I'm not debating the value of self defense, i'm debating the labelling of a child a hero for stabbing another child with a pencil. You yourself admit that you wouldn't tell him to stab someone. Why not? It's self defense, right?
I missed the part of the article where the kid was being threatened with puncture wounds. Self defense is justifed it it is 1. The only viable response to an immediate threat and 2. If it matches the severity of the threat you are currently under. If someone is pushing me, i can't shoot them in self defense, i can't hit them with a baseball bat, and i most certainly can't stab them and claim that it was all in self defense.
The reason i can't tell you what he should have done is that i don't have enough information to decide. And neither do you. You can pretend that it is a cut and dry case of "stab the bully", but you really don't know all of the details. Furthermore, even if i did know all of the details down to the location of every last fucking atom, who am i to pretend to know what this child is capable of, or whether he had truly exhausted every last option in terms of dealing with said bully. I know that people who bully generally lack self esteem, and will generally not bully people who don't provide them net gain in overall sense of self worth. That is to say: If you can make a bully lose more self respect by trying to fuck with you than he could hope to gain by fucking with you that he'll leave you alone. How you accomplish that is up to you, but violence is a crude, unpredictable tool. Anyways, knowing this, my advice as to what the child should do would be woefully unhelpful to the child if the child didn't understand that by having a smart mouth/making himself a sympathetic figure to his peers and the capacity to make nice-nice with a bigger kid he could avoid much ridicule.
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