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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?
Ma bring me my shotgun. Theres another of them their intlectuls on the front grass.
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.
Which was unusual in that the person doing the bullying was the fucking teacher. (First grade believe it or not. Turns out she hated the smart kids. I'm fairly glad my mind won't let me remember what she did but I at least know she was cruel, nasty bitch.) Every grade after that I way under-performed.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Indeed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Socrates
Palm trees and 8
A few things...
:)
Talent schools do exist, a lot of them are private though.
Being in the top 10% of your math class doesn't make you a math prodigy.
Smart people who act "cool" tend to get applause for their "talents" , not bullied
Lifting weights never killed anyone in this age group (at least I don't think)
Where the f' are the parents in all this?
In life in general, sometimes it's better to fit in than be the nail that gets hammered
If the kids actually cared about excelling in their subject of choice, they wouldn't care about being bullied, I can think of a chess person, and a chem person who are testaments to this from back in HS
Last, but not least, AP Calc has yet to help me in life, AP chem... kind of
In a work environment, just as in school, you get along by pretending to be like everyone else, and as dumb as everyone else, particularly your managers. Lip service is always given to tolerance, but lip service is all it is.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
In Asia, overachievers and well-studying kids are looked up to. While that still doesn't make them the 'cool' kids, they do just fine socially and have no such problems as TFA.
I suggest North American culture change its stigma of nerds, geeks, and intelligence, or face vastly deteriorating social values and social/scientific progress.
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.
Math nerds score big wins with superstorm Sandy, Obama victory
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?
Socrates' last words:
"I drank what?"
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
made things a lot worse. When my oldest (who is actually good at math) went to school, he never got in trouble because he'd get some A's, a few B's and occasionally he'd even get an F... by now, math and other subjects are so dumbed down that any reasonably smart person gets straight A's - and suddenly you're being punished for being too smart... In the end, we need kids to fail more in every way.
Peter.
Dearies, when I was growing up in India, I was very good in academics. Yes I was good in a number of extra curricular activities too, but acads were stellar. I was fit, but except for some recreational table-tennis, I was not much into competitive sports. Oh btw, I was a small kid in stature compared to others. Anyway, I was actually respected, especially because of the acads. And thankfully the culture has not changed much at all. Kids who are talented in sciences and acads, or other stuff, get respect, and are considered cool enough to hang out with - it's not the losers who sit around and are bulky that are considered cool (well, India being India, if the losers start getting physical, rest assured there are external contractors whom your parents can hire to take care of the matter quickly - and the losers know that too).
Anyway - this is good news for India and china. At least their brainy kids would not be beaten up and turned away from studies by the idiots. No immediate worries of ending up as an idiocracy. I guess future generations of Indian and chinese kids will thank the prolific US 'cool' football and basketball stars for beating up the brainy ones and damaging them permanently.
Good show USA.
This has been going on for a long time, and no, it isn't just public schools.
George Orwell mentioned getting mocked -- by the headmaster's wife, for cripes sake -- for being part of a group that collected insects. ("Such, Such Were the Joys.")
But the OA made me think of this Freeman Dyson quote:
"So it happened that I belonged to a small minority of boys who were lacking in physical strength and athletic prowess, interested in other things besides football, and squeezed between the twin oppressions of whip and sandpaper. We hated the headmaster with his Latin grammar and we hated even more the boys with their empty football heads. So what could the poor helpless minority of intellectuals, later and in another country to be known as nerds, do to defend ourselves? We found our refuge in a territory that was equally inaccessible to our Latin-obsessed headmaster and our football-obsessed schoolmates. We found our refuge in science. With no help from the school authorities, we founded a science society. As a persecuted minority, we kept a low profile. We held our meetings quietly and inconspicuously. We could do no real experiments. All we could do was share books and explain to each other what we didn't understand. But we learned a lot. Above all, we learned those lessons that can never be taught by formal courses of instruction; that science is a conspiracy of brains against ignorance, that science is a revenge of victims against oppressors, that science is a territory of freedom and friendship in the midst of tyranny and hatred."
-- From "To Teach or Not to Teach," 1990
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.
Last, but not least, AP Calc has yet to help me in life
Don't knock AP Calculus.
It's a lot cheaper to take the class in high school and pay for the AP test than to pay college tuition later.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
They killed him for speaking English?
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
Similarly, very few people have the courage to examine the role rape victims play in being raped. Promiscuous dress and behavior attract rapists. People need to recognize that behavior of victims contributes to the attacks.
Or you're talking out of your ass.
No zero tolerance bullcrap. All that does is protect bullies. If somebody shoves your student, give them every right to give the aggressor a black eye.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
A little humility goes a long way. Not too much, mind you, otherwise it ends up being only marginally better than bragging.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
No, it frightens "grownups" too. It's just that later in life you're segregated away from those people by your education, career, and your income: where you live, where you shop, where you go for fun and so on.
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 !
They were just intentionally making dumb mistakes so the other authors wouldn't bully them.
#DeleteChrome
They'd get nailed to the wall and whatever video games they play would be excoriated in Congress. I got in more trouble defending myself than my attackers ever got in for attacking me.
Was the main reason I got into some light theft and break and enter when I was in my teens. I'd realized that I'd never seen the school administration blame the right person for anything, so I started doing things to get back something for the times I'd been punished. Never got caught for anything I did.
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.
Our society rewards bullies* and punishes those who try to defend themselves against them.
*Look at who gets the highest positions in their occupations. The bully who pushes hardest for it. The alphas.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Picked on for being smart? Not where I'm from.
I graduated in the early 2000's, and no one ever cared about any one else's grades or smarts. The people who got low grades didn't care about grades, or just joked about how low they could get their GPA. Those with a high GPA never caught flak for it. The low achievers didn't care; they were focused on their own little world.
Not to say no one ever got picked on. I distinctly remember the guy who almost lit me on fire with a zippo on the school bus, but that was because I was a small and easy target.
Ummmm *checks the list*
'This is not funny. This is bullying. This is wrong.'
Being an Aussie kid in the 90's I can attest to the horrors of constant bullying. In year 10 I wanted out so bad I gave up hiding my tracks in circumventing the school's computer network, I'd been breaking into it for over a year by this stage, and started changing the teacher's passwords to speed up my discovery. Being expelled and having other local schools decline my entrance was the best thing that happened to me! No more having to worry about peers trying to light my hair on fire during science class!
I still remember my amazement when first attending higher eduction, people actually respected my intelligence and welcomed my help!
Actually, most people already know that a woman walking through a park, at 1am, in a mini-skirt shouldn't be all that surprised if she gets attacked. That doesn't make the attack wrong and does not excuse the attacker. The victim should also learn to not be so damn stupid.
We're usually taught how to stay out of that sort of trouble. However, it seems pretty rare that we sit a kid down and teach them how to avoid being a target of bullies. That's what the parent is pointing out and shouldn't be mocked. I can't think of a single kid in school (of any age) who was being bullied and wasn't an easy target. Kids should be helped to learn why they are targets and how to help change their situation.
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.
But I have to say that when I was in school, the fact that I did pretty well academically is always something that earned me respect. I run ins with my fair share of bullies and shitheads but really it didn't seem to have much to do with my intellect. Stupid kids got bullied just as much.
I have to wonder if this whole concept of "nerd persecution" is concocted by nerds who don't want to admit that maybe they have obnoxious personalities and kind of had it coming.
Holy fucking shit, how did you get a single positive mod, let alone 2 or more?
How was I, weighing 95 pounds my first day of high school*, supposed to react when the fat tub of shit asshole in my gym class decided to tackle me INDOORS onto the hard gym floor for no reason and knock the wind out of me? Fuck you and fuck him.
What if I come to your house with a gun, and you're unarmed? If you act afraid, does that make it OK? And what if you stand your ground and I STILL shoot you? How would you like that?
Tell me exactly what defensive options I had at 12 years old (or any age, really) against someone who is literally 50% larger than me. With friends present. Not ALL bullies fall into the bullshit movie-of-the-week "if you stand your ground, he'll respect you and leave you alone" category. In fact, I've never met one like that in my life. All the bullies I've ever known were just fucked-up cliquish assholes who never let anyone into their club.
Typical scenario: bully comes up to you and decides to fuck with you. Option a: Act scared, get beat up. Option b: stand your ground, get beat up. I've seen it happen.
Yes, kids need confidence, but thinking that being meek in ANY way makes you deserving of ANY amount of bad treatment is so totally beyond belief I don't even know where to start.
What you're talking about applies to literally maybe 1/2 of 1% of bullies. Sure, bullies might be insecure assholes who need to make others feel bad in order for themselves to feel good, but they also usually have the size, the strength, and the friends (and, later in life, the political skills) to make your life miserable no matter what you do.
* Private college-prep high school, by the way. Just because some kid's parents have money and send him to a private school doesn't mean he's a great guy. My school was roughly evenly divided: half the kids were pretty bright and their parents wanted them to go somewhere "better" than a regular high school, and the other half were bright kids that maybe didn't work so hard, or average kids that the parents were hoping to make smarter, thanks to tougher classes and stronger discipline. That is to say, it wasn't just full of super-bright kids who chose to be there and never bullied each other. And the ones who were assholes on the first day were still assholes at graduation.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
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.
It might be interesting to read about a comparative study of bullying in private vs. public schools. I've had friends who went to both, and from that small sample, I'd guess that there's not a lot of significance to the public/private labels. It depends on the people running the school.
I got sent entirely to public schools. But I also learned at an early age to make friends with the school's authorities, and mention the bullying topic to them when there were opportunities. There were usually adults around who were interested, and wanted to help protect the kids. On several occasions, I and a few other kids worked with the cooperative adults to "entrap" some of the bullies, by enticing them into physical attacks when there were adult witnesses in a position to watch. There were interesting effects when they then reported the incidents to the bullies' parents and to the local legal authorities.
But this doesn't always work. As others have mentioned, sometimes there are no adults in a school who care, and sometimes they're even bullies and/or molesters themselves. It can be sorta difficult for a child to handle such situations successfully.
I did have one friend who ran into this in a private academy, where the local legal authorities were even unwilling to get involved with the school. After a couple of years, his parents understood the problem, pulled him out, and he did a lot better in the local public school.
(British readers should swap the terms "public" and "private" in this discussion. It's an interesting different between the dialects of English. ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
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
====
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.
A word has been invented and used to label what is essentially assault, simply because it is minors assaulting minors. Can we PLEASE call it what it is and DEAL WITH IT as ASSAULT? As in, treat it as a CRIMINAL OFFENCE instead of just saying "kids will be kids" ::rolleyes::? Let's make examples of these so-called "bullies", criminalise their activities and maybe the incidence will go DOWN.
I wasn't "bullied" at school. I was ASSAULTED. My overachievement in all fields of study suffered, so by the time I got to college age I just couldn't be arsed any more. I went from straight-A to C/D/E/F in my GCSEs, and scraped by in A-level physics and biology and completely failed advanced math. Fortunately I managed to beat that stigma and went on to run several successful businesses, all of which I parted company with reputation intact and no creditors.
As an aside, schools don't like it when you send them Cease & Desist notices to get them to address problems of targetted assaults on their students which they're doing nothing about. They like it even less when you pull your own kids from their institutions citing "multiple assaults by students and teaching staff" with dates and times. They go all out to perjure themselves in sudden and unexpected parallel care proceedings when you file suit against the local education authority for failure to perform to expectations as Corporate Parents in ensuring student safety.
So it's not just a culture of "bullying" that schools are neglecting until it's thrown into the limelight by pissed off parents who are having to take their kids to the hospital every two weeks, it's a culture of perpetuation of the problem on the part of the institutions, whose staff themselves are PART OF THE PROBLEM. Let's have this all out in the open so we can DEAL WITH IT, before more kids die at the hands of these "bullies" through terminal attacks or suicides!
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
In a world where people truly respected the personal rights of others, your hypothetical woman should be able to dance through the park stark naked and not fear sexual assault.
Sadly however we know that isn't a low risk activity. But apparently, neither is sleeping in your own bed at home behind a locked door - there was an incident in my home town last week of a woman suffering an aggravated sexual assault at home in her own bed. It certainly wasn't the first news report I'd heard of similar assaults.
Blaming the victim is denial of the responsibility of the aggressor to behave in a civillised manner in the first place.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
The post you're replying to was an oblique reference to the movie _Real Genius_ where Val Kilmer's character invents a Socrates quote for the sake of comedy.
One thing that might work is to try to kill the bully in the next fight. You'll get beaten up no matter what, but if you can hurt the bully you might be placed into the crazy people to avoid category, and that's a win in this case. You won't succeed in killing the guy, of course, and you don't really want to, but make a serious attempt at it. Failing that, do anything you can to hurt the bully. If beating you up has a risk attached to it, you'll be a less attractive target.
This isn't the sort of advice I normally give, but school bullying is a strange situation.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes