freedom-in-education.co.uk

Newsletter July 2003

Bullying – Zero Tolerance

Bullying in schools is a problem that appears to be becoming progressively worse with the passage of time. The reasons for this and possible solutions are discussed in the following article:

“I realised that my own experiences of going to school, sending my own children to school, and even of being a school teacher myself, had given me no insight into the reality of school bullying”

I first became aware of the problem of bullying in schools about ten years ago, when the Local Education Authority asked me to provide individual lessons, at home, for a girl who had attempted to take her own life.

I had no idea of the nature of her problems but one day while we were doing ‘lessons’ (which generally consisted of playing card games, talking things over, and looking after her baby brother) she suddenly announced that if she met such-and-such a girl, she would kill her. I was stunned by the strength of the emotion that was being expressed and I realised that my own experiences of going to school, sending my own children to school, and even of being a school teacher myself, had given me no insight into the reality of school bullying. I was dealing with a girl whose early life had been ruined by her experiences at school, and society at large seemed to be prepared to turn a blind eye to her sufferings.

In recent years I have been made aware, by the many parents who have written to me on the subject, that this was not an isolated case, but something that is being repeated time and again in schools across the country.

It seems to me that the people running the schools, who ought to be doing something about this problem (teachers, politicians, doctors, etc.) are still failing to see the situation clearly and cannot grasp that if even one child is driven to the brink of suicide by their experiences at school, then there must be something very wrong indeed with the way in which we educate our children.

“It is not the job of a parent to send their child into a situation that might be difficult or dangerous for them, and school is no exception to this simple rule.”

Facing the Facts
The reason why the issue of bullying is not being dealt with properly is because people are not prepared to face the fact that schools currently bully children in almost every aspect of their organisation. Left to their own devices, children would have no inclination to sit tests and examinations, they would not sit quietly behind desks, they would not be quiet when the teacher was talking, they would not study the material on the school curriculum, and in truth, they would not go to school at all. Everything that they do at school, is under the influence of some form of coercion – which in other words could be called bullying. This may not be the way that teachers would like to describe their activities, but if you investigate how they keep ‘order’ in their classes it is by doing such things as threatening to keep children behind after class, ‘making an example’ of children that they deem to be troublemakers, shouting, and similar techniques with which we are all familiar from our own time at school.

The modern trend of having a more rigid curriculum and more frequent testing has reduced teachers’ ability to meet their classes half way and to spend at least part of the time doing things that the children want to do. The result is almost constant harassment and hectoring (bullying) to make the children do well in tests that can have no meaning for a child, and which are relevant only to the adults who set them.

Given that coercion and resentment run through every strata of school life it should not be surprising that it sometimes breaks out in the form of the pitiless persecution of one child by another – and when this happens, it is naïve and unthinking of us to blame the children concerned, rather than the system in which we have placed them.

“The problem of bullying has arisen because people have assumed that there is a level of bullying which is acceptable – which there is not.”

An Acceptable Level of Bullying
The problem of bullying has arisen because people have assumed that there is a level of bullying which is acceptable – which there is not. People think that it is all right for teachers to impose their authority upon children up to a certain point, and that it is only when they resort to a certain level of physical violence that it becomes unacceptable; similarly, they think that a certain amount of unpleasantness between ‘school friends’ is normal and that it only constitutes bullying when violence is involved or when the victim starts to demonstrate ill-effects.

These peculiar ideas are the result of the long-standing belief that it doesn’t matter that children are unhappy at school. It is even commonly said that no child likes school, but that the experience is good for them. Precisely why it should be good for a child to be made to go somewhere where they are unhappy, is difficult to explain, but because the idea has taken a firm root in people’s consciousness, it is now often accepted without question. While this is the case, the problem of bullying can only get worse; if we accept that it is acceptable to inflict a small amount of misery upon children, then who can draw the line as to where is should be stopped? The only practical solution to bullying is to eradicate it altogether.

“It is not the job of a parent to send their child into a situation that might be difficult or dangerous for them, and school is no exception to this simple rule.”

Zero Tolerance on Bullying
Zero tolerance on bullying can be achieved by parents not putting their children into any situation in which they are not happy. This is not an argument against school, it is an argument in favour of radical school reform. If parents simply refused to send their children to places where they were unhappy, those places would be forced to change, or they would cease to exist.

Furthermore, it is not an impractical suggestion. A simple application of common sense would allow parents to make the best use of schools, instead of being bullied by them to do things that they do not want to do.

For example: