Comment by armchairhacker
7 hours ago
Expel the kid
I want everyone to succeed as much as possible, I feel bad for such kids. But at that point, the kid won’t learn, won’t launch, there’s no benefit to keeping them in school and massive consequences for the good kids.
> Expel the kid
I guess (from my experience) the expelled kid is actually not that unhappy ;-) about being expelled, since very commonly it actually would prefer not having to go to school. :-)
If corporal punishment is effective then we don’t have to terminate anyone’s education. For some kids it may just take one painful lesson to turn them around so why forgo that and ruin their lives?
Certainly, if they also don’t care about physical punishment then expel them as a hopeless case but don’t do it reflexively as a cop out.
If it’s effective, yes.
I think corporal punishment is fine as a last resort before expulsion. Not before, because I’m worried some kids would be traumatized, but those expelled or misbehaving indefinitely without consequence will otherwise find trauma and/or ruin other’s lives.
Two problems:
1) school education is mandatory until 16-18 in most countries, so what do you do with them once they get expelled. They have to be in education somewhere - so do you just put them in one school for all the expelled students, which is just constantly on fire? You made the problem much worse for yourself(as in - the state).
2) " there’s no benefit to keeping them in school and massive consequences for the good kids" - the massive consequences for kicking them out and not dealing with the problem are then on us, the society, because you get dysfunctional kids that got no help and just got kicked out instead. What kind of adults do you think they will grow into? Or is the answer "I don't care"?
Keeping them in school like it is done now, does not help them in any way, it merely transforms school from a place to learn into a mini prison where dysfunctional kids do not allow other kids to learn too.
15 year old who decides that he doesn't want to learn would be much better off if he gets expelled, goes to work at macdonalds, and comes back later, than the current situation where he gets to go to school and do nothing.
Also the mere possibility of being expelled and having to go to work will help many more children to keep studying.
>>Keeping them in school like it is done now, does not help them in any way
Well of course not, because schools don't have the support they need to help those students in turn.
>>goes to work at macdonalds
I don't know where you live where employing 15 year olds is legal, but even if we assume some kind of state where it's allowed, what mcdolands would employ a 15 year old that was expelled from school?
>>and comes back later,
How would that even work? You mean they enroll back at a private school to get their education? With what money?
The path isn't "well they get expelled so they just go to work" - most likely the path is that they just stay at home doing nothing all day if their parents let them, or they just turn to vagrancy/crime. No 15 year old is going to go "well I got kicked out of school so I better look for the most basic job" - it's some kind of unrealistic pipe dream of how society works.
But either way - you haven't really answered my question. In most places a child has to be in education until they turn 18. So when you kicked them out of school at 15, what is the state supposed to do with them?
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Put them in work programs. If they can’t be productive, put them in mental institutions.
To be clear, abuse in these programs should be prevented as much as feasible, and there should be an opportunity for any kid who demonstrates redemption to get back in school.
It’s a bad solution, but I don’t know any which is better. Keeping them in society is worse for innocent people (and doesn’t seem to usually benefit them either, misbehaving kids usually seem miserable).
And yes, the state pays to take care of them. Otherwise it’s paying for the damage they cause outside.
>>Put them in work programs. If they can’t be productive, put them in mental institution
....what kind of work programs can you put 12 year olds into? I'm really curious.
And I'm sure it's clear that putting anyone into a mental institution costs the state far more than providing resources to a school to deal with this would cost? Psychologists, separate classes, teachers specialized in this. We struggle to put people with actual mental problems into mental health insititutions(because there are so few and they cost a fortune to run) but we'd start putting misbehaving kids in them?
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Some dysfunctional kids are there because of trauma, others because of opportunism and poor impulse control they'll eventually grow out of, and some are fundamentally defective and no amount of support will make them less destructive or dangerous to themselves and others.
Psychopathy and narcissism are psychological/emotional disabilities. They're the emotional equivalent of being born without a limb - or in congenital cases, without the brain structures needed for empathy and adult risk management.
I don't know what to do with these people. No one does.
I do know they're the single biggest threat to our future as a species, because if they get into positions of power they wreak havoc on unimaginable scales.
And even if they don't, they reliably leave a trail of wreckage behind them, because their relationships are defined by lies, gaslighting, and emotional and physical violence.
Unfortunately we have limited tools for diagnosis, so there's no way to know for sure if a problem teen can be rescued, or if they're guaranteed to become a problem adult.
> They're the emotional equivalent of being born without a limb
For start we could stop cutting part of their limbs shortly after birth. Doing this to dogs is considered too cruel and banned, but somehow it is ok for little boys?
> some are fundamentally defective and no amount of support
No need for support, just stop harming them!
It’s been said that the British executed about 1% of their population each year for a few hundred years, and that a similar number died in prison.
The claim is that this made Britain a much safer country in later centuries.
So other kids should just be their victims? How is that better?
We should do whatever we can to help kids with problems, but that doesn't include victimising people. Remove the bullies and deal with them elsewhere.
>>Remove the bullies and deal with them elsewhere
Everyone agrees on this, no one agrees on what "elsewhere" should be. Like I said in my post - do you just send them to one special school for unruly children, which is just basically on fire all the time? Or prison? Or like other commenters have said - just send them to work programs, let them work at mcdonalds, or send them to a mental institution? Like, we're not the first people on earth to come to this stunning conclusion that it would be better if bullies were taken away from the rest of the class - the question is where and how and if that is really the best solution for us, for them, for the victims and for the society at large.
You expel them and they become another person's problem. I heard recently of a local problem child aged seven. He's already been expelled from a private school but has entered a state school where he seriously injured another pupil and attempted to strangle one of the teachers.
Expulsion isn't going to reform them, it will just move it on elsewhere.
So directly to prison. Or must they succeed first?
I can't tell if you're being deliberately obtuse / sarcastic, but even aside from the ethical considerations here, prison is an insanely expensive way of dealing with the issue.
In the US in 2010, cost per inmate per year in a state prison ranges between $14,603 (Kentucky) and $60,076 (New York), and averages at $31,286. That's 16 years ago, so it'll be higher now. In the UK it was an average of £32,315 in 2020-21. You might as well employ an individual case worker, and the societal outcomes would be a hell of lot better.
> expel them and they become another person's problem
True, but we have institutions dedicated to dealing with people like that.
A school isn't that kind of institution and will fail in its mission (to protect and educate) if it tries to fill the role of controlling violent people.
The moment you abandon any attempt to correct the behavior you guarantee they are “lost” to society.
The other kids will have to suffer so the misbehaving kids can be saved, but that's a sacrifice we're willing to make!
Emotionally I’m all-in on painful punishments for bullies.
But when I stop, and think slower, and more rationally:
That bully is a human being who will grow up and he will be a neighbour to somebody (some will die, some will go to prisons, but most of them will be somebodies neibhours).
If we show him only more and more cruelty, he will be a terrible neighbour to somebody (so indirectly, the system made that somebodies life worse).
One anecdote of creative solutioning: to reduce vadalisations of waste bins in the village, teacher somehow convinced(maybe by promising bad grade if they don’t) several bully’ish kids to make baskets, to be used as waste bins.
Idea was that makers will feel some ownership for it, so they won’t damage it later and maybe even prevent lower ranking bullies as well.
The cases where the bully is truly irredeemable are few and far between. Most of the time the adults just abandon too quickly. Especially in school where teachers are stretched thin and have no “blood duty” to the child.
But more importantly, children who are abandoned “to save others’ suffering” grow up to be adults who can and will cause even more suffering. Education and care are like a debt, if you don’t service it early eventually everyone pays with interest.
Yes, which is why it’s a last resort, because some kids are lost either way.
And kicking them out of school isn’t yet abandoning them. They can be put into a vocational school: maybe some kids misbehave because they can’t sit still, but would behave and be happier following a simple job that involves moving.
That can be just fine to me.
I still live in my hometown, and while I was never bullied, a bully a year or so above me killed himself in his late 20s.
lol lmao was my reaction xD