my experience with kids comes from the 10 or 12 years as a kid that i remember, one of my parents being a teacher and hearing about what happened in their school, and 1 year of helping teaching middle schoolers about computers on windows 7 boxes half of which had parts taken from by the kids (don’t ask me how i got to that point). should preface this by saying that all of these were in poor urban schools without councilors or other similar kinds of staff in a third world country.

i got nothing against kids. they are indeed very sweet and innocent and i don’t hate them. i got bullied when i was a kid because i couldn’t socialize with anyone, all of it seemed very arbitrary and strange. it was the same routine in and out, someone sees me crying and they ask what happened, i tell them the kids name and we both get called to the office, and i would see the moment the kid gets accused of anything the tears start running down their face and they start lying through their teeth. at the end the teacher would decide either it was a close call or can’t do nothing about the kid and let us go.

i’ve seen both how assholish kids can get (worst was definitely the time the drug dealer kid decided to have a go, in which he subsequently broke my nose and almost broke my leg), and how teachers fail to do anything about it. i’ve seen my fair share of abusive and sadistic teachers which would hit us if we didn’t do our homework even though it was illegal for at least a few years by this point, but looking back i clearly see that some people at least cared and tried to help me, but couldn’t do anything about it especially in that environment. and things have improved since then. spending time with teachers in break rooms, it’s obvious how much most of them care these days. they’re almost always discussing the kids relationships, how well they are doing, if any of them is getting bullied ect. some of the assholes are still there, no doubt about it.

so to answer your question, probably the bias that has formed in me being a victim of bullying, or poverty, or a mix of them both. in my folly i assumed 1. teachers at richer countries are better and 2. yet at the same time kids are exactly how they are here. the amount of downvotes my comment got tells me otherwise. i just wanted to defend teachers that always getting thrown under the bus for bullying when in fact it’s much more of a complex and systematic issue.