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Because the culture rewards bullies, by signing them up for martial arts classes so they can take out their horrible home life in the form of aggression towards other innocent victims. Everyone gives them huge praise of beating up on other kids, and the parents don't care the reason, their kid is always defending themselves. Bullies are encouraged into sports to further reinforce that physical confrontations are the only way to deal with emotions.
If you have been to a place that rewards bulling you are not at a true martial arts studio. marital arts teaches respect for others. A bully at our school would not be in it for long. They would either learn that being a bully is not appropriate or they would be kicked out of the school.
martial arts teaches discipline, which is something that a bully does not have. It takes a disciplined person to put up with a bully. I also do not know of any kids that have terrible home life that are in Martial Arts.
It is a myth that bullies always have a horrible home life. Sure, some do, but many do not. Many bullies have a high self esteem, great home life, supportive parents, and a huge sense of entitlement.
It's also not true that martial arts training teaches kids "how to be bullies". The whole point of martial arts is self-defense, not aggression. Martial arts instructors don't teach kids how to beat up other kids. Where are you getting this from? I've had some martial arts training and so has my child. We learned self defense and discipline, both mental and physical. There was no training in "how to beat people up".
I think kids who are bullies just turn into adults who are bullies.
I believe the best thing to do is to turn into a "hard target". Just like you won't re-educate burglars not to break into houses - but you can use security lights, strong locks, have neighbors aware of what's going on, and get a barking dog - you can make a child a "hard target".
After being bullied for many years I eventually made myself a "hard target". Boys who gave me a hard time knew that I would react with shock and awe. If I waded in, fists flying, feet kicking, wielding whatever stick or brick or pipe came to hand, I might get my butt kicked, but they knew that they were going to pay a price too. Alternately, they might simply become the target of withering sarcastic scorn, and they might kick my butt but I would have made them look like an idiot. Finally, there was the mechanism of self-deprecating humor.
If all the targets around them are hard targets, then they will have to do something else.
I think it would have been interesting to see what would have happened if anyone had ever just decked Steve Jobs when he went into one of his abusive rants. It sounds like all his employees were so terrified of losing their jobs at Apple that they just flushed all their pride and self-esteem just to keep that job, no matter how much abuse from Jobs they had to take. Personally, I think someone should have discussed it with him in the parking lot.
Exclusion is a form of bullying. If no one will sit with this child at lunch, she is being ostracized and that is actually quite hurtful. Girls are the ones who most often use exclusion as a form of emotional bullying. In fact, it's been noted that this type of group exclusion is a very basic way in which girls exert power over each other.
There is really not much a principal can do about this except to teach kids that they should accept differences and should try to be kind. Creating an atmosphere where all kids are accepted can really help. It really needs to start earlier than high school though. Vivian Paley's book "You Can't Say You Can't Play" has been used to work on this in kindergarten and first grade. It's a fascinating study of how the children in elementary classrooms react when you implement a rule like this. That does not mean all the kids in that classroom have to be friends outside of the class, but it does mean that no one can be excluded from playing on the playground or in the classroom. The kids actually loved this.
It's a tough call. Not being invited to somebody's birthday party is not bullying. Being picked last in gym class is not bullying. An individual or even a group not wanting to sit with somebody that they don't get along with at lunch is not bullying. But an entire school refusing to allow somebody to sit with them at lunch is a form of bullying. But where do we draw that line?
As for the defense (physical or not), no matter how much good it actually does the victim, it doesn't so much solve the problem as it does shift the burden onto someone else. The bully still have the same attitude and so they'll look for an easier target. Even in the hypothetical case in which even the weakest student is able to make the bully pay a higher price than it's worth, this only creates a never-ending treadmill - the weak gain strength, the bully (or another one) gets his relative/differential strength back, then that forces the weak to get even stronger (diverting energy from more productive or societally redeeming causes - with the consequent drop in good things society could have. In economics, it's called an "opportunity cost"). Or if this next analogy works, antivirus software - it's great only until the "baddies" develop something better.
That is a good analogy. Anti-virus software is a necessity these days, but it wastes so much processing power. If you ever try running your computer without anti-virus software, it runs much faster.
Please read carefully. The issue is not his use of jargon, but rather his pretentious tone and vocabulary.
As I said in the posted you quoted "There is a difference between correctly using jargon and having a pretentious vocabulary."
Once more, using the correct terminology is not pretentious. Using overly complicated language in an attempt to make something sound more complicated is pretentious.
I'm still curious to hear examples of this pretentious vocabulary that you say isn't technical jargon.
This is a very good summary of the realism of the situation. Looking back at my adolescent years, I do want to point out that "what goes around comes around". Bullies usually get what they dish out at some point. It may take years to "catch up" to them. But it eventually happens.
Unfortunately, that is usually not the case. Most of the former school bullies from my school have high paying jobs.
Quote:
One of the most infamous bullies of the working world was Steve Jobs. He bullied employees constantly and humiliated them many times. But he got fired eventually. Decades later, he made a comeback with the iPhone and iPad, but he died of cancer. The bullying eventually caught up with him.
If these adolescents are going off on a tangent like that, I shudder to think what "karma" will catch up to them later in life. It's real - very real - Divine Retribution.
Unfortunately, that is an example of a bully who was very successful in life. Being a bully did not cause him to get cancer. Bad luck caused cancer. Both good people and bad people die young from cancer.
If you have been to a place that rewards bulling you are not at a true martial arts studio. marital arts teaches respect for others. A bully at our school would not be in it for long. They would either learn that being a bully is not appropriate or they would be kicked out of the school.
martial arts teaches discipline, which is something that a bully does not have. It takes a disciplined person to put up with a bully. I also do not know of any kids that have terrible home life that are in Martial Arts.
I remember one of the first thing that we learned in karate were "fighting attacks" where the attacker would always lose and the defender would always win. It was over-idealized, but I think it was a good way to introduce the target demographic to karate.
Sometimes, as been shown here, victims create their own victimhood. Stand up for yourself. Understand your surroundings. Understand social cues. It's like excuse after excuse after excuse why this person is a victim (his desk is next to hers nonsense) and can't help but be a victim because the teachers aren't coming in to rescue them.
Newflash: Teachers often don't rescue kids.
Kids need to be taught BY THEIR PARENTS to stand up for themselves. Or their parents can teach them nothing, so when they get picked on they do nothing and continue to get picked on for 12 years.
See how that works? Created victimhood.
Unfortunately, as I have posted in the past, schools punish students who stand up for themselves. And, unfortunately, the punishments that they give (such as disqualification from honor roll, ineligibility for honors and AP classes, ineligibility for extra-curriculars, disqualification from honor society) only affect the high achieving students who stand up to a bully, and not the (usually lower achieving) bully who wouldn't be taking honors classes anyway. I honestly think that a lot of the bullying that I endured was people trying to bait me into defending myself so that I would get punished.
The most recent case of bullying in our school involved a student I will call S. He is a nice kid, gets along well with his peers most of the time, but if there is any joking around he immediately over reacts. I will give the two examples I personally witnessed. First, reshman sit in one of four tables near the front of the cafeteria, because we have had issues of them not cleaning up after themselves. While I was on lunch duty, I witnessed him and several of his table mates, laughing goofing around, and growing popcorn at one another. I told them to stop and to pick up the popcorn. He then went to the principal and accused his friends of bullying him. I watched him cheerfully throw the first piece of popcorn, and by the time I had gotten there they had each thrown some. Another time I was covering a class he was in, and the students had been left group work. They were to work with a partner. The boy who sat behind him asked S if he wanted to be partners, and loudly S replied "EW NOT WITH YOU". I asked S to step out into the hallway with me, and told him first that was not appropriate to turn someone down that way, and he immediately accused me of bullying him. He accused so many teachers and students of accusing him, that people began to avoid him, in order to avoid being accused of bullying.
This child had been taught that anytime someone hurt his feelings he was being bullied, he had also been taught that his own behavior was always that of the victim, and anyone who disagreed with him was a bully. By the time he was halfway through the year, his parents had started a lawsuit against the school, and named all 7 of his freshman teachers, his guidance counselor and the principal as personally bullying him in addition to the rest of his grade. We later found out he had sued 4 different schools before ours for the same issue.
This is a shame not just for his child who could not adjust to having friends but also for children who actually do get bullied, as this child took up all of the available resources by loudly and constantly demanding bullying investigations literally, daily.
I think that a real problem is that people who try to turn everything into a bullying issue (such as not being invited to a party, or being picked last in gym class) distract from true bullying. Just like people who turn everything into sexism or racism distract from real sexism and racism.
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