Has School Become Too Hostile to Boys?

[LiquidMidnight]

Also, I should point out that it seems unintuitive that bullying still seems to be a huge problem, but yet, nobody is allowed to even rough house if we are to believe the author of the article. Now, assuming that A: Bullying is still an epidemic, and B: Schools, on the whole, have become bastions of PCness and kids aren't allowed to be kids, there may be some sort of theoretical reason that both of these two seemingly contradictory things exist. However, I do think it's worth bringing up.

 

[Mysterion]

Also, I should point out that it seems unintuitive that bullying still seems to be a huge problem, but yet, nobody is allowed to even rough house if we are to believe the author of the article. Now, assuming that A: Bullying is still an epidemic, and B: Schools, on the whole, have become bastions of PCness and kids aren't allowed to be kids, there may be some sort of theoretical reason that both of these two seemingly contradictory things exist. However, I do think it's worth bringing up.

Your consistent stream of logical insight has no place on the internet. Could you please re-frame that in more sensational terms?

 

[zachoff]

I hear all of these examples of school sports where they don't keep score, but I've yet to actually see any of it...except of course, on random people's post on the Internets and in sensationalist blogs.

I kept score and both of my kids were happier for it. Winning is fun and learning to be a good loser is important. None of the YMCA/rec leagues kept score until a certain age (usually Jr High). Granted, this isn't really a school thing because most elementary and middle schools have done away with athletics due to budget cuts.

I call it the pussification of America. All this PC crap has seriously got to go away, people need not be so easily offended, and our whole country needs thicker skin.

 

[Lonesomedave]

Also, I should point out that it seems unintuitive that bullying still seems to be a huge problem, but yet, nobody is allowed to even rough house if we are to believe the author of the article. Now, assuming that A: Bullying is still an epidemic, and B: Schools, on the whole, have become bastions of PCness and kids aren't allowed to be kids, there may be some sort of theoretical reason that both of these two seemingly contradictory things exist. However, I do think it's worth bringing up.

uh...the bullies haven't gotten the memo?...

they are all cyber-bullying?

sorry, that's a non-sequitur....schools can be bastions of PC and yet there can still be bullying...just like a thousand other things that we tell kids not to do, but they do anyway....

one has nothing to do with the other

 

[jmattbassplaya]

and i am sorry for that...no one should be bullied at all...BUT, in trying to fix that (among other things we are trying to social-engineer out of American life), we are screwing up the best, most productive system the world has ever known, and we are screwing up boys.



again, there has got to be a middle ground....stop bullying, but allow boys to be boys....

and, BTW, this great new world that we are building doesn't seem to have solved the bullying problem, has it?...every week you hear/read stories about kids being bullied...sometimes to the point of suicide....why do think we have this national campaign against bullying?

and it's not just boys....you hear all these horror stories about girl bullying...both as the victims and the perpetrators

they really are 2 unrelated issues....address the bullying but don't screw up society, while doing so....

except, i think for many, bullying is just a pretext...they WANT to screw up society...granted, they wouldn't call it that, they would say they are making "social progress" and actually fixing society....well you say TOMAYTO and i say TOMAHTO

That's the way I see it.

As they say, no one gets out of life alive. Obviously things like bullying need to be mitigated, but not to the point where living life and doing things that are naturally human are stopped for some 'greater good' that doesn't seem to be good at all.

 

[jmattbassplaya]

uh...the bullies haven't gotten the memo?...

they are all cyber-bullying?

sorry, that's a non-sequitur....schools can be bastions of PC and yet there can still be bullying...just like a thousand other things that we tell kids not to do, but they do anyway....

one has nothing to do with the other

Like I was hinting at, you can't stop human nature.

 

[sloasdaylight]

I'm not really sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me. Arguably more schools are adopting zero tolerance policies, but a policy only has value if it's actually carried out. How many of these zero tolerance policies are being carried out to the extreme level as those cited in the article or those talked about in the corner diner with friends? If we conducted a panel study of school districts over time, we may find a statistically significant result that schools have adopted more zero tolerance policies. However, if we were to then turn-around and do a cross-sectional study with districts and examine "Critical Incidents" of zero tolerance policies being carried to extreme ends, there may be nonsignificant findings.

There are probably thousands of school districts in the United States, and that's not including private and parochial schools - lots of opportunity to cherry-pick extreme examples that may not be representative of the average. For the record, I graduated high school in 2000, and for as long as I could remember, students couldn't self-administer any sort of medication, even aspirin. They had to go to the school nurse.

I agree that policy only matters if it's carried out, but what I'm saying is that these policies are becoming more commonplace, and are going to be carried out more often as a result. Also, as the older generation of teachers retires (the ones who used their judgement for 20-30 years prior to having to report a kid for shaping a pop-tart into the shape of a gun), and newer, younger teachers who were brought up in a zero-tolerance environment (and were educated in it), you'll see an increase in these sort of cases, I can pretty much all but guarantee it.

 

[Lee Moses]

I hear all of these examples of school sports where they don't keep score, but I've yet to actually see any of it...except of course, on random people's post on the Internets and in sensationalist blogs.

http://www.ffps.org/

 

[sloasdaylight]

I hear all of these examples of school sports where they don't keep score, but I've yet to actually see any of it...except of course, on random people's post on the Internets and in sensationalist blogs.

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Check the second page. This is in the younger age brackets I grant you, however once kids are 7-10, they're old enough to deal with score keeping, and winning and losing.

 

[Jazz Ad]

What is really strange with the phenomenon is that school is supposed to prepare kids to the society they will live in.
They have schools full of butterflies, then they go home, turn on the tv and see dozens of people getting killed daily, real or not. Then they turn on internet and get porn flicks, with hateful racist comments all over youtube and various sites.

The behavior is induced by zealots. I'd like to see a single study showing that playing bandits turns kids into criminals but there is none. Rules are introduced without any solid fundation.

 

[LiquidMidnight]

schools can be bastions of PC and yet there can still be bullying...just like a thousand other things that we tell kids not to do, but they do anyway....

Then the PC policies that are being lamented as the downfall of Western civilization are either not working or are just being given lip service by the administration. Thus, what's the big deal then?

one has nothing to do with the other

Yes they do. If the whole reason for these policies, as stated in the article, is to get children to act less aggressive, be more respectful, and hold hands and sing Kumbaya, then it's definitely linked to bullying in some form or another. Bullying, whether physical, verbal, or electronic is a form of aggression. Logically, if these policies are cracking down on students as much as people are saying they are, shouldn't they have a causal relationship with reducing bullying? Now, I'm not saying that's necessarily the case. There may be a spurious factor at work or a theoretical reason why PCness is cracking down on students and bullying is still a problem, but that's ultimately an empirical question. It is quite unintuitive, though, and if increased PCness and bullying aren't related - at least on the face - then I don't know what is.

 

[LiquidMidnight]

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Check the second page. This is in the younger age brackets I grant you, however once kids are 7-10, they're old enough to deal with score keeping, and winning and losing.

Do you mean: Law 10 Goal Scored: shall conform to FIFA and the sections concerning Winning Team and
Competition Rules shall conform to US Youth Soccer guideline?

I'm a bit lost on the problem with that. I'm not familiar with the rules of soccer, so is there some other Law on the page that I'm not understanding?

 

[LiquidMidnight]

I agree that policy only matters if it's carried out, but what I'm saying is that these policies are becoming more commonplace, and are going to be carried out more often as a result. Also, as the older generation of teachers retires (the ones who used their judgement for 20-30 years prior to having to report a kid for shaping a pop-tart into the shape of a gun), and newer, younger teachers who were brought up in a zero-tolerance environment (and were educated in it), you'll see an increase in these sort of cases, I can pretty much all but guarantee it.

While you may see an increase in these cases, it still doesn't mean that they'll become the average.

 

[sloasdaylight]

Do you mean: Law 10 Goal Scored: shall conform to FIFA and the sections concerning Winning Team and
Competition Rules shall conform to US Youth Soccer guideline?

I'm a bit lost on the problem with that. I'm not familiar with the rules of soccer, so is there some other Law on the page that I'm not understanding?

Page 3, sorry, I must have still had some of page 2 up in my pdf viewer and it told me page three.

"No score or standings should be kept."

 

[Lonesomedave]

Then the PC policies that are being lamented as the downfall of Western civilization are either not working or are just being given lip service by the administration. Thus, what's the big deal then?



Yes they do. If the whole reason for these policies, as stated in the article, is to get children to act less aggressive, be more respectful, and hold hands and sing Kumbaya, then it's definitely linked to bullying in some form or another. Bullying, whether physical, verbal, or electronic is a form of aggression. Logically, if these policies are cracking down on students as much as people are saying they are, shouldn't they have a causal relationship with reducing bullying? Now, I'm not saying that's necessarily the case. There may be a spurious factor at work or a theoretical reason why PCness is cracking down on students and bullying is still a problem, but that's ultimately an empirical question. It is quite unintuitive, though, and if increased PCness and bullying aren't related - at least on the face - then I don't know what is.

i really don't see what your point is....

are you saying that schools have NOT become bastions of PC-ness (if that's a word...political correctness-ness........)....because if that's what you are saying, i respectfully disagree

 

[sloasdaylight]

While you may see an increase in these cases, it still doesn't mean that they'll become the average.

True. It's also true that just because studies haven't been done regarding it that they're not happening, and not becoming more prevalent either.

 

[Dale D Dilly]

As parents, do you ever punish your kids for a minor infraction because it's the most recent in a patterned string of such infractions? Do you ever see that whatever mildly disobedient action your child is taking at a moment, is a probe preceding escalating disobedience and so you cut him off there instead of letting him build up to a behavior you really don't want to see?

Teachers do the same thing of course. And I think we should consider the likelihood that most of these moronic reasons for punishment are really responses to a larger behavioral pattern. A kid shoots his pencil like a gun in class? You know that kid has been disrupting class for weeks and was about to step up from shouting "bang bang" at another student to even more disruptive behavior.

Now I think, even in that case, a good educator would have better diffused the situation and that suspension was uncalled for, but you get the idea. Someone isn't waiting around to nail kids for these nominal breaches of the rules; educators trying to control their classrooms just occasionally choose one of these actions as the intervention point in a series of unwanted behaviors.

The same reasoning accounts for the difference in the "redirection" of boys' and girls' play. I'm going to challenge the single study mentioned in paragraph seven by appealing to my own experience and yours: boys' play leads to roughhousing and a kid getting injured far more often than girl's play. When a typical educator "redirects" some boys pretending to be super heroes, etc. it's because she's seen something in the play that suggests it's going to become too rough for the classroom. That actually reinforces the argument that our classrooms are designed to favor girls, but not become of some PC aversion to the themes boys enjoy including in pretend play.

Of course, some of us (like myself) might say, their idea of "too rough" is ridiculous and part of the problem. Who's fault is the expectation that no kid ever scrapes a knee, and that if he does, paperwork must be filled out in triplicate to document the incident? I don't think schools created that atmosphere of their own volition--we likely have law suit happy parents to thank for much of that.

 

[aborgman]

again, there has got to be a middle ground....stop bullying, but allow boys to be boys....

Well... the problem with that is which parts of "boys being boys" are:

1) Nature
2) Nurture and purely a product of social conditioning.

It's BAD to try and go against natural instinct. It is completely different to attempt to change a social construct with no "natural" source.

Modifying essential innate qualities of boys is bad... changing the social structure under which we raise them (and thus their learned "boy" behaviors) is a different ball of wax.

 

[aborgman]

I agree that policy only matters if it's carried out, but what I'm saying is that these policies are becoming more commonplace, and are going to be carried out more often as a result.

Absolutely.

Problem is - it was consumers (students and parents) that drove "zero tolerance" through litigation, not something pushed from on high by schools.

 

[bassinplace]

THE TROUBLE WITH POSTING ALL CAPS IS THAT NO ONE CAN TELL WHICH BIT YOU ARE EMPHASISING.

THIS IS GOING TO BE MORE COMPLEX THAN I THOUGHT.

No it's not. A successful capitalist uses THIS. You're welcome.