[FRIAM] [WedTech] Teachers drop the Holocaust to avoid offendingMuslims|theDaily Mail

[Bill Eldridge]

Nicholas Thompson wrote:
> Bill, thanks for your many clarifications. 
>  
> I apologize for my crappy memory.
>  
> Two weeks ago, we were sitting around a family party chatting and 
> watching two little kids roughhousing.  They were behaving just on the 
> edge of dangerous, and any one of the adults in the room would have 
> been seen as authorized by the others to rein them in, including two 
> parents, two grandparents  of the younger child, one parent and 
> various aunts and uncles of the older child.  In a millisecond, the 
> older child was down with a badly broken upper arm.  Required pins, 
> surgery, the whole nine yards. 
>  
> There was not an adult in that room who did not report that she or he 
> would have stopped the kids long before if other adults had not been 
> there.  This was not said in an exculpatory way by anybody.  Nobody 
> took blame in this case as a zero sum game.  We we did seem to feel, 
> rightly or wrongly, that social groups have a certain viscosity that 
> we felt restrained within a membrane of group inaction. 

One of the serious witnesses of the Kitty Genovese murder was going to 
call the police,
but his wife said, "don't bother - they must have had 30 calls by now", 
though that's
a different situation from having imperfect information. Obviously the 
parents in a circle
all had pretty much the same information. On the kids, typically we 
default to the parents
as figuring out if things are okay, though I'm a weirdo in that respect 
in that I more often
step in to situations where the parents themselves have checked out 
mentally.
(I do see parents often abrogating responsibility once their kids are in 
a group, and
it's not every parent who'll automatically fill in as surrogate parent 
for other kids in
such a group situation).

Past history plays a part as well - if kids always play like that and 
nothing happens,
you draw the conclusion that nothing will happen. And then weird things 
do occur -
one daughter pushed the other off a swing 1 1/2 feet above slightly hard 
sand and she
broke her upper arm. Go figure.
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