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Young Students Hiding Academic Talent To Avoid Bullying
jones_supa writes "The recent anti-bullying survey conducted by ABA brings up some interesting findings. According to it, more than 90% of the 1,000 11-16 year-olds surveyed said they had been bullied or seen someone bullied for being too intelligent or talented. Almost half of children and young people (49.5%) have played down a talent for fear of being bullied, rising to 53% among girls. One in 10 (12%) said they had played down their ability in science and almost one in five girls (18.8%) and more than one in 10 boys (11.4%) are deliberately underachieving in maths – to evade bullying. Worryingly, this means our children and young people are shying away from academic achievement for fear of victimization."
That people feel they need to hide their abilities because they would do better than others.
It was like this when I was in school back in the 60's and 70's. I realize the study is from the UK, but anti-intellectualism is a long tradition here in the good ol' USA - witness the support for creationism and denial of climate change, etc, etc.
Have you read my blog lately?
How is this news? I would wager that humans have been acting like this for many thousands of years. The only people who should find this surprising are people who grew up somewhere away from all human contact,.
I don't respond to AC's.
The Election is Over, and the Math Geeks Won.
Obama's data geeks have made Karl Rove and Dick Morris obsolete
The Real Election-Day Winner? Math Geeks.
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A library datebase, not just for science nerds
This is only from recent events, but the same type of headlines are repeated all the time. Why the hell would any child want to be good at something that puts them into a category that is openly disdained in our culture?
and 90s and 00s but the response shouldn't be to toughen up. it should be to take the fucking bullies and remove them.
To a nerd, acquiring social skills merely means learning that he can never mention anything he really cares about, and that he must learn to politely endure other people's boring rants without showing it. And then people wonder why he dislikes socializing.
People don't get bullied for being good at soccer or for being good at art.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Riiight....cuz no one was every bullied at a private school...
There was a girl in my class in middle school who was first rate at figure skating, and never got picked on at all. There were kids who were good at art and other things ... no hassles. Precious athletes, for the most part, exempt from the social tax on excellence.
There was a girl hideously deformed in the jaw and neck who showed up one day. No one said a word for two months, then the dam burst. I'd been in a children's hospital down the hall from a burn unit. I wasn't having any of it. Most of the adults who came to visit were so green around the gills to step onto that ward you almost needed a bucket in the hallway.
Sam Harris says we grant religious beliefs too much automatic deference. I think this also extends to our little rotters. There's something terribly vicious in young children that we neither discuss nor study to the extent warranted by their appalling capacity for social cruelty.
Not my little angel! Well, I suspect your little angel has become adept at emulating attitudes learned at home.
The social violence of little angels should be news. Today and every day. Do people think it just goes away, or does it merely mutate into more mature forms? I'm not trying to stamp out scorn or derision. That's a fact of life, man. But I do think that the use of "gay" as a generic adjective of derision should get the little rotters shuffled onto a short bus for the social learning disabled.
High time "gay" went the way of DUI, where nearly everyone looks at you funny, like you're charting a life course for a wall-mounted chrome toilet with no lid.
I went through this shit... Teachers are awful. Half the time the teachers would join in. Fuck them. I remember in 7th grade my science teacher telling the class that one day we wouldn't have our pinky toe anymore because we don't need it anymore and evolution would take care of it. I raised my hand and pointed out that evolution didn't work that way. She got mad and told me I was wrong. The next day I brought in a book on evolution from the library to prove my point. I failed that class... and not because I failed any tests.
If there's bullying going on in a classroom, it's the teachers fault. Period. I've always said it's a sad truth that your children are safer in a bar than they are at school. If the shit that went down in your local high-school happened anywhere else people would go to jail.
Love it. When I tell people that my kids will be home-schooled they usually say "but school is where you learn to socialize." No. School is where you learn submission to authority, to muscle and to bullies. Also, teachers try very hard to prevent socialization in the classroom. Socialization can happen in sport activities or extra-scholar activity, but learning does not require bullies and crowded classes.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
What's so surprising is that the current crop of intelligent people have actually succumbed to the bullies by the inferiority complex sufferers.
I too, and many like me in my generation, and those before me, had gone through the gauntlet of taunts and shovings and beatings, just because we think differently.
Those that bullied us bullied us because they felt inferior. They INSTINCTIVELY KNEW that they are inferior, but their ego just won't that happened.
It's their internal struggles - ego versus instinct - that promoted some of them to act out in violence.
As I said, I too got beaten up just because I ain't one of them, but so what?
Why should I hide my own self just because someone else don't like who I am?
Hey, I am born into this world not because I am destined to follow dumbasses. I am born into this world to do what I must do - that is, to be myself.
Yes, I got beaten up, but that didn't affect my determination to be my own self, not even a bit.
I hold my head high because I know that I am not guilty of anything. The guilty party is THEM, not me.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The only way to deal with them is bash them. Sorry of that's not PC New York Times and soccer mommy friendly enough for you but that, fellow geeks and nerds is what you have to do.
Someone bullies you, break their arm. If they and their thug friends come back at you break their heads. If their mommies and daddies complain tell them everyone can live in a new house after their burns to the ground.
They're not human, they're animals and this is what you do with animals. You beat them until they stop.
Do you think that students should be required to lift weights if they don't want to be bullied? Including girls?
We have an underlying problem here: that academic excellence is despised, while sporting excellence is admired. Telling a talented student that they should dedicated themselves to sports instead does not fix that. It just ensures that we have another generation of children growing up to glorify sporting prowess, without the educational background to do something that really matters.
Hmm, let's apply this logic to a few other scenarios:
- An abusive husband likes to call his wife a 'stupid f-cking c-nt' and beat her, and you know what she needs to do (according to snsh), she needs to "keep her cool or joke at it, then he'll show her respect -- it all comes down to how she handles herself in those moments", you know.
- Here's another one: An abusive boss likes to push and spit on some of the employees and call them stupid useless idiots. What they need to do, is keep their cool or joke at it, then the boss will show them respect. It all comes down to how they handle themselves.
Does this seem stupid yet? It's bad enough when the victim is an adult, now you think a five year old should put up with it? Really? These actions are criminal when adults do them.
My other UID is three digits.
I will say this, I definitely received less bullying at a private school than I believe I would've at the local public school. I never felt like I should underperform in order to fit in better or to avoid bullying.
Then you were lucky. I was terrorized at private school. Once I switched to public school, the bullying didn't actually stop, but it got down to a level I could deal with and eventually learn to defend myself against. As someone further up the thread noted, it's a whole lot harder to get the administration to deal with problem students when their parents are writing the checks. There's a class issue at work here too--my parents were sending me to schools they really couldn't afford in the (mistaken) belief that I'd get a better education that way, and being a middle-class nerd surrounded by rich juvenile delinquents is really a special kind of hell.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Where the f' are the parents in all this?
That is a fantastic question. But... Whose parents? Note that the victims parents can't teach the bully that he's misbehaving.
When I was in junior high, I was bullied frequently and mercilessly. My parents did get involved. They were told by the school councilor that I just had a self-esteem problem (I didn't) which somehow made myself a target (blame the victim, anyone?). They were told by teachers that there was nothing they could do (not true). They were told by administrators that everything was fine. They weren't permitted to contact the other students' parents. I blame the school system (primarily) for permitting bullying.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
There are a LOT of smart people out there that nobody hates. Perhaps it says more about you and your ego, than about "society" that they don't like you.
I had a chat after a Cub Scout outing once, with one kid who was crying that "all the other kids hate me because I'm so much smarter than them".
Obviously, I couldn't say it to the kid, who just needed a sympathetic shoulder at the moment, but the fact is: any kid whose parents have taught him that he's such a special snowflake that he could even HAVE such an egotistical, obnoxious thought, is in for trouble.
And it's NOT because "he's so much smarter than everyone else". Not by a long shot.
-Styopa
Alternatives: http://www.educationrevolution.org/
From John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm
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Our problem in understanding forced schooling stems from an inconvenient fact: that the wrong it does from a human perspective is right from a systems perspective. You can see this in the case of six-year-old Bianca, who came to my attention because an assistant principal screamed at her in front of an assembly, "BIANCA, YOU ANIMAL, SHUT UP!" Like the wail of a banshee, this sang the school doom of Bianca. Even though her body continued to shuffle around, the voodoo had poisoned her.
Do I make too much of this simple act of putting a little girl in her place? It must happen thousands of times every day in schools all over. I've seen it many times, and if I were painfully honest I'd admit to doing it many times. Schools are supposed to teach kids their place. That's why we have age-graded classes. In any case, it wasn't your own little Janey or mine.
Most of us tacitly accept the pragmatic terms of public school which allow every kind of psychic violence to be inflicted on Bianca in order to fulfill the prime directive of the system: putting children in their place. It's called "social efficiency." But I get this precognition, this flash-forward to a moment far in the future when your little girl Jane, having left her comfortable home, wakes up to a world where Bianca is her enraged meter maid, or the passport clerk Jane counts on for her emergency ticket out of the country, or the strange lady who lives next door.
I picture this animal Bianca grown large and mean, the same Bianca who didn't go to school for a month after her little friends took to whispering, "Bianca is an animal, Bianca is an animal," while Bianca, only seconds earlier a human being like themselves, sat choking back tears, struggling her way through a reading selection by guessing what the words meant.
In my dream I see Bianca as a fiend manufactured by schooling who now regards Janey as a vehicle for vengeance. In a transport of passion she:
1. Gives Jane's car a ticket before the meter runs out.
2. Throws away Jane's passport application after Jane leaves the office.
3. Plays heavy metal music through the thin partition which separates Bianca's apartment from Jane's while Jane pounds frantically on the wall for relief.
4. All the above.
You aren't compelled to loan your car to anyone who wants it, but you are compelled to surrender your school-age child to strangers who process children for a livelihood, even though one in every nine schoolchildren is terrified of physical harm happening to them in school, terrified with good cause; about thirty-three are murdered there every year. From 1992 through 1999, 262 children were murdered in school in the United States. Your great-great-grandmother didn't have to surrender her children. What happened?
If I demanded you give up your television to an anonymous, itinerant repairman who needed work you'd think I was crazy; if I came with a policeman who forced you to pay that repairman even after he broke your set, you would be outraged. Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?
I want to open up concealed aspects of modern schooling such as the deterioration it forces in the morality of parenting. You have no say at all in choosing your teachers. You know nothing about their backgrounds or families. And the state knows little more than you do. This is as radical a piece of social engineering as the human imagination can conceive. What does it mean?
One thing you do know is how unlikely it will be for any teacher to understand the personality of your particular child or anything significant about yo
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.