| >There's a lot of the petty BS that you learn from in school that transposes to adult life. No, you learn maladaptive patterns. Your options are artificially constrained. Most of the ways a grown adult would deal with e.g. bullies are just not available to you. Take physical violence for example. As an adult, if you're threatened with physical violence you have the options to: - Get out of there. But kids can't do this because they're physically confined to the same classroom with the same people, every day. And obviously you're not allowed to just leave the school when you want to. - Fight back. Risky, but you at least won't be punished by the courts if you can argue self-defense. But kids can't do this because "zero tolerance" policies punish both the aggressor and victim, by design, if the victim fights back - Call the police. Kids can't do this, police don't care about schoolyard disputes. Snitching to a teacher just gets you bullied even more. - Talk the person down. Maybe this works, but in a school they'll be back again the next day, and you'll have to do it again, and again, and again. Adult interactions are not so predictably repeated, unless in some other highly institutionalized setting like the military or a prison (guess which places also have problems with violent bullying). Adults can, well, solve their problems like adults. Schoolkids literally aren't allowed to solve their problems like adults. Fuck, they're not even allowed to go to the toilet without asking someone first. Is there any wonder they develop behavioral pathologies to cope: passivity, social withdrawal, self-harm, proactive aggression, self-sabotage, etc etc. And I wonder how much of adult suffering comes down from not un-learning bad behavioral patterns learned in school? How many people have put up with being treated like garbage for years (at work, in a relationship, etc), because they haven't internalized that they don't need to ask an authority figure to be allowed to leave? |
At some point I had to defend myself from a bully (that probably had a awful home life, since that guy managed to come home to school 7:00 in the morning already drunk, multiple times) by bashing the guy with a metal table and then threatening to kill him with a knife. Only then, he stopped bothering me.
Also I knew more than one guy that admired Columbine guys, their reason is that it was a good way (in their minds of course) of both getting out of their shitty life and taking revenge at same time.
Thankfully, now that I am adult, all problems so far I could solve by just talking to people, no tables, knives, planks or chains necessary.
Note: I went to "good" private schools, thus nobody died or got seriously injured, but I have friends that went to public schools, and one of them for example was forced to cause serious injury when 3 older students ambushed him right outside the school, and the only thing he had to defend himself was his skateboard, so he proceeded to hit them with the metal axis where you attach the wheels, broke half of the teeth of one guy, caved in one of the temples of another, and broke the shoulder and one knee of the third, after that the school started to have the police patrol near the school to prevent a repeat of this. Also that school banned skateboards, yoyos, long rulers (specially a particular metal ruler distributed as souvenir during a political campaign, that people found out you could sharpen and use as a decent machete) and spinning tops (specially those with metal tip, one kid made a hole in another kid head with one).