A whole school of psychopaths?

[WhiteBear]

http://my.earthlink.net/article/us?guid=20101008/fe8b831d-695b-4758-847c-acc6bdb0253c

It was the fourth time in little more than two years that a bullied high school student in this small Cleveland suburb on Lake Erie died at his or her own hand — three suicides, one overdose of antidepressants. One was bullied for being gay, another for having a learning disability, another for being a boy who happened to like wearing pink.

If there has been soul-searching among the bullies in Mentor — a pleasant beachfront community that was voted one of the "100 Best Places to Live" by CNN and Money magazine this year — Sladjana's family saw too little of it at her wake in October 2008.

Suzana Vidovic found her sister's body hanging over the front lawn. The family watched, she said, as the girls who had tormented Sladjana for months walked up to the casket — and laughed.

"They were laughing at the way she looked," Suzana says, crying. "Even though she died."

:O

 

[Buddy]

It was the fourth time in little more than two years that a bullied high school student in this small Cleveland suburb on Lake Erie died at his or her own hand — three suicides, one overdose of antidepressants. One was bullied for being gay, another for having a learning disability, another for being a boy who happened to like wearing pink.

If there has been soul-searching among the bullies in Mentor — a pleasant beachfront community that was voted one of the "100 Best Places to Live" by CNN and Money magazine this year — Sladjana's family saw too little of it at her wake in October 2008.

You might be interested in this:

[...]
One conclusion I eventually came to was that school was not for education ... instead of encouraging children to learn on their own, it turned it into a hateful chore that had the effect of making learning 'boring'. How useful for the control system! I was conscious of a certain level of ideological and political indoctrination from a young age, and not at all receptive to it (or so I told myself ... what really happened, I eventually figured out, was that by seeing through one level of indoctrination I fell for an even deeper level, the hidden, manipulative and cynical elitist mindset that produced the system in the first place).

Later, just a few years ago, I came across the work of John Taylor Gatto, whose research revealed how the public school system had been set up explicitly to use behavioural psychology to acclimate children to lives as factory and office workers: classes as shifts, recess as coffee and lunch breaks, periods in which arbitrary activities decontextualized from any meaningful goal are performed by rote for no obvious reason, all broken up by bells, and then finally, report cards as paychecks.
...
It doesn't help that every year more of their students are drugged up on ritalin or dexedrine, autistic, or simply brain-fried from too many computer games ... nor that many of their colleagues are themselves fully indoctrinated supporters of the system who see nothing at all wrong with it (and of course, these are the ones who get promoted up the chain....)

Adults should be appreciating and looking out for gifted, creative, highly aware children who are labelled as mentally handicapped (ADHD, ASD, CFIDS, or ME in the UK) or unlabelled and otherwise treated as such just because they don't exchange predictable robotic/mechanical/socialized ritual with their parents, teachers and peers. Perhaps these children have a specific brain chemistry or configuration that prevents a part of their mind going to sleep when everyone else's does? I wonder if dopamine denial resentment (the Grrr! in withdrawal) among the zombies could be a cause of bullying?

Can't have anyone being 'different' now, can we?