Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

For me the school system was like that.

Paul Graham's "Why Nerds Are Unpopular"[0] article makes multiple references to the similarity between prison and school - especially how they both devolve into popularity contests.

[0] https://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

I'm fairly sure Paul hasn't been in prison and from the people that I know that have been in prison, especially in the United States it is nothing at all like school, even if there may be some superficial similarities.

For me being the victim of violence was part of the curriculum and I wound up "graduating" from elementary school the same way Ender Wiggin did.

By killing another kid?

Making an attempt.

Never had a talk with the principal, they just told my parents not to send me back. It was a shame because otherwise I liked that school. That kid was making threats against my life and I told the principal before that if he couldn't stop it I would protect myself.

While Michel Foucault sometimes gets a bad rep, he does actually talk about this in length in his book "Discipline and Punish (1975)" [0], in which the prison ends up becoming the Blueprint for other spaces such as the school, the barracks, the hospital and the factory/workplace. While dense, I would still recommend the text.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish

You were raped in school???

Yes.

If the school enabled this or in some way facilitated it I hope you sued them into bankruptcy.

If I ever made it as a billionaire I'd start a foundation that found the most outrageous bullying cases and tried to sue school districts out of existence. We'd see some culture change if teachers thought they could lose their pension because some other teacher let bullying happen in their class.

If it was over 25 years ago then "good fucking luck", that's just kind of the way the world worked back then before the harvey weinstein's of the world started to be jailed and things like the me too movement brought these issues to light.

The leadership and police were commonly complicit in these actions with the "boys will be boys, therefore no charges" actions. Attempting to bring lawsuits at that time was generally failure prone and put you at high risk of official oppression.

If churches can be sued into bankruptcy long after the fact I suspect that the same holds for schools.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com