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Its kind of like the basic line you can ask anybody who is helping out a boy scout troop - any outdoor camping activity will eventually have a session where the kids beat each other with sticks.

10-4 on that. Although there is another problem, these days. The "hip-hop" culture teaches the kids that they can't take any slight or minor defeat in passing. They have to retaliate to maintain their reputation, and not just in kind but in escalation. An accidental bump must be returned deliberately. A strong word merits a blow in return, a blow merits an assault with a weapon. It's not like the old days when a couple of kids could mix it up and then be done with it. I've had to step in and stop things and get adults involved where in my day we'd have just let the kids duke it out.

"I've had to step in and stop things and get adults involved where in my day we'd have just let the kids duke it out."

Just yesterday I mentioned to a couple of thirty year olds at work that I used to carry a pocket knife in grammar school and when the teacher needed to open a box she would ask one of us boys to loan her a pocket knife. They both looked suspicious and one commented that we must not have used them for what people use them for now. I replied that they were a tool and in those days two guys would get in a fist fight and not pull their knives. One of the young guys accused me of telling fairy stories at that point. I turned to another man who is my age for backup and he looked at them and said slowly and quietly, "yeah, that is how it was".
In those days it was far more of a disgrace to pull a weapon than to lose the fight.