Originally Posted by Val
Originally Posted by MegMeg
Shunning should be reserved for communities where people have chosen to come together with a shared belief system. It has no place in public organizations in a pluralistic society.

I'll second that. I'll also add that shunning is a practice designed to mark the shunned as an outcast with no standing in a group. This is very different from deciding you don't want to hang around with someone and leaving it at that. Shunning is a form of aggression and it's completely unacceptable in an environment like a school.

Suppose a group of children never talk to "Jim" at lunch. That is shunning. How can you force them to talk to Jim? How do you punish them? A ban on shunning is not enforceable in the way a ban on physical violence is.


"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." - George Orwell