In some communities and schools, the bullies are gang members and future (if not present) career criminals. In situations like that, telling kids to “fight back” can be dangerous. It’s much better to get kids out of that environment and home-school them if possible. Also, there is a huge variation in physical size and strength among kids, esp. at the middle school level; kids who are bullied are likely to be small for their age. Unless they are highly skilled at martial arts, they don’t really have a chance in a fight. In my middle school, the bullies were often goons who had been held back 2 grades or more, so they were much larger than anyone else in the class.
I think bullying is a result of our cultural choice to separate children from adults when they develop. In more apprenticeship-type environments, bullying is never done by the younger person.
When you separate children into age groups, attention-getting and dominance behavior appears. Without older people around, bullies can gain status easily.
I believe that the great age-separated, public school experiment, that has been going on for quite a while now, will one day be laughed at.
Bullies these days are also more likely to escalate from beating a kid up to crippling or killing him/her. That’s why the adults in the schools HAVE to impose justice. But they won’t because they’re largely bullies and cowards (aka union leftscum), too.
If I had kids, I’d homeschool...
I agree. I think in addition to the disparity in size/strength, viciousness gives a bully an unfair advantage over a ‘normal’ kid who has the capacity for empathy and, thankfully, lacks a predatory mindset. Even a child who is larger but not a vicious thug-in-training can be bested by a smaller, ambitious young thug. And children should not have to ‘become’ (act out aggression) as vicious as the bullies just to get through their day.