cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4393803
We've already talked about school and how we can change it in the past. But today I want to discuss a specific topic related to school: bullying.
As a neurodivergent person, I've had my own share of bullies pick on me in the past, two of which I was lucky not to get into physical fights with. There are so, so many people who have had even worse experiences with bullying.
In school, children/adolescents pretty much have to be around each other, making it more difficult to deal with bullying.
How can socialism deal with this issue?
Put adults who care about this sort of thing in place as teachers, counselors, hall monitors, etc. It's important, so throw a little too much labor at it; the consequences of over-staffing are just that some of those people get extra free time at work, oh no. Struggle with a shortage of caring adults as a generation poisoned by living under capitalism isn't very good at this. Slowly get better as kids who grew up under communism qualify for that sort of job. Slowly get better as they take things seriously and argue with each other about it in their child care industry conferences. Receive a mixture of very sensible and completely baffling suggestions for improvement from that crowd; implement all of them because they're closer to the problem and know it best.
A problem with this for whoever is responsible for such appointments is how does one determine if a person does care about that.
Also, another problem is that just caring is not enough. Bullies can only really be stopped if there are negative consequences for them when they do engage in bullying, and teachers and other relevant workers might not have any sort of tools to punish bullies.
There is also the issue of how does one determine whether somebody is a victim of bullying. This would, I do not doubt, be helped by having adults care about this stuff, though.