliberately performing anti-social acts. I think this is a broader problem than simply bullying, but extends to more general rule-breaking in reckless and destructive ways where a victim to the act exists.

I think this is where we have a lever to pull. I think in the west we tend to infantilize kids. We give them no freedom, respect or responsibility, despite how deeply these things are craved by kids. When we systemically refuse kids any agency, some will submit but some will unconsciously strive to perform acts that are uniquely their own to receive recondition and praise for them.

Many kids find ways to pursue passions that they can be good at and they end up serving as psychic proxies for actual agency and independence, satiating this drive in a positive way - they feel they have legitimate value to offer the tribe and feel rewarded and recognized for it. This might be kids who are naturally good at academic subjects, or maybe even some other weird thing they're into like ballet, guitar, whatever. What's important is they feel like they receive social cache and feel validated as a legitimate member of the pack who gets to be confident that they not under threat of being cast out of it.

Most kids don't have that source of feeling of unique value. Out of those kids there is a subset who are going to force it - seek out their independence themselves. However, when you are completely controlled the only agency you really have is to break rules, that's the only thing you can do that is uncontroversially truly an act of your own doing. Kids performing these acts immediately receive the type of social cache from the kids surrounding them, breaking rules (which can be in the form of bullying) become as Skinner box where when you press the button you get the dopamine, this dopamine attending to the distress you feel from feeling you're old enough to take responsibility but not having any freedom to exercise that freedom.

Holy shit I've been typing on my phone for forever and I was just about to get to my actual thoughts on the question at hand but my partner has made breakfast for me. I'll return to finish up .

To fix it we need teachers that can monitor young children and both create and model a safe environment. Kids don't know how to treat other people yet, they have to be taught it and accidental fights need to be headed off, deescalated, lead to reconciliation.

We also need to address home life, as kids going through shit will run into more conflicts at school. Solving that starts with solving poverty, though there's more to it than that.

Parents with contradicting priorities, mostly.
Give parents the time and space and resources and support to raise their children properly, without having to fight tooth and nail to feed/clothe/nurture this marvellous humanworker-in-training into the being they ought to be