I grew up in the "zero tolerance for fighting" era. Even if your parents said it was ok to smack someone if they hit you first, it was drilled into kids by teachers and the administration that there would be serious consequences for both parties.

All it does is give more power to bullies. They can be jerks out of sight as much as they want, knowing their targets will never do anything to protect themselves. When it happened to me, I was always more overcome with fear that they would kick me out of school and my life would be over than I was scared of the bully, so I never retaliated. Of course, you can't tell the teacher or your parents either. Not only does that make you look like a "wimp," but it's somehow against the code of kids to get an adult involved; you would feel ashamed if you tattled. So instead, you just put up with it, and the school basically enables the bully to torment as much as they want, as long as they aren't dumb enough to get caught. I didn't have too many problems with bullying growing up, but there were other kids that were basically doomed to years of torment because of this, and were seriously screwed up and jaded because of it. Even worse, even most of the regular kids would avoid the bullied kid and talk about them behind their back, partially for fear of retribution from the bully, and partially because kids in general are cruel and enjoy having power over others almost as much as the bullies themselves, so being the target of a bully meant "you endure cruelty and physical violence on a daily basis, you have no friends, you cannot escape, you aren't allowed to defend yourself, and the adults aren't on your side."

Jumping forward a few years to being a teenager, a guy I didn't like was being a jerk outside of school, and something inside of me was just so tired of always backing down that I ended up hitting him. We traded blows for a minute or so (we were more thrashing like idiots than doing anything "cool" and actually dangerous you'd see in a movie) before it got broken up. We were barely hurt, no busted lips or black eyes, and neither of our parents ever found out. Afterwards, I immediately had a lot more respect amongst my friends, and I somehow ended up becoming friends with the guy I fought. Guys are funny like that.

Random violence and actually hurting people is obviously not ok, but fighting back against bullies prevents them from getting overconfident and lets the bullied keep their dignity. I'm convinced that a more understanding administrative policy and less adult supervision would have allowed most of these problems to sort themselves out pretty quickly, evening out the power distribution in the classroom and making life significantly better for the worst victims of bullying. It probably wouldn't completely solve the problem, for example in the obvious scenario where a group of older kids screw with younger kids outside of school, but at least it solves the horrendous problem we have today where, as I described above, almost an entire class is pitted against a kid.

> do we really want the next generation to grow up thinking that fighting is OK? Will they apply that same pattern when they're adults?

As I understand it, the past few generations are the weird ones, and kids have pretty much always been allowed to get away with harmless fights. Ask your parents how often many fistfights they've had since graduating high school.