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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.
Indeed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Socrates
Palm trees and 8
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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
"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."
You left out the quote attribution. Is that from Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wish it had been Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold. Littleton, CO would be better for it.
In school, I was bullied too. Here's the kicker - my dad was a cop, gunsmith, and holder of a Federal Firearms License. Yes, that means he sold guns.
My home had guns stacked like cordwood. I'm not exaggerating. I had my first rifle at age 11 and became very proficient - most of the guys on the force considered my dad the marksman of the group. Probably came from his stint in the military, but whatever. I think you get the picture. I knew my way around most guns, could hit what I wanted to, and had easy access to weapons of all sorts.
Here's the thing. I never took the bully's shit. They called me a name, I embarrassed them. They put a tack on my chair, I stabbed them in the kneecap with my automatic pencil. By the time I got to the back half of high school, I had no problems with people whatsoever.
You see, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold just sat there and took it. They tried to find an outlet for their rage - video games, violent movies, blowing stuff up in the woods - but in the end, it was never enough. Because they never learned to send the evil back where it came from.
Hate is like acid. Try to contain it, and you become the only thing that can hold it - glass. And when you do shatter, it gets really damn messy.
Eric and Dylan shattered. I never did, because I realized a long time earlier that holding it in was the path to self-destruction.