Presumably the heralded new movie “Bully” will soon be in local theaters, punctuating a period of heightened interest in this subject. Stopping the evil of bullying in schools has been one of the hot topics in the last couple of years.
In Massachusetts a lot of the discussion was triggered by the suicide of South Hadley teenager Phoebe Prince which led to the recently implemented law requiring schools to implement anti-bullying programs. There have also been a number of high-profile cases of cyber-bullying, homophobic and other bullying brought to public scrutiny.
The anti-bullying movement is a heartening and overdue phenomenon. But there is a troubling disingenuousness to a lot of the publicized concern. News stories present evidence of bullying as if it were a result of ignorance and simple inadvertence on the part of adults in charge in schools and at home. It’s as if we’re all just innocent bystanders puzzled by this phenomenon: What’s this you say? Bullying in the schools? Why that’s terrible. How can our schools allow such a thing? If we had but known …
But of course since K-12 is a passage of life we all go through, we don’t need the proliferating reports of bullying to have a pretty good idea of what goes on there, what has always gone on at that level of society. K-12 has, compared to later life, a bit of the feel of an underworld, beneath the gaze of teachers, operating by less civilized rules than post-school life. When we emerge at age 18 into the light of the adult world suddenly there’s a rule of law. People who pick on other people, at least in the middle-class world I live in, are treated like criminals. We have policemen to do our fighting for us.
Bullying has always been officially condemned, but a widely held idea has always provided a certain amount of unofficial acceptance if not approval. De facto tolerance is based on the idea that K-12 is not just about book- learning, it is a social proving ground and if life is a little tough for kids, including dealing with bullies, it serves the positive function of toughening them for life beyond school. This idea was and for all I know still is found in such standbys as “You’ve got to learn to stand up for yourself, son.” “Don’t go telling tales; you’ve got to learn to fight your own battles.” “Life is hard, you’ve got to learn to be tough.”
In other words, life itself is a bully and school is where, once out of the nursery, you learn to cope with it. It is shocking to see in a novel such as Thomas Hughes’ “Tom Brown’s School Days” the extent of the cruel, institutionalized bullying accepted in 19th century British schools as preparation for later life.
My guess is that at least some readers of this will say at least to themselves, Well, what’s wrong with that? That ‘s simply true. Life is tough. You do need to learn not to take —-.” Some parents may well see their responsibility to act as stand-ins for the world as ultimate, inescapable bully: the world as boss, the world as a lousy, debilitating job, the world as death and taxes and other inevitabilities; to toughen their kids up for a hard, bullying world that will try to beat you down.
How many parents are there out there feeling less outraged that bullying still survives in schools than that their own kid has learned to cope with it?
It is to be hoped that through all the publicity and institutional intervention bullying is being rapidly made into such downright repulsive behavior it will soon be a thing of the past. But as with domestic abuse we know it’s not so easy. To the extent that school-as-proving-ground feelings are still common it will b e hard to make much real headway against the phenomemon.
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