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- cross-posted to:
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A bunch of eighth graders in a “wealthy Philadelphia suburb” recently targeted teachers with an extreme online harassment campaign that The New York Times reported was “the first known group TikTok attack of its kind by middle schoolers on their teachers in the United States.”
According to The Times, the Great Valley Middle School students created at least 22 fake accounts impersonating about 20 teachers in offensive ways. The fake accounts portrayed long-time, dedicated teachers sharing “pedophilia innuendo, racist memes,” and homophobic posts, as well as posts fabricating “sexual hookups among teachers.”
This isn’t 2+2=5. It’s not forgetting to pay for your groceries one time. It’s not even tying your shoe laces in a knot instead of a nice bow. Those are mistakes.
This is a group of kids setting out to humiliate and potentially incriminate teachers at their school for apparently no good goddamn reason according to this article. This is a group of sociopaths failed by their parents. Yes, the children should be punished. The parents should also be punished. Idk how that punishment should go, but IMHO it should involve mandatory community service at a soup kitchen every weekend for a year or two.
No, even good kids are capable of making much more severe mistakes depending on their environment. To really judge we’d have to go through their social media exposure whatever trends/cultures were going around the school at the time.
Don’t forget, this is America where a former President and current candidate supported Qanon. People, especially kids, are vulnerable to being misled.
And this is exactly the time to teach them that this is not acceptable behavior. Sometimes, the best lessons in life are when you learn what to NOT do.
Reading some of these responses, I swear these people are armchair parents. There’s an entire science of nature vs nurture. Nurture also includes peers and group acceptance and even the best of kids sometimes do horrible, shitty, stupid things for nurture of their peers.
It’s like they do not want to entertain that this happens. Head. In. The. Sand.
Source: Am parent with a good kid who is learning to push boundaries, entering the teen years soon, and sometimes does stupid shit even when I taught him better. I was also the good kid that did stupid fucking shit every once in a while despite having parents who taught me better/right v wrong.
When I was young, I was not terribly good at taking responsibility for my own mistakes, especially if I could blame my parents instead.
Should the teachers be punished as well, given the state’s shared role in raising kids and inculcating them with values?
Clearly they were already punished, and inappropriately so. Nobody “taught” the students to act like little sociopaths in the same way nobody “teaches” your puppy to shit on the floor. This is, in fact, the direct result of a lacking education. This education is not taught in schools outside maybe pre-k, as children are expected to act civilly in a classroom, let alone middle schoolers.