(1) Bullies exist and can do horrible damage to kids when the adults surrounding the kids are incompetent or insensitive.
(2) When the adults surrounding kids are competent and sensitive, the damage done by bullying and the incidence of bullying can be reduced to a very low level.
(3) Most adults in most public schools in the USA are incompetent or insensitive or both.

(Sometimes this is because the system’s incentives make or select for incompetent or insensitive teachers; I count a teacher who is afraid to help a bullied kid because of bad school district policies as “incompetent” because if the teacher is sensitive enough to understand who is bullying whom and how, a great deal can be accomplished, even if it has to be outside the system, such as giving the bullied kid a lot of emotional support and encouraging his parents to fight for him or switch him to a better school).

What is there to say that these three points don’t cover?

I have always hated bullying more than practically anything else, and it was always obvious to me that the kids who were bullies included the ones who would grow up to be criminals, and although there were lots of bullying attempts I was so convinced of my own righteousness that I never stopped insisting that my schools stop tolerating behavior that would be unacceptable if an adult did it to another adult (thus, hitting me or taking my stuff was absolutely and utterly unacceptable but I didn’t think the school needed to stop people calling me names). The one school I went to that wouldn’t act properly when this happened, I simply refused to attend (I was in 8th grade).

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All schools have anti bullying programs. Not having them, or not training teachers in them, or not following them whenever there is a suspicion of bullying would be a legal liability.

Here is how a program works. Details vary, but essentially an anti bullying program is an overly complicated protocol for informing your bully that you have snitched. After that you of course get a beating. If you answer truthfully, or just don’t come up with a good enough explanation when your parents ask about your contusions or bloody clothes the bully is informed that you have snitched again. Rinse repeat until you have learned not to snitch. Problem solved.

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Then somebody did a modified experiment with the same test, but this time they manipulated how much the kid trusted the adult giving the test. And it turned out that a much bigger proportion of the children passed the test in the high trust condition.

You wrote about that as a debunking of the original findings. Of course a kid’s trust in adults controls all of these important outcomes many decades later! The marshmallow test has nothing to do with internal qualities of people!

Now let’s get back to the study you talk about today. Specifically let’s talk about the part where the inter rater reliability between children and their parents is 0.11. That means that parents don’t know shit about whether or not their children are being bullied.

So how do parents not know shit if their children, whom they love more than anything else, are being tortured daily for years? Because the children don’t tell them. Bullied kids don’t tell their parents, and they don’t tell adults in school who would tell the parents, because they have learned that confiding in adults leads to getting hurt.

If you find it natural that experiencing broken trust can explain all manners of outcomes decades later, then I don’t see why you would think it so extraordinary that broken trust plus regular beatings and shaming plus severely reduced opportunities to have normal relationships with ones peers would have long term consequences.

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Oligospony: I am working from the premise that some people being studious is a good thing– either because it actually teaches them valuable skills or because it signals hardworkingness. I can certainly see an argument that punishing kids who set the curve is good for the other students, even if it is not good for Society As A Whole, but that still leaves Anonymous’s equation of scholarship and bullying somewhat puzzling to me.

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If it is true that homework is an unjust system*, I am still unclear about why we are blaming studious children for it, because even if every studious child in the world stopped doing their homework homework would still be assigned.

If academic success is a positional good, then everybody benefits from not spending real resources on it.

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I don’t even think it would be that hard. You could set up a “Family Feud” type set-up where students are asked who people are dating, who people are friends with, and who is popular. The more your answers align with other people’s answers, the more points you get.

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