The solution to Bullying in Schools

Bullying is an inherent part of school life. It will only be solved when people are prepared to make a radical re-appraisal of the way in which children are cared for and educated.

Schools Bully Everyone

Children are being bullied to a greater or lesser extent from the moment that they arrive at school. This is not because all teachers deliberately set out to be vindictive and uncaring but because the system within which they work forces them to be so.

In a normal family setting, children enjoy a great deal of personal freedom and get a lot of personal attention. They learn to develop acceptable patterns of behaviour, but only slowly and in their own time. There is always an element of compromise - members of the family have to adjust their own behaviour to meet the needs of the new member just as much as the young child has to learn to conform to the requirements of the family.

This give and take does not happen once the child goes to school. The system is rigid and inflexible, children must conform or else they will be punished. Sometimes they are punished when other children fail to conform, the system is unjust, but the children have no right to appeal against injustice, they do not receive personal attention: there are not enough adults present to make it possible.

This is institutional bullying and it sets the tone for everything that takes place in school. The children in a class soon realise that anyone who does not conform to the expected code of behaviour will cause problems for everyone - so they all gang up on the misfit. This could be the child who is a little slower than the others to understand the teachers instructions, the child who is less fit than the others, the child who is slightly deaf or who does not have very good eyesight. It can then be any child who is slightly different, a child with a different colour skin, with a different accent, different cloths, a different diet etc.

The point is that every child was a separate individual when they first went to school. The bullies who victimise the children who don't fit in seem very offensive to us - but they also are the victims. No one fitted in on the first day at school, some children just proved more amenable or more capable of being moulded into a certain pattern than others.

The biggest bully in the class is always the teacher. It is the teacher who comes down ruthlessly on any child who tries to express their own individuality - even if its only talking or walking around the room - the lesser bullies are only following the big bully's lead.

Pretending that one teacher can put twenty or thirty children through a pre-determined course of education, day in and day out, without bullying them is to deny the obvious and demonstrates a lack of resolve to solve the problem.

Pathetic Excuses

School in its present form is a fairly recent innovation and the reasons why it is the way that it is are pretty well documented: state run primary schools were created to keep children off the streets while their parents were at work and compulsory secondary schooling was invented because there were no jobs for teenagers.

The whole system is more about cheap child care than about real education; it has only been going for a couple of generations and it was entirely predictable that it could not be made to last any longer - children who are not cared for properly themselves make terrible parents and their children make even worse parents and their children are completely unmanageable.

Instead of acknowledging that school is an inhumane way of treating children, people try to blame the children themselves. When children are not being blamed, it is their families, and when it is not their families then blame is directed at individual teachers for not being strong enough to control bullying.

Taking Responsibility

Everyone is waiting for someone else to solve the problem of bullying, in particular people expect the government to come up with a solution.

Surely the natural instinct of a parent who discovers that their child is being attacked is to protect that child - not to expect the government to do something about it.

The natural response to seeing your children being bullied at school - whether by the teachers or by other children - is to stop sending them to that school.

People are reluctant to follow their feelings on this because they are frightened of the consequences (a sign that it is the whole family and not just the children who are being bullied in this situation) but they see only the things that they stand to lose and not the things that they stand to gain.

Parents who have kept their children at home instead of sending them into a school in which they are being bullied report that their relationship with their children improves dramatically; that their children's relationships with each other improves dramatically; that their children become more polite and helpful around the house; that their children show more interest in reading; that their children start to ask questions again; that their children take more responsibility and that the whole tenor of family life improves out of all recognition.

If a lot of parents took this step then even more dramatic changes would result. Schools could not continue treating children the way they do if parents removed children who were not happy.

In such circumstances, schools that could not care properly for children would close down, and the schools that remained would have to focus on serving the needs of children instead of children being made to serve the needs of the school.

Sources: freedom-in-education

*By: Syaziela