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zslastman comments on Don't rely on the system to guarantee you life satisfaction - Less Wrong
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It's also worth noting that the social environment in school is artificially horrific. That many young people should not be left to socialize amongst each other without older peers to decrease the jostling for status, and enforce humane behavior. A large percentage of people will emerge from school with mild trauma and a set of learned social behaviors that are severely maladaptive in a more normal environment.
This, a thousand times this. If you have an opportunity to escape that environment, especially if it's for a different style of school that avoids it - some do exist - take it!
If you don't have the opportunity, make one. Even moving to a different town may be an option, with sufficient research.
Schools are what sociologists call total institutions. They consist of rigid status hierarchies, and people are forced into repeated interaction with no possibility of escape. Bullying is a typical outcome of total institutions. Interestingly, I read the hypothesis somewhere that many people become libertarians because they hated school; they experienced first-hand the ugliness due to lack of freedom.
As an adult, if you hate your peers at work, you can always go find a new social circle. Somehow, while at school, both the school and family discourage this. So, an excellent piece of advice to students: try to have friends who are from different places (i.e. not just your high school), and even better if they are older than you. When I was kid, I always used to hang out with my cousins who went to college, and they were so much more kinder, smarter and easier to talk to. That saved me a lot of sanity.
Tellingly, the other classic example of a total institution? Prison.
Yes, it's peculiar that most people think Lord of the Flies model used in mass schooling is the appropriate model for the socialization of children.
It's particularly apropos that Lord of the Flies is common required reading in American high schools.
Paul Graham on the subject:
Were it not the case the teachers are often the biggest bullies. On the contrary, IMO, it is the excessively authoritarian, prison-like model school follows that generates bullies.
Prison is the better model for the whole institution, while Lord of the Flies is the model of the schoolyard.
I think there's a good correlation between people who think a pile of children makes for good socialization and people who ignore the overarching prison model of the institution as a whole.
But I really don't think it's the interaction with the Prison Guards that predominantly makes for bullying - it's the interactions in the prison yard.
Very well stated, and exactly on target.