Posted on 04/02/2004 5:34:30 AM PST by TaxRelief
For discussion and education purposes only.
Greensboro, North Carolina-AP -- A North Carolina fifth-grader has been charged with assault for knocking out a boy in a school bus fight over a snack cake.
(snip) ...According to the principal, when the boy sitting next to him asked for a bite, Kevin said no and was smacked in the face with a stuffed Tweety Bird. Kevin hit back, but was slammed against a window and hit in the back.
Then he fell in the aisle and was stomped.
School officials say when the bus driver pulled the aggressor off him, Kevin was unconscious.
(Excerpt) Read more at whnt19.com ...
Realistically speaking it would at the very least get you thrown in jail, and if the "parent" assuming there was a father in the equation at all, is good with defensive stuff, ie packs, will get you killed. If you want to get thrown in jail, why not go direct to the source and beat up the kid? Or why not beat up his momma since it is much more likely that there is only a momma around?
PS getting to meet bubba in jail may also be a major catharsis for you too.
Not to get too far off subject topic, but I firmly believe that whipping dad's ass would help in lots of situations. Kid acts up—whip dad’s ass. Wife acts like a fool—whip dad’s ass. Some people respond to getting knocked around. It may be the only thing they respond to. Pretty soon, dad won’t want to see you pulling into the driveway and get control of his family. </rant>
An Arena Of DishonestyI remember clearly the last school where I worked, on the wealthy Upper West Side of Manhattan. An attractive atmosphere of good-natured dishonesty was the lingua franca of corridor and classroom, a grace caused oddly enough by the school’s unwritten policy of cutting unruly children all the slack they could use.
Student terrorists, muggers, sexual predators, and thieves, including two of my own pupils who had just robbed a neighborhood grocery of $300 and had been apprehended coming back to class, were regularly returned to their lessons after a brief lecture from the principal. All received the same mercy. There was no such thing as being held to account at my school. This behavioral strategy—leveling good, bad, ugly into one undifferentiated lumpenproletariat1—may seem odd or morally repugnant in conventional terms, but it constituted masterful psychological management from the perspective of enlightened pedagogy. What this policy served and served well was to prioritize order and harmony above justice or academic development.
Once you know the code, the procedure is an old one. It can hardly be called radical politics except by the terminally innocent. If you spend a few hours with Erving Goffman’s work on the management of institutions, you discover that the strongest inmates in an asylum and the asylum’s management have a bond; they need each other. This isn’t cynical. It’s a price that must be paid for the benefits of mega-institutions. The vast Civil War prison camp of Andersonville couldn’t have operated without active cooperation from its more dangerous inmates; so too, Dachau; so it is in school. Erving Goffman taught us all we need to know about the real grease which makes institutional wheels turn.
A tacit hands-off policy pays impressive dividends. In the case of my school, those dividends were reflected in the neighborhood newspaper’s customary reference to the place as "The West Side’s Best-Kept Secret." This was supposed to mean that private school conditions obtained inside the building, civility was honored, the battlefield aspect of other schools with large minority populations was missing. And it was true. The tone of the place was as good as could be found in Community School District 3. It was as if by withdrawing every expectation from the rowdy, their affability rose in inverse proportion.
Not long after my transfer into this school I came into home room one morning to discover Jack, a handsome young fellow of thirteen, running a crap game in the back of the room, a funny looking cigarette in his mouth. "Hey, Jack, knock it off," I snapped, and like the surprisingly courteous boy he was, he did. But a little while later there was Jack undressing a girl fairly conspicuously in the same corner, and this time when I intervened harshly he was slow to comply. A second order got no better results. "If I have to waste time on this junk again, Jack, you can cool your heels in the principal’s office," I said
Jack looked disappointed in me. He spoke frankly as if we were both men of the same world, "Look, Gatto," he told me in a low, pleasant voice so as not to embarrass me, "it won’t do any good. Save yourself the trouble. That lady will wink at me, hold me there for eight minutes—I’ve timed her before—and dump me back here. Why make trouble for yourself?" He was right. Eight minutes.
How could such a policy produce hallway decorum and relative quiet in classrooms, you may ask? Well, look at it this way: it’s tailor-made to be nonconfrontational with dangerous kids. True, it spreads terror and bewilderment among their victims, but, happy or unhappy, the weak are no problem for school managers; long experience with natural selection at my school had caused unfortunates to adapt, in Darwinian fashion, to their role as prey. Like edible animals they continued to the water hole in spite of every indignity awaiting. That hands-off modus vivendi extended to every operation. Only once in four years did I hear any teacher make an indirect reference to what was happening. One day I heard a lady remark offhandedly to a friend, "It’s like we signed the last Indian treaty here: you leave us alone; we leave you alone."
It’s not hard to see that, besides its beneficial immediate effect, this pragmatic policy has a powerful training function, too. Through it an army of young witnesses to officially sanctioned bad conduct learn how little value good conduct has. They learn pragmatism. Part of its silent testimony is that the strong will always successfully suppress the weak, so the weak learn to endure. They learn that appeals to authority are full of risk, so they don’t make them often. They learn what they need in order to be foot soldiers in a mass army.
I don’t. When I was in school, I just didn’t take any crap. Even if I was going to loose, I wouldn’t back down. I never started anything, but I finished plenty. I NEVER got into trouble either. Why? Because I got good grades & behaved. The teacher’s knew I would not start trouble. That wouldn’t happen now. I’d probably be sent to counseling. Kids today don't learn to defend themselves...and, they really aren't allowed to anyway.
When your mother is a teacher form the old school style of teaching, school IS about learning. No matter what else went on there it was STILL about learning.
Yeh, I got bullied, a lot. I was a small teenager and the only thing that stopped it was fighting back.
I lost a lot but I ALWAYS left a visible mark.
The bullies eventually got tired of answering the question, "Who did that to you", having to answer with my name, and getting the, "That LITTLE kid?", reply.
You just can't, IMO, get this if you go in with preconceptions of what is "Left" and "Right."
Oooh, good one! May I quote you?
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