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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.
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.
witness the support for creationism and denial of climate change
This doesn't have anything to do with the article. The article is about bullying, not your favorite religious/political issue.
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.
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.
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
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 !
This also doesn't have anything to do with the article. The article is about bullying, not the "assault" on fiscal conservatism.
Just to be clear, the right wing in the US is not advocating for fiscal conservatism. Conservatism is keeping with historical norms. Rather, they are advocating for fiscal extremism, levels of taxation progressiveness lower than anything in the last 50 years. That's the opposite of conservative.
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.
but that's just displaying your lack of analytic skills which in a normal studious person can quickly identify
Again, you regress to Ad Hominem attacks. Why are you so quick to point out how little estimation you have for other peoples' "analytical skills"?
Exactly.
Are you bullied because of your 98% score in the maths quiz? Or because you're a weirdo who picks his nose, and stands way too close when trying to have a conversation?
In my experience at school, the most bullied people weren't smart. One was smelly (he must have had constipation and some faecal leakage I guess, and his home didn't have a shower, only a bath) and would have only been about average academically - he turned out okay as an adult I remember. Another kid I remember used to insult someone randomly, then run away because he knew he'd get the bash. I remember at a school concert him sitting on his mother's knee, he would have been 15.
I remember being punched in the stomach once for no reason, but that was by an older kid who would have had no idea about my grades. Probably because I was weak looking and he didn't like my hair or something.
Sure my friends/classmates might have said something like "geek", or "schoooolaaaaar [said sarcastically]" or whatever we said in 90s, but no-one was actually bullied for being smart - just occasionally for the baggage that can come with being academically smart. Being smart was a good thing, because at least that could explain some of the weirdness and was a valued skill.
My thought is that "bullying" now means "said something mean to me once". Whereas I think of it as the daily harassment of someone with constant verbal barrage, destruction of property, deliberate ostracism, demeaning and devaluing comments about the victim, and physical violence and irritation.
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.
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.