You did get yourself into a lot of trouble out in the country.

Fortunately it never escalated beyond getting my britches warmed a few times.

These days we live in an era that is unable to forget or forgive. Kids are expected to be miniature adults these days, so an indiscretion when one is 6 years old can follow you well into adulthood.

Your last sentence is a lot.like where I moved to in 5th grade. It was a small town outside of Portland with a lot of farm kids. The teacher had a fit (almost) because I read beyond the assigned chapter in a fictional story the class was reading. In the big city school I came from we had been encouraged to read more.

It can with social media. At the same time, parents are bullying schools or friends parents to cover things up.  I may have mentioned a group of high school kids who vandalized a school sports arena  and destroyed a custodian vehicle as a senior prank. It was felony vandalism. The parents  said they would split the costs if the school didn’t contact police. There were enough students involved that the cost was $1,000 each, so they coughed it up. The students were able to graduate and go to college. I thought they deserved some jail time.

Don’t you hate teachers like that? It’s cruel!

Yes, esecially in an area whertparents and grandparents spoke a different language at home. Many of my mother's relatives came from homes like that and didn't go to hs.

Yes, that was very common in previous generations.

Yeah, that's called regression to the mediocre mean.

I heard a motivational speaker once say that people are like crabs in a basket. If you put one crab in a basket, then it will promptly crawl out and escape. If you put several crabs in, then the first one who tries to crawl out will be actively discouraged from doing so by the other crabs, pulling the more enterprising ones back down.

Then there's the 12 monkey analogy. You start out with 4 or 5 monkeys. You put some highly desirable food at the top of a flight of stairs. When a monkey tries to go up the stairs, it gets soaked with a fire hose and knocked back down the stairs.

After a couple of days of this, all of the monkeys are well conditioned to not even try to climb the stairs.

Now you replace one of the monkeys with a new one. The other monkeys will immediately jump on the new one the moment he tries to climb the stairs.

After a few days, you replace another monkey. Repeat until none of the original monkeys are there.

Now, when you introduce yet another new monkey, the others, none of who have ever experienced the fire hose, or know *why* climbing the stairs is forbidden, will continue to condition the newcomers to NEVER climb those stairs no matter how tempting the treat is.

People and bureaucracies are like this. No one knows why some things are done that make no logical sense, but it's always been done that way, and no one really knows why it was originally.

Some affluenza kids are exempt from the consequences that kids born in the ghetto are.

The "monkey see, monkey do" principle?