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In some ways, I would expect a town that thinks of themselves as the best to have even more aggressive students.
Yup and that it happens in every school some to a lesser degree,I agree some maybe more than others but there are fights among students in high school and there have always been since school was invented.
High school students are full of hormones and their brains don't have the reasoning or concept of consequences that adults do. Add on that this is an age when major mental illness can start to express...and odds are that a handful of students in every HS cohort were or are being abused by somebody in their lives. You're going to get situations where students have no idea how to address conflicts other than violence, and it really doesn't have anything to do with wealth or class or district quality.
Girls are the ones who do the emotional bullying. Boys still punch each other
Clearly they don’t send each other to the hospital, or this wouldn’t be news.
I’ve lived in a towns like this my whole life. Sure there were fights here and there, but never anything like what happened to this kid. And people should be outraged about it.
Clearly they don’t send each other to the hospital, or this wouldn’t be news.
I’ve lived in a towns like this my whole life. Sure there were fights here and there, but never anything like what happened to this kid. And people should be outraged about it.
Well of course, this is extreme
I'm not surprised at all this happened in Ridgewood.
I don't think anyone is assuming that bullying and violence doesn't exist at the top high schools, but I would expect that at least the level of violence to be less than at schools in lower-income districts. There are several reasons for this:
- Generally better family dynamic in higher income households if both parents don't have to work long hours
- Ability to fund extracurricular activities that help instill discipline and teamwork (karate, after school tutoring, boy scouts, golf lessons, soccer)
- Attending more formal functions where etiquette and manners are the expected (e.g. going out to nice restaurants, weddings, bday parties)
- Probably not experiencing financial hardships, which is a major cause for family strife (parents aren't always fighting over money, budget, inability to buy nice things, struggling to pay bills, etc)
- Parents are probably working in industries where there is zero tolerance for violence, which can potentially ruin careers (finance, corporate law, medical field), which should translate to some of those values being passed down to their children
Now of course that's not to say all families in high-income towns will be like this, there will obviously always be some bad apples, but we're talking about probability as it relates to the socioeconomic environment and the resources available. You can't tell me all high schools and towns are the same, that you expect this type of violence in Ridgewood or Summit or Short Hills just as much as you would in public high schools in Newark, Paterson and Trenton. Why pay a premium for the aforementioned towns then?
Now if your argument is that the violence that happened at Ridgewood was not all that bad and it's normal HS violence/bullying that should be expected at every HS, well then that's a different debate.
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