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by thegrimmest
1293 days ago
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Right, I'm suggesting that adults are sufficiently cognitively developed to take personal responsibility for their actions. Children clearly are not. I'm not suggesting we stop punishing bullies, I'm just suggesting that we apply our knowledge of childhood psychology to the engineering of the school social environment. Unlike adults, there has been no intervention that has been demonstrated effective in stopping children from applying violence to the construction of dominance hierarchies. Lord of the flies is deemed chillingly instructive for a reason. Children typically age out of this behaviour by their late teens and go on to become functional, peaceful adults. The ones that do not are indeed destined for prison. Children and adults are significantly cognitively different, they may as well be different species. We should embrace this reality. |
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It tells you what children might do if left to their own devices without adult supervision – i.e. in an environment completely unlike a school. The Lord of the Flies is also a work of fiction that's not based on any real life events, as far as I'm aware. In any actual instances of kids being stranded on an island that I've been able to find, the results were rather different: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-...
>Unlike adults, there has been no intervention that has been demonstrated effective in stopping children from applying violence to the construction of dominance hierarchies
In my school there was an effective intervention: you got punished if you beat someone up, and excluded from the school if you kept doing it. I guess no-one had told us that we were required to form 'hominid dominance hierarchies' and that we were cognitively incapable of responding to simple incentives.
>I'm just suggesting that we apply our knowledge of childhood psychology to the engineering of the school social environment
And what would this mean, exactly, beyond just accepting the inevitability of violence?