The focus this time around is on the non-academic aspects of primary and secondary school, especially various questions around bullying and discipline, plus an extended rant about someone being wrong on the internet while attacking homeschooling, and the latest on phones.

Bullying

If your child is being bullied for real, and it's getting quite bad, is this an opportunity to learn to stand up for yourself, become tough and other stuff like that?

Mostly no. Actually fighting back effectively can get you in big trouble, and often models many behaviors you don’t actually want. Whereas the techniques you would use against a real bully outside of school, that you’d want to use, don’t work.

Schools are a special kind of bullying incubator. Once you become the target it is probably not going to get better and might get way worse, and life plausibly becomes a paranoid living hell. If the school won’t stop it, you have to pull the kid. Period.

If a child has the victim nature, you need to find a highly special next school or pull out of the school system entirely, or else changing schools will not help much for [...]