The thing that stood out most to me in this article is the tale of abuse and torment the kids received when going back to the formal school system. The concept of teasing and abuse was foreign to them. Obviously it's just one datapoint, but I'd love to see a study that checks whether the school system makes children meaner and more cruel.
Imagine the damage being done to society if it really is the case that traditional schools result in meaner people.
It might be the law of large numbers. The larger the school, the larger the probability for one or more really mean kids per age group. This is then probably amplified once more by school size since mean kids thrive on a large audiences and have an easier time recruiting allies (who in this context aren't actively mean themselves but are eager to provide social support structures to bullies).
I switched primary schools once at that age because of massive bullying (in my country switching to a different primary school is almost impossible unless you move to another school zone, so it took quite some effort). The second school was smaller and more diverse socially, and I got through the whole thing much easier.
Same experience I had. Went from a medium sized middle school of ~3k to a high school of ~15k students and had the worst time. Transferred to a rural high school of ~1500 and had a much better experience the rest of my high school years.
The other contributing factor though is culture. My middle school was serving a metropolitan suburbia. Demographics were mostly white, a good amount of Hispanics, and few Asian / African kids. Parents were often overbearing and abusive through their helicoptering, Stark contrast with my high school - much more mixed culture, knock 30k off the mean income, tons more violently abused kids who take it out on their peers.
And then I moved to a literal bleach show, where in 1500 kids there were probably ~50 - 100 non-white students, and it was in a college town where the median income was around 100k. The kids were super passive aggressive to an outsider like me, but there was absolutely no violent bullying, and the insularism of the community meant I could just ignore everyone and they ignored me.
Fundamentally though, its systemically broken to stuff kids in grades like this, with the same peers, with no escape for over a decade. Bullying is barely a thing outside of school because its only in school that you cannot escape it. In the real world, you quit jobs with peer abuse, you move away from toxic neighbors, you avoid the bad neighborhoods. It isn't toughening them up because its in no way reflective of reality to have to put up with verbal and physical harassment every day without reasonable recourse.
> In the real world, you quit jobs with peer abuse, you move away from toxic neighbors, you avoid the bad neighborhoods. It isn't toughening them up because its in no way reflective of reality to have to put up with verbal and physical harassment every day without reasonable recourse.
As long as you have the money or support to quit your job, or move, or avoid the bad neighborhoods.
Do people choose to live in bad neighborhoods? Do they choose to send their children to poorly funded schools? Do they choose to work part time, minimum wage jobs?
> Bullying is barely a thing outside of school because its only in school that you cannot escape it
n=1 anecdote, but my experience is that I had equally-bad (if not worse) bullying experiences outside of school than inside.
What I suspect is happening is that the school environment mixes people of different "cultures" much more thoroughly than non-school environments, which greatly increases the possible exposure of would-be bullies and would-be bully targets.
The other obvious thing that comes to mind w.r.t. school and bullying is that one fallback option for dealing with bullying is leaving the situation, but in school, if you want to switch classes or even schools to avoid a bully, I think you would basically have to ask some adults for permission, and if they don't grant it, tough luck--you're still forced to spend N hours per weekday there. Non-school activities seem less likely to be so compulsory (though if the activity is "walking in your neighborhood and encountering your bully", complete avoidance would require moving), which would seem to put some upper limit on how bad a case of ongoing bullying can get.
Could you comment on how the above relates to your experience?
In middle school (the only time when I had any sort of bullying problem at school), the problems all stemmed from gym class. The school system had decided to send both the GT and the emotionally-disturbed students to the same school, but the only place where the two groups ended up mixing was gym class. Well, maybe some elective courses as well, but I never had any problems there.
I think that the bullying only really ended up happening (both in and out of school) when there was no adult supervision. I'm not entirely certain, though, since I have tried to purge my memories of what happened during those times.
This is one big reason I'm really happy I never went to school. I was fragile enough as it was, particularly in my early teens; I'm really glad I had time to grow up and sort myself out in a social environment dominated by adults rather than children.
Imagine the damage being done to society if it really is the case that traditional schools result in meaner people.