My expectation was that "stay at home" increased isolation and loneliness, which in turn increased suicide. Their data says that my expectation is wrong - it didn't increase suicide.
The abstract hints that bullying is the issue, and bullying is a lot harder when everyone's staying at home. Was the isolation not that bad? Or is it just that the bullying was worse?
Their data says that suicides rise in August, when everyone returns to school. Over and over here we've seen claims that school is really unhealthy; these people have data that confirms it.
Let's try unpacking the case you must be imagining to arrive at that expectation. If the kid had any friends, they wouldn't be isolated when school was closed, so we must be imagining a kid with no friends. If we're imagining a kid with no friends, they must not be getting on very well at school. Well, so much for the expectation, eh?
If they have friends that they never see any more, because school is closed, then they're isolated, right? And before you say "they should just get together", well, they used to get together five days a week, and they probably won't do that, even if they're ignoring the "socially isolate" part.
Alongside bullying there are a lot of other pressure factors that can intensify feelings of depression. This can be things like peer pressure, or simply being around others but not necessarily feeling like one fits in. Its important to separate school into the learning aspect and the social aspect, and the very negative part of the social piece is likely what drives the suicide rates. From my experience in school, kids are often absolutely brutal to each other, I never really understood where that all comes from...
Consider how many people kill themselves from feeling lonely and how many kill themselves from having to go to a place where they are physically and mentally tortured 5 days a week, 8+ hours a day.
I was bullied and retrospectively know no other word than torture for what happened to me. And I wasn‘t the worst off victim, we made three classmates leave the school.
I also describe it as torture. The conditions many children and young adults experience at school at the hands of their peers would be cause for firing in a corporate environment and even legal action in the adult world.
> The conditions many children and young adults experience at school at the hands of their peers would be cause for firing in a corporate environment and even legal action in the adult world.
This isn't really relevant though, because kids are a lot more cruel than adults.
Kids are just allowed to get away with it. If adults were allowed to beat others with no consequences - it would be happening everywhere.
Sadly - teachers encourage the "macho" "don't tatter, be a man" attitude to have less work. Hence bullying. Imagine if judges did that :) "So he stole your book, so what, be a man, deal with it yourself". "I don't care who beat whom - just shake hands and leave me be"
Adults created the school environment and place the kids in it, and perpetuate it, and all knowingly.
I don't think you can separate adults from the awfulness of school, including the awfulness of kids toward kids, because school isn't a Lord of the Flies situation where the setting happened by itself, and the ongoing proceedings happen without witness and active maintainance.
Ask any teacher or admin and they may say "this system has problems", but tomorrow everyone gets up and does all the same stuff, so we are a full participant in this.
Me too, even as someone who never had kids. I'm complicit in the sense that even though I went through the process and know how awful it is, now that I'm past that, I'm relieved that this problem and those people (kids) are all kept on some kind of reservation out of my hair. It's really somewhat like packing undesirables away in a compound.
Even though I don't have kids, I don't think it would be wrong or unfair to still expect me to have some sort of share in a general collective responsibility (beyond simple taxes) to help raise (and deal with) the young. After all I was one once and could have used a better society, and I still have an interest in it since they are still part of the world I have to inhabit, and are people I will have to deal with.
Please don't "If you feel a calling then go work at a school". My point isn't about me or any individual, it's that we all have this vested interest and this responsibility, we've just set things up in such a way that most of us can shirk it without having to face up to that's the essense of what we've done.
I think we should bring the full force of the legal system in these cases. And treat the perpetrators extremely harshly. Maybe segregate them from normal system to some separate system with each other.
Is this primarily a US phenomenon, or is this evenly distributed around the world? If so, is there something unique about the US school system that leads to this?
It's not primarily a US phenomenon, but I believe it's easy to forget or to ignore for those who were not subjected to bullying.
It seems to me like it's just how humans work when they're not properly socialized and educated (which is expected for children of course) and nobody really polices their behavior effectively.
"According to ... International NGO Bullying Without Borders ... the country with the most cases of bullying is Mexico, with 7 out of 10 children and adolescents. In the USA, the numbers are 6 out of 10, followed by China"
A lot of people talk about bullying, which is definitely a possible factor, but I don't think adults remember what it was like to be in school. Unless you don't care about it and ignore your future plans, school invades every part of your senses and monopolizes all of your time. Any new information you intake is sized up for difficulty and likelihood that you'll recall it on a rest. If you fall behind one or two weeks on homework and screw up an exam you can end up an entire grade lower. Then there's the constant attention of people who don't really care about you that you're exposed to all day, whose apathy can be just as damaging as their interest.
Online school just wasn't real. Everyone I've talked to said they put in a fraction of the effort required to pass classes online that they did in person, and many people said they had grades practically forgiven.
I didn't have too hard of a time in school but I still remember it as immensely stressful, and for little reason. It is easy for someone with a real problem (drugs, bad relationship, abuse, trauma) to spend a few weeks marinating in cortisol as a result of the panopticon of in-person school to become convinced that suicide is the only way out of their negative feelings.
I do because I went to school and interacted with other students. Yeah, kids run into tough stuff growing up, but that's life. To say school = stress for most needs backing up.
No it doesn't. Where are all the articles and stories from the last, oh idk, couple hundred years about how everyone is miserable at school? Sure, no one likes homework, but if you've ever been in a school, most people are having a good time.
Can we stop normalizing trauma and problems with ones social life? It's not the norm, stop pretending it is.
They're all over the place. Have you ever read essays by British, Japanese, Indian, Singaporean people describing their and their friends' mental state throughout schooling over the past several centuries?
School is also becoming more and more stressful as smaller and smaller metrics were tracked. When my grandfather went to school his parents were sent a report card twice per year. When my father went to school his parents were sent four report cards per year. When I went to school my parents were sent twelve report cards per year, and they started experimenting with an online system to track every grade on every assignment. Now that my young cousins are in school even their daily classroom participation can be tracked.
Any survey of modern schoolkids that asks about anxiety or depression has enormous rates of response in the positive.
Well, I did read this article that said that school attendance increased youth suicide incidents between 12-18 percent. I wonder where I could find that... Oh wait, that's the thread we are talking about.
You seem weirdly insistent about this. About 20% of high school students consider ending their life and plenty more are managably miserable. This alone would seem to suggest that bad experiences are fairly common. My own was a shit experience from start to finish that could have profitably been replaced by a well chosen youtube playlist.
You’re not alone. I was severely stressed in the K-12 system. Problematic child. When they wanted to put me in the special education class, my parents took me out, dropped the Ritalin and just helped me pass the standardized tests. We used even courses over the internet to help! This was in the late 90s. Suddenly I didn’t have any “autism” anymore, got into college at 14 and I’m now a thriving adult with a family and rich social life. Of course a lot of people seem OK, but for enough of us, it isn’t. I remember how I felt and I -can- envision having commit suicide if I had gone to high school.
I failed out of 3rd grade and was put in a private school focused around learning disability. This was in the 80s, so before Ritalin. Turned out I was just bored, and could actually do academic work easily. I totally would have loved to have gone to college at 14, high school wasn’t worth it or very educational.
My high school experience was different in that it wasn’t very challenging; I was shocked in university when I couldn’t just get my homework done in class anymore. I worked a full time job instead. But the bullying was real, all my challenges in high school were social (again, those went away in university…so I felt like it was actually easier even though I had to actually study then).
Online schooling might have been a way out of the social side of public school, though just going to college a couple of years earlier would have been ideal.
For years kids are rewarded and punished based on how well they do in school, so is it any wonder that by the end their lives revolve around this twisted system that doesn't actually end up mattering much.
I count myself lucky for realizing half way through my education that school and especially grades don't matter at all, so I could just wait out the couple last years so I can get to work life and relax.
There’s a reason why one of the most common recurring adult nightmares relates to childhood school scenarios, like having a test, and realizing do you never open the book, or never attended the class, stuff like that, is extremely common to dream about decades after such responsibilities end.
I've had those on and off in 25+ years since HS/college, but they've been more ... regular in the last few years. Not every night, but I think I have "didn't go to class" dreams (nightmares?) probably every other month now. Usually it's a college class, not HS, but same thing. Sometimes when waking up... it still feels real, and I need a moment to double check I'm really... here and not in the past about to fail a test.
This. I attempted suicide when I was middle school-aged. While I'm sure puberty and social issues had a lot to do with it, it was mainly because school was bad and hard (I went to a public "gifted" magnet school) and all you heard from adults is that high school is even harder, college is harder than that, and "real life" in the workforce is even harder than that. Based on this faulty intel, I assumed that suicide was rational: if I was miserable now, I would be miserable for at least 40 years (until retirement).
It turns out that "real life" is way lower stakes than I was led to believe (at least if you have solidly upper middle class parents like I did). Even poorly-paid jobs are livable if you have low expectations, live somewhere cheap, and don't have children. Rent gets even cheaper relatively if you have a partner with a job. Unemployment insurance and medicaid are an inadequate safety net but they do exist and can get you through a rough spot.
bullying is issue, but children mental health during school closings clearly deteriorated if you look at increase in mental related visits, so I doubt results of this study, there might be temporary increase associated with any change, but long term it's definitely healthier if someone in school is able to monitor kids and take care of their mental health, which is going largely unchecked if schools are locked
The study uses large, national statistics, and shows a clear pattern on a national level.
The article you linked is just for a single school district, which may have unique circumstances. It could also be statistical chance, given the small sample size and single year referenced.
LV is a weird, violent place. The schools are designed from prison architecture. The culture is a bunch of people who wanted to move somewhere so far from where they left they’d never be visited. (See the Anthony Bourdain episode as he did it justice.) People routinely move there then leave with a turnover rate of around 7 years. The heat and ultra dry conditions are their own form of violence, too. Pretty sure it consistently ranks low on education scores.
Suffice it to say, not a place to raise kids nor use as an example of choices made for their best interests.
I think it's common to have schools designed/built by the same people who built your jails, who reuse plans. At least, I'm pretty sure a lot of schools in central Indiana (where I mostly grew up) are like this.
and tons of other articles while here we have one clickbaity study which says opposite, but sure this one study will be the right one, while literally everyone else is wrong that school closings are harmful and very bad for children mental health
You're referencing a study about china, which had severe lockdowns, and one that isn't about kids in school but the 18-24 age group. Completely different populations studied.
This is not surprising, but not for the reasons the authors imagine.
Of course going back to jail after being free would make any kid who values his own autonomy depressed. School in its current form is awful, because it's far too authoritarian and preachy, not because "bullying".
You wouldn't have issues with bullying if you didn't force kids who don't like each other to interact without oversight in the first place. Oversight is key, when you know kids don't like each other, don't put them together again until you know they're cool again. It's hard being a little person.
I thought the same. Schools are very, very much like prison and the schedule is so intense. I have so many issues with it. Many children seem to say they enjoy school, but I bet they aren't the ones at risk of suicide. Bullying is a symptom/consequence of the unhealthy prison-like environment.
I think bullies usually “learn” it somewhere - like being bullied themselves or outright abuse. Or they’re just budding psychopaths. (Which occur at 1/100 rate of the population-and I really wish this was considered more seriously.)
More like about one in three classes have at least one psychopath with class sizes around 30 students. Granted the other characteristics of these children as you say add a lot of other problems.
I enjoyed high school (because I wasn't bullied, had friends and was doing well).
I was bullied in primary school and hated it. I still did well grades-wise.
If you weren't bullied seriously you probably can't understand how big of a deal it is for small kids. Like psychological-issues-30-years-later serious.
Agree. I was bullied horrifically through the 10th year of public school. I even attempted to fight back against the bullies and was punished for that by the school. The effects linger to this day 20+ years later.
I understand how serious it can be. I think in a healthy environment you would more often be able to escape and avoid interactions with bullies. It is unnatural to the extreme to be pushed and forced into randomly chosen social groups and forced to interact according to an extremely fixed schedule, in fixed locations, etc.
It leads to damaging abusive interactions with others who take advantage of that situation. Bullies know that you can't get away. I had a situation where I was literally forced to sit next to someone I hated for months - I can't think of anywhere that could happen except prison and school
> If you weren't bullied seriously you probably can't understand how big of a deal it is for small kids. Like psychological-issues-30-years-later serious.
Assuming the depiction of serious bullying in TV series is more or less acurate wrt seriousness, I was barely mildly bullied. That still has had implications on my life, still to this day, more than 30 years later.
Same here (30 years later). It has absolutely impacted my social development and the way I interpret how others interacts with me. I have not been in therapy, but I think I also have some type of PTSD
The authors considered other possibilities for the reduction in teen suicide:
> There could be a number of explanations for these findings. Families spending time together during a period of fear and uncertainty may have generated important mental health benefits for teenagers. Moreover, increased communication between parents and teenagers, as well as increased monitoring (both of behaviors and psychological health) may have yielded important psychological gains for teenagers. In addition, the absence of in-person schooling could have helped teenagers avoid negative peer effects of in-person bullying. Or, it may be that reductions in pressures associated with high-stakes exams, athletics, or romantic relationships may have reduced triggers for suicide ideation. In the final section of this paper, we empirically explore a few potential channels.
As someone who has gone to public school, I know the answer is bullying.
The authors were careful to point out that they do not advocate shutting down in person schooling because it can also offer positive mental health benefits. But you have to wonder, between teachers, guidance counselors, and administrators, you would think someone would notice some bullying behavior. Could it be that collectively the adults tasked with overseeing children are, understaffed, unempowered, ignorant, complicit, or do the facilitate or lead this behavior?
One is that the teachers have been stripped off all powers. Just today I was reading some article from hacker news where the teacher was complaining that all kids from the latest freshman year gave her/him the finger when they were asked to show their hall pass.
Other side of the argument is that if teachers are empowered, then it is documented sufficiently that some teachers (not all) absolutely abuse their power and exploit/harm kids in even worse ways.
I dont know whats the solution. I hope I come out more wise from someones comment here.
Smaller class sizes would probably help as a blunt measure. Might have to be down to 5-1 or 10-1 to really know it’s controlled though. And this isn’t practical.
If my hunch that bullies are products of abuse or otherwise need psychological help is true then trying to identify and help bullies and their victims could help.
A classical case of both can be true at the same time.
Like in every similar position (e.g. sports trainers, preachers, band leaders, ...) teachers are both powerless and powerful at the same time. If the student has respect for them/their role the power can be real, if we are talking about students who question the rules (and have parents that don't care/actively support the breaking of them) teachers are powerless.
Is a babysitter powerful? Towards an adult no, towards the child yes. Towards a certain type of child, no.
Bullying doesn't usually happen in plain site of teachers, administrators, or parents. Often it's only noticed after a students mood changes, and it can only be dealt with when that student is willing to share what is wrong. It's also not easy to spot right away when you're seeing 100 kids a day across 4 or 5 classes.
And I can assure you, there are interventions a institution can take that change situations for the better. IF the institution has the capacity to do so. I can only speak for European schools tho.
Pease name these interventions. How big is the share of European schools that have the capacity to follow these best practices? In Germany for example, there is a teacher shortage.
Speaking for central EU schools, there is no such capacity and the teachers sometimes join in the bullying too, and pretty often they ignore it when it's the popular children doing it.
It's also very hard to deal with it if you have 30-35 children per class and 3-5 classes per year - which you do because we are at the height of a population wave in this region right now.
They are also absolutely unable to deal with stuff like dyslexia, ADHD, or other mental issues - meanwhile we have a push for "inclusive schooling"...
It can also happen in plain site of teachers who do nothing. This is even worse mentally because the situation seems even more hopeless.
Ever seen a kid clearly bully another kid, like call him names then push him down and the teacher comes over and says 'cut it out you two, now get up and shake hands'.
Yup, I was a bully in high school and when my victim went and complained about it to the math teacher, the teacher went and humiliated him in front of the whole class. Felt good at the time...
There's a scene in the 1979 film Scum (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079871/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0) where one of the warders in a young offenders' institution allows a bullied inmate to be framed by his peers and punishes him.
When I saw that (not long after it was released) I thought how well that captured the spirit of many school interactions, where bullies would blame their victim and the teachers would fall for it.
I also went to public school and a lot of my depression and suicidal ideation in my high school years was related to failed romantic relationships and unwanted academic status pressure (a guidance counselor leaked my class rank to my peers).
No bullying was necessary.
I lacked experience in coping with the resulting intense emotions and didn't trust any adults enough to talk about it.
I do agree that bullying is probably the worst culprit.
Cameras - everywhere - except individual, single occupancy enforced, stalls.
I'd still support it, because with video evidence there is no they said vs they said. There is just the truth.
There's also no more wiggle room for mistakes or minor deviance. Policies that normalize and enforce non-punishment for non-serious offenses must also be put in place to prevent the abuses of that system.
Yes Bob, lack of adequate staffing at schools is probably the single biggest contributing factor for student alienation.
Infact, social media (which has a lot to do with cameras and technology) is often a factor in alienation and bullying.
So I agree, cameras everywhere is not a viable solution. After all, someone would need to view and review those videos! And then what? Punish the bullies, leading them deeper into conflict with the school system?
How about exactly and only that? You go to school, sit in your assigned stall for the day isolated from all other stalls by a locking mechanism, and assigned to lunch periods according to your history and the other kids histories.
(Sounds a lot like administrative segregation in a prison…edit- yet I would have RAN to this option in my school days)
There is a lot I am unsure about but I'm sure about this: zero tolerance does not work.
Read more about it on the web. Zero tolerance is something management / administration created to not have to do their job. The world is nuanced and each case has to be judged on its own merit. I do not support slapping a zero tolerance "policy" (not really a policy, more like a copout).
You define places where only one person is allowed at a time, a camera records the entrance to the place. If someone reports being attacked at given place, and the accused student says "actually, he attacked me", then you look at the record. The person who entered the place second is the one who broke the rules. Plus, you know he is lying to you.
The problem with bullying is not just that someone can beat you up, but that if you try to complain, the bully can say "actually, he attacked me" or "no, we were just playing" or something like that, and the teacher will be like "wtf, I have no idea what actually happened, so just shake hands and be friends again, okay?" And you know you get beaten up tomorrow again. What an improvement it would be to have a place where, if you get beaten up, at least the camera will record that you were the victim.
There's a lot of dubious research that shows that the quality of education is not related to the student-to-teacher ratio. It flies against common sense, but people in power like to give it credence, since it's budget-friendly. The funny thing is that education budgets in the US are already very large. I don't know how the money is spent, but it's not spent on lowering that ratio.
If people need a proof that fewer students per teacher result in better outcomes, they just need to compare public and private schools.
I'm in favor of smaller classes, but still. In private schools, a teacher can count on the parents' backing. In private schools, the teacher can count on nearly all kids coming from stable, economically secure families. If worst comes to worst, a private school can expel a kid who is causing problems.
> If worst comes to worst, a private school can expel a kid who is causing problems.
Even deeper bingo.
In the first order, it's absurd how much better you can make your performance at a task look if you get to not count the times you dropped the hard cases.
For a second-order effect, the students who cause problems degrade the educational effectiveness of the entire classroom, so eliminating them improves performance for the rest of the students.
Unfortunately (for public schools re. their comparisons to private schools), our society demands that a cursory attempt be made to provide educational opportunities for _all_ of the children.
This is the problem with all comparisons between government programs and private action. Private players can skip the hard bits. Government must be universal.
I guess learning to live together in a society and putting yourself at risk of other's judgement is more stressful than the comfort of your house where everything you need is provided for by hardworking parents... But that's a very necessary step towards growing up.
From the study, in-person schooling increases teen suicides by 12-18%. Is this fatality rate acceptable on the basis that it's "very necessary" to socialize the remaining children in this way? Is there evidence that kids in online classes wouldn't have "grown up"?
I find this line of thinking abhorrent. If it will reduce suicides by 15%, in-person schooling should be stopped outright until someone fixes what's wrong with it.
I understand this can be shocking, but to me excessive precautions (such as no in-person school to avoid suicides), just lead to another ripple effect that is extremely detrimental to us as a society. The problem needs to be addressed for sure, but it doesn't mean home schooling is superior to in person.
Society is nothing like school though. Who has 30 friends all the same age that you spend most of your life with and that you can't change for the next 5-8-11 years?
School is organized the way it is, because we need workers and soldiers. Not because we want kids to behave better or to "grow up". People "grew up" before we had schools.
Schools were made to get people used to working fixed hours and teach them the minimal skills required to operate the mills [1]. It's really time to rethink schools (and work).
[1]Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World
A lot of people here pointing to bullying as a major issue, while not knowing what to do about it.
So, I'll point out that the KiVa [0] program from Finland has been proven to reduce bullying by a huge amount. It has been running for years now, with repeated success.
Isn't this very US-centric? or is it true in europe as well?
We French have the worse schools in europe according to PISA, where we score around the same as the US. According to data, too much emphasis on grade, too much pressure, school is mostly good for children who already do well (we would rank in the top if only the top 5% was ranked), but bad for the rest. Interestingly, we also have on of the higher teen suicide rate of europe.
But we do not have as much bullying issues as it seems US have if i read the comments right. Or at least did not when i was there, nor when i was a youth camp counselor, or "speaker" in school (i brought science experiments, gears and stuff for 6-11yo and did cool stuff with an association). I don't remember any isolated kid when i was in middle school, and i guess in highschool "I" was the most bullied kid at the start of the year (playing violin in the school boarding facilities when the school was 70% technical/trade and 30% generalist do not help), but i mean, people overall were great and the education team helped me past the first few months until my natural charm and bad jokes did the work and offset the out-of-tune sounds (joking, but not entirely).
Are those hn comments representative of the overall bullying in public school in the US?
We do have bullying in France though, i don't mean to say we are good on this point, and from what i managed to understand in my few years around the education system, those who have the greatest impact are the directors (school or youth camp). A good director will have meeting with this team where he talks about children with special needs, or children who are especially needy ("attention whore" is the special term internet came with, which says a lot about how charitable and nice we are with each other naturally), and help professors or counselors manage those needs. With permanent emphasis on this, the "bad elements" are peer-pressured into doing better (in my experience as a counselor, but its probably the same for teachers). Those with the second greatest impact are people at the departement of education who allocate budgets and basically decide how many children per teacher. Teachers themselves are a most third, at least 5th behind parents and the community.
I don't know, this sounds an awful lot like the justification for harsh punishment for crimes the benefit of which is controversial as well. Just because you throw people in jail doesn't make the problem go away either, sure they're off the street for a while but the "cost" to society is still huge.
Fun fact: boys are more likely to die as a result of suicide than as a result of an attack or stabbing, use of drugs, accidental poisoning, drowning, fall and any other kind of accident, except for traffic accidents, COMBINED.
Parents should talk to boys about the danger of suicide much more that they talk about drugs and or drowning.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 473 ms ] threadThe abstract hints that bullying is the issue, and bullying is a lot harder when everyone's staying at home. Was the isolation not that bad? Or is it just that the bullying was worse?
Their data says that suicides rise in August, when everyone returns to school. Over and over here we've seen claims that school is really unhealthy; these people have data that confirms it.
I was bullied and retrospectively know no other word than torture for what happened to me. And I wasn‘t the worst off victim, we made three classmates leave the school.
This isn't really relevant though, because kids are a lot more cruel than adults.
Sadly - teachers encourage the "macho" "don't tatter, be a man" attitude to have less work. Hence bullying. Imagine if judges did that :) "So he stole your book, so what, be a man, deal with it yourself". "I don't care who beat whom - just shake hands and leave me be"
I don't think you can separate adults from the awfulness of school, including the awfulness of kids toward kids, because school isn't a Lord of the Flies situation where the setting happened by itself, and the ongoing proceedings happen without witness and active maintainance.
Ask any teacher or admin and they may say "this system has problems", but tomorrow everyone gets up and does all the same stuff, so we are a full participant in this.
Me too, even as someone who never had kids. I'm complicit in the sense that even though I went through the process and know how awful it is, now that I'm past that, I'm relieved that this problem and those people (kids) are all kept on some kind of reservation out of my hair. It's really somewhat like packing undesirables away in a compound.
Even though I don't have kids, I don't think it would be wrong or unfair to still expect me to have some sort of share in a general collective responsibility (beyond simple taxes) to help raise (and deal with) the young. After all I was one once and could have used a better society, and I still have an interest in it since they are still part of the world I have to inhabit, and are people I will have to deal with.
Please don't "If you feel a calling then go work at a school". My point isn't about me or any individual, it's that we all have this vested interest and this responsibility, we've just set things up in such a way that most of us can shirk it without having to face up to that's the essense of what we've done.
I also had a tough time in school, and I grew up in Europe.
It seems to me like it's just how humans work when they're not properly socialized and educated (which is expected for children of course) and nobody really polices their behavior effectively.
https://steptohealth.com/kiva-method-bullying-and-school-har...
Online school just wasn't real. Everyone I've talked to said they put in a fraction of the effort required to pass classes online that they did in person, and many people said they had grades practically forgiven.
I didn't have too hard of a time in school but I still remember it as immensely stressful, and for little reason. It is easy for someone with a real problem (drugs, bad relationship, abuse, trauma) to spend a few weeks marinating in cortisol as a result of the panopticon of in-person school to become convinced that suicide is the only way out of their negative feelings.
Can we stop normalizing trauma and problems with ones social life? It's not the norm, stop pretending it is.
School is also becoming more and more stressful as smaller and smaller metrics were tracked. When my grandfather went to school his parents were sent a report card twice per year. When my father went to school his parents were sent four report cards per year. When I went to school my parents were sent twelve report cards per year, and they started experimenting with an online system to track every grade on every assignment. Now that my young cousins are in school even their daily classroom participation can be tracked.
Any survey of modern schoolkids that asks about anxiety or depression has enormous rates of response in the positive.
I'm glad to hear you had a good school life. Most people aren't that lucky.
Online schooling might have been a way out of the social side of public school, though just going to college a couple of years earlier would have been ideal.
I count myself lucky for realizing half way through my education that school and especially grades don't matter at all, so I could just wait out the couple last years so I can get to work life and relax.
It turns out that "real life" is way lower stakes than I was led to believe (at least if you have solidly upper middle class parents like I did). Even poorly-paid jobs are livable if you have low expectations, live somewhere cheap, and don't have children. Rent gets even cheaper relatively if you have a partner with a job. Unemployment insurance and medicaid are an inadequate safety net but they do exist and can get you through a rough spot.
Win-win? I would have loved isolation when I was at primary school.
And the data from early 90s to present year confirm that.
Surge of Student Suicides Pushes Las Vegas Schools to Reopen
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/24/us/politics/student-suici...
bullying is issue, but children mental health during school closings clearly deteriorated if you look at increase in mental related visits, so I doubt results of this study, there might be temporary increase associated with any change, but long term it's definitely healthier if someone in school is able to monitor kids and take care of their mental health, which is going largely unchecked if schools are locked
The article you linked is just for a single school district, which may have unique circumstances. It could also be statistical chance, given the small sample size and single year referenced.
Suffice it to say, not a place to raise kids nor use as an example of choices made for their best interests.
https://thehill.com/opinion/education/588302-closed-schools-...
and tons of other articles while here we have one clickbaity study which says opposite, but sure this one study will be the right one, while literally everyone else is wrong that school closings are harmful and very bad for children mental health
Of course going back to jail after being free would make any kid who values his own autonomy depressed. School in its current form is awful, because it's far too authoritarian and preachy, not because "bullying".
You wouldn't have issues with bullying if you didn't force kids who don't like each other to interact without oversight in the first place. Oversight is key, when you know kids don't like each other, don't put them together again until you know they're cool again. It's hard being a little person.
Combine that with the primitive undeveloped child brains and human group behavior...
I was bullied in primary school and hated it. I still did well grades-wise.
If you weren't bullied seriously you probably can't understand how big of a deal it is for small kids. Like psychological-issues-30-years-later serious.
It leads to damaging abusive interactions with others who take advantage of that situation. Bullies know that you can't get away. I had a situation where I was literally forced to sit next to someone I hated for months - I can't think of anywhere that could happen except prison and school
Assuming the depiction of serious bullying in TV series is more or less acurate wrt seriousness, I was barely mildly bullied. That still has had implications on my life, still to this day, more than 30 years later.
> There could be a number of explanations for these findings. Families spending time together during a period of fear and uncertainty may have generated important mental health benefits for teenagers. Moreover, increased communication between parents and teenagers, as well as increased monitoring (both of behaviors and psychological health) may have yielded important psychological gains for teenagers. In addition, the absence of in-person schooling could have helped teenagers avoid negative peer effects of in-person bullying. Or, it may be that reductions in pressures associated with high-stakes exams, athletics, or romantic relationships may have reduced triggers for suicide ideation. In the final section of this paper, we empirically explore a few potential channels.
As someone who has gone to public school, I know the answer is bullying.
The authors were careful to point out that they do not advocate shutting down in person schooling because it can also offer positive mental health benefits. But you have to wonder, between teachers, guidance counselors, and administrators, you would think someone would notice some bullying behavior. Could it be that collectively the adults tasked with overseeing children are, understaffed, unempowered, ignorant, complicit, or do the facilitate or lead this behavior?
One is that the teachers have been stripped off all powers. Just today I was reading some article from hacker news where the teacher was complaining that all kids from the latest freshman year gave her/him the finger when they were asked to show their hall pass.
Other side of the argument is that if teachers are empowered, then it is documented sufficiently that some teachers (not all) absolutely abuse their power and exploit/harm kids in even worse ways.
I dont know whats the solution. I hope I come out more wise from someones comment here.
If my hunch that bullies are products of abuse or otherwise need psychological help is true then trying to identify and help bullies and their victims could help.
Like in every similar position (e.g. sports trainers, preachers, band leaders, ...) teachers are both powerless and powerful at the same time. If the student has respect for them/their role the power can be real, if we are talking about students who question the rules (and have parents that don't care/actively support the breaking of them) teachers are powerless.
Is a babysitter powerful? Towards an adult no, towards the child yes. Towards a certain type of child, no.
And "dealing with it" can make the students situation worse in some cases
It's also very hard to deal with it if you have 30-35 children per class and 3-5 classes per year - which you do because we are at the height of a population wave in this region right now.
They are also absolutely unable to deal with stuff like dyslexia, ADHD, or other mental issues - meanwhile we have a push for "inclusive schooling"...
Ever seen a kid clearly bully another kid, like call him names then push him down and the teacher comes over and says 'cut it out you two, now get up and shake hands'.
When I saw that (not long after it was released) I thought how well that captured the spirit of many school interactions, where bullies would blame their victim and the teachers would fall for it.
No bullying was necessary.
I lacked experience in coping with the resulting intense emotions and didn't trust any adults enough to talk about it.
I do agree that bullying is probably the worst culprit.
I'd still support it, because with video evidence there is no they said vs they said. There is just the truth.
There's also no more wiggle room for mistakes or minor deviance. Policies that normalize and enforce non-punishment for non-serious offenses must also be put in place to prevent the abuses of that system.
Infact, social media (which has a lot to do with cameras and technology) is often a factor in alienation and bullying.
So I agree, cameras everywhere is not a viable solution. After all, someone would need to view and review those videos! And then what? Punish the bullies, leading them deeper into conflict with the school system?
How about exactly and only that? You go to school, sit in your assigned stall for the day isolated from all other stalls by a locking mechanism, and assigned to lunch periods according to your history and the other kids histories.
(Sounds a lot like administrative segregation in a prison…edit- yet I would have RAN to this option in my school days)
Read more about it on the web. Zero tolerance is something management / administration created to not have to do their job. The world is nuanced and each case has to be judged on its own merit. I do not support slapping a zero tolerance "policy" (not really a policy, more like a copout).
> Cameras - everywhere - except individual, single occupancy enforced, stalls.
Will you place an actual human outside each such stall to guarantee there is ever only one person inside?
The problem with bullying is not just that someone can beat you up, but that if you try to complain, the bully can say "actually, he attacked me" or "no, we were just playing" or something like that, and the teacher will be like "wtf, I have no idea what actually happened, so just shake hands and be friends again, okay?" And you know you get beaten up tomorrow again. What an improvement it would be to have a place where, if you get beaten up, at least the camera will record that you were the victim.
Bingo.
There's a lot of dubious research that shows that the quality of education is not related to the student-to-teacher ratio. It flies against common sense, but people in power like to give it credence, since it's budget-friendly. The funny thing is that education budgets in the US are already very large. I don't know how the money is spent, but it's not spent on lowering that ratio.
If people need a proof that fewer students per teacher result in better outcomes, they just need to compare public and private schools.
Even deeper bingo.
In the first order, it's absurd how much better you can make your performance at a task look if you get to not count the times you dropped the hard cases.
For a second-order effect, the students who cause problems degrade the educational effectiveness of the entire classroom, so eliminating them improves performance for the rest of the students.
Unfortunately (for public schools re. their comparisons to private schools), our society demands that a cursory attempt be made to provide educational opportunities for _all_ of the children.
I find this line of thinking abhorrent. If it will reduce suicides by 15%, in-person schooling should be stopped outright until someone fixes what's wrong with it.
School is organized the way it is, because we need workers and soldiers. Not because we want kids to behave better or to "grow up". People "grew up" before we had schools.
[1]Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World
So, I'll point out that the KiVa [0] program from Finland has been proven to reduce bullying by a huge amount. It has been running for years now, with repeated success.
[0] - https://steptohealth.com/kiva-method-bullying-and-school-har...
We French have the worse schools in europe according to PISA, where we score around the same as the US. According to data, too much emphasis on grade, too much pressure, school is mostly good for children who already do well (we would rank in the top if only the top 5% was ranked), but bad for the rest. Interestingly, we also have on of the higher teen suicide rate of europe.
But we do not have as much bullying issues as it seems US have if i read the comments right. Or at least did not when i was there, nor when i was a youth camp counselor, or "speaker" in school (i brought science experiments, gears and stuff for 6-11yo and did cool stuff with an association). I don't remember any isolated kid when i was in middle school, and i guess in highschool "I" was the most bullied kid at the start of the year (playing violin in the school boarding facilities when the school was 70% technical/trade and 30% generalist do not help), but i mean, people overall were great and the education team helped me past the first few months until my natural charm and bad jokes did the work and offset the out-of-tune sounds (joking, but not entirely).
Are those hn comments representative of the overall bullying in public school in the US?
We do have bullying in France though, i don't mean to say we are good on this point, and from what i managed to understand in my few years around the education system, those who have the greatest impact are the directors (school or youth camp). A good director will have meeting with this team where he talks about children with special needs, or children who are especially needy ("attention whore" is the special term internet came with, which says a lot about how charitable and nice we are with each other naturally), and help professors or counselors manage those needs. With permanent emphasis on this, the "bad elements" are peer-pressured into doing better (in my experience as a counselor, but its probably the same for teachers). Those with the second greatest impact are people at the departement of education who allocate budgets and basically decide how many children per teacher. Teachers themselves are a most third, at least 5th behind parents and the community.
Eg, a hint of bullying gives you a two week online-only experience that increases in duration for repeat offenses.
They could find a room at the library or something.
It’s an obvious solution that would work to some extent.
Bullies don’t deserve the right to be at school when they could learn online if they are pushing people to suicide.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/childrens-risk-of...
Parents should talk to boys about the danger of suicide much more that they talk about drugs and or drowning.
Cause of death by age and gender, EU, 2010: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/HLTH_CD_ANR__...