Oh this is ANOTHER thing. Kids are NOT allowed to defend themselves and it leaves them woefully unprepared for the times when they are going to have to. I would know, as I mentioned earlier I was bullied terribly in school and I never did fight back, didn't have the courage, didn't want to get into trouble, etc. To this day, I sincerely wish I had. It drives me now to want to be stronger, to learn to take up for myself so that if I ever have to, or have to defend someone else I can.

Teaching these kids to ALWAYS rely on someone else to fight their battles for them does them a TREMENDOUS disservice. If they don't learn to defend themselves then, what are they gonna do when no one else is around and they're on their own? I think ALL kids should have some sort of self defense training, and ALL kids should be allowed to stand up against aggressors to fight back.

It is ABSURD, that if someone starts a fight, the one who simply is acting out of self defense is punished to the exact same degree as the one who started it. You wanna discourage bullying? Give the bullier a bigger punishment for bullying, LET the bullier get a taste of his or her own medicine if they start a fight. All this "zero tolerance" bullshit basically gives them free reign to do anything they want with little fear of consequences, while the bullied can only sit there and take it if they want to stay of trouble.

No one wins in a scenario like that, the bullier doesn't learn anything, doesn't learn any consequences for bad behavior, and the bullied doesn't learn how to take up for themselves or learn to become stronger. I would know as a product of that mindset.

And anyway, I personally believe that we demonize fighting a lot more than we ought to. Some may disagree with these, as it is not exactly the most popular thing to say in a society that bends over backwards to try and protect its' children even if doing so stunts their own growth emotional and physical both, but I believe we do.

When you put all these kids together in one place, you WILL have conflicts, it's just a fact. Not everyone is going to get along, no matter how much you may want them to. To try and FORCE them to even when they can't or won't just causes more problems than it fixes, because what ends up happening is, all the tension and anger builds bigger and bigger for lack of an outlet to release it.

I honestly think the school environment would be much much better if, instead of suppressing all this emotion and discouraging even a hint of it from coming out, the kids were allowed to let it out from time to time in a controlled setting. If two kids decide they want to fight, let them. You'd wanna supervise it of course so that it doesn't get overly out of hand where one or both would get hurt, but let them get it out of their systems instead of forcing them to hold it in.

All that does to me is just makes things worse, because the feelings still will be there, nothing will be solved, and the clash will still probably happen, except when it does it will be FAR worse than if you had let them fight the first time they had a problem. Maybe you wouldn't get the murders, the gun violence, the stabbings, etc that you see so frequently among youth IF the issues were allowed to be settled the moment they started instead of left to build and fester. You may even end up with some of these supposed enemies becoming friends for having the chance, though not always of course.

Just my two cents, I don't expect everyone to understand or agree, but that's how I see things now. I think sometimes we expect this perfect behavior of people.....even adults really, what I say here doesn't just apply to kids, when it's just not realistic.