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Study Finds Delinquent Behavior Among Boys Is "Contagious"
According to a new study, if everyone else was committing a crime, you would too, at least if you are a boy. The 20-year study showed what every grandmother could tell you; children from poor families, with inadequate supervision and bad friends were more likely to end up in juvenile court. What was more surprising is that exposure to the juvenile justice system seemed to increase the chance that the boy would engage in criminal activity as a young adult. "For boys who had been through the juvenile justice system, compared to boys with similar histories without judicial involvement, the odds of adult judicial interventions increased almost seven-fold," says study co-author Richard E. Tremblay.
"Boys more likely to do what the other boys in their peer group are doing. Juvenile delinquents teach juveniles to be delinquents."
Another amazing result by the Maximegallion Institute for Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious.
The enemies of Democracy are
This may be true: sticking the bad kids in with the good kids may improve the behavior of the bad kids. BUT BE WARNED! I was part of an educational experiment in which honors students (such as myself) were placed in an 6th-grade English class with, well, the criminal class.
I LEARNED NOTHING IN THAT CLASS! The teacher spent the whole time playing cop to stop the delinquents. Furthermore, sticking us in with them actually encouraged the good students to out-bad the bad students. It was a complete disaster.
For the good of this country, we need to concentrate on making sure our best students get the best education. This should be a higher priority than trying to make scientists out of juvenile criminals and bullies. Society doesn't need, and will never get 100% genius-status for all students, anyway. Attempts to make this happen will likely drag us all down.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
My grandfather used to say that "One boy is a boy, two boys are half a boy, and three boys are no boy at all." Meaning that when boys get together they have less good sense than one boy by himself does.
Atheism is a religion to the same extent that not collecting stamps is a hobby.
I love the correlationisnotcausation tag every single time an article on any study is posted. Correlation means nothing! Nothing causes anything! There is no order in the universe! It's all chaos! :)
If only the Department of Health in England could have read this before they spent millions placing kids with higher risk to be a teenage parent in a room with each other, then they wouldn't have been suprised when the pregnancy rates jumped.
Clearly, they should have been thinly distributed amongst the chess clubs and mathlete societies, where they would have either benefited from the complete lack of sex or been instrumental in breeding a new race of promiscuous geeks.
Heh. Yeah, the "If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you?" always confused me as a child.
Growing up in Oregon, two things we had in abundance were rivers and bridges over them.
Some bridges are too high, or the water too shallow, to jump off the bridge into the river below.
One way to tell is to see where everyone else is jumping in at. If they swim back to shore and climb back up you know it's safe. (For various values of "safe".)
Which is a longish way of saying the answer to the question is, "Well, yeah. Of course."
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
I put myself through college working as a night counselor at a school for boys --- one needs to remove the perceived glamour of the ``gangsta'' lifestyle, demonstrate the consequences of poor decisions and provide the rewards of mature and responsible behaviour.
Most importantly this needs to be done regardless of the child's intellectual level --- at one meeting a fellow counselor argued that one of the students should be released because he wasn't particularly bright and was ``simply going to be a janitor when he grows up anyway'' to which another added, ``one who swipes small pilferables which won't be missed.'' --- my rejoinder was that if we kept him in the program and continued working w/ him until he successfully graduated that while he might be a janitor when he grew up, he'd be an honest one who wouldn't steal and that that was a worthwhile goal, and maybe he could be something else, but that he would never get that chance if he didn't graduate.
He stayed in the program and I actually ran into him a couple of years later --- he was just completing an apprenticeship in the building trades and had been out of trouble since graduation.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
First, the parent is correct,
Second, education should be about equality of opportunity, not equal achievement for all, that means that the BAD and the STUPID need to be controlled, to enable that equality to the brightest and hard working.
You in the US are caught up in an orgy of political correctness and confusion which helps nobody and disadvantages all, and MUCH WORSE, it is second time around as Ms. Shirley Williams did exactly that in the UK in the late 60s and 70s (so the Educational Elite and teachers unions can not claim they dont know). And as Obama said "lipstick on a pig" is exactly like assuming you can make all children academic, which is the assumption (WRONG) of the academic elites.
In Switzerland, education is streamed, and bad behavior is punished quickly, firmly and effectively, which is very likely to get the delinquent child punished physically by their own parents. The result is that we have very little crime and antisocial behavior, well educated kids who are employable, and very low taxes because people take pride in being a "Good Swiss".
People laugh at the rediculous hi-junks in the US, where the parents (are allowed to) oppose the authorities correcting children, and except for incomers from some parts of Europe, who stand to be expelled, the native Swiss would not think of it.
The result of this is that 4 year olds can walk to kindergarten safely, and all adults expect to stand in "loco parentis" of any child in need without phobia about paedophilia, as was the case in the rural US 40 years ago.
Put very simply, you have very arrogantly lost your own way, and the rest of the world is now FULLY wised up to you.
Your court system, and law, is in a complete mess vide the games SCOX have played for so many years.