[quote=mdk]
because it's generating discussion, . They do between 1.5-9% better, on average. The model used tries to reduce the impact of competitive, motivated people choosing to play sports, and make it more of a random-selection, 'if any single person just randomly got thrown into a sports program, would they do better' type of equation.
[/quote]

It becomes a different ball-game is it's college athletes.
Those Jocks have already proved to have enough Intelligence to get in a college (Unless if say, they excepted some "Shoot 10 baskets and we'll accept you" crap), while the examples most of us were pointing to were High School Jocks. Those who could have as little Intelligence as possible, cause unlike college there is no grade, performance or skill requirement to get into a High School (with some acceptations).

[quote=HeySeuss](If they do you physical harm, of course, you gotta do something...but I suppose as an adult, that doesn't come up much anymore. I think minors should be able to fight a bully in scenarios of physical self-defense without punishment so long as they don't provoke, but that's me, thinking that people who fuck with the bull should get the horn.)[/quote]

That's often the issue though. If a Physical fight does happen the school lacks witnesses for the incident usually.

Friends who were present don't count, cause they're friends and count as a bias source. And usually in High School, those who do watch who aren't friends don't care to report it and see justice done. They just want to see a fight and then bail before a teacher breaks it up. So often you get left with a "He says, she says" situation, so even if it's a case of one kids a big trouble maker, and the other is a good kid the school often feels forced to punish both the same because they can't actually prove whose fault it is.

So basically, the only way for victims to have a change to not be suspended for being beat up, is by simply taking it and not defending yourself. At least that's how my High School worked.

[quote=Jorick]-snip-[/quote]

I get the reasoning here, and I can agree to an extent. Being in Early Childhood Education atm, I'm seeing people be trained to go as far to not even allow competitive games like Musical Chair's cause of "self-esteem". So yea, they are taking it to a bullshit extreme. 

Now to speak from the view as someone who spent 3 years at a school where everyone hated/picked on me. Verbal bullying can be as serious as physical bullying, if enough people do it at once it can seriously destroy you on the inside. But at the same time, that same experience is one of the main reasons I look at things from a Realist viewpoint and not a "I want it to be X so the world is X" viewpoint. It also made me unafraid for other communities in the future to hate me, cause I'm already used to it and they're simply not worth my time if they choose to cast me out like that.

So in the end, I can agree such experiences do toughen you up and make you better prepared for the real world. Bullying is never going to fully go away, and without some kind of negative conflict as a kid you're not going to grow up right. But at the same time, that's not a license for us to ignore it and let bullying go rampant (even if we prevent the Physical bullying). The bullying I was exposed to there only lasted for 3 years (Granted, I was still bullied later years. Just not to the same extreme), but if say I never left that school and had to graduate from there (It was elementary school and I started there at Grade 3) that would of been 6 years of it. That could of broke me, that could of simply crushed my spirits. That might of been enough to make me actually want to kill myself and stop being afraid of burning in hell for doing so (fear of hell is what stopped me last time, I was still religious back then).

We should at least be trying our best to prevent bullying without being completely paranoid and safety bubble over it. Some bad stuff will leak through anyways, that should be enough to teach kids what real life is like anyways.