What I am about to say will be quite controversial so I would like to declare up front what I am NOT saying. I am not saying that teachers, school officials or administrators, school owners or school boards themselves actively promote bullying or are secretly in favor of bullying. Though I am not discounting the fact that some of these people can themselves be the biggest bullies of all. But in general, I will readily assert that most of these people are good and kind-hearted and only want the best for our kids.
What I am asserting when I say that schools promote bullying is that the traditional SYSTEM of schooling itself provides the structure and breeding ground of bullying, REGARDLESS of the desires or intentions of those who run the system.
Dr. Peter Gray, a research professor at the Department of Psychology of Boston College, names at least 3 structural elements in school that promotes bullying (in the book Free to Learn):
- Grading/Ranking
- Age Segregation
- Lack of Free Play
Top Ten, Honor Roll, Honors’ Class, Valedictorian, Salutatorian, Gold Medal — from the time children start school all the way until they are of legal age, these terms ingrain upon their minds that school is ultimately a place for competition. Since the highest honor in most schools is to be the valedictorian, the implication is for each student to look out for himself or herself rather than to help others. Cooperation is not the highest goal, not if it means sacrificing one’s grade.
In the words of Dr. Gray, “By design, it teaches selfishness…Indeed, too much help given by one student to another is cheating. Helping others may even hurt the helper…Some of those students who most strongly buy into school understand this well; they become ruthless achievers, more interested in beating others than in helping them.”
Again, and I cannot stress this enough, it is the design, the system itself that teaches selfishness. I am certainly not saying that teachers teach selfishness, but that the structure itself rewards selfishness — and kids can see that very early on. They are more perceptive than we think.
Now of course, not everyone can be academic achievers and kids understand this very early on. So they try to find a niche where they can be at the top. They will try to excel in sports, in the arts, or in being the most fashionable, the coolest, the most notorious, the most daring, and so on. And while the latter may not earn them any medals from the school, they earn approval from their peer groups — which they will come to value more than any recognition they get from the school.
So although the school may have a system for ranking the best in academics and even the best in behavior, the students themselves have unconsciously devised a way of ranking themselves in other ways, inspired by the basic idea that life is about ranking and gaining approval even at the expense of others.
The stage is now set for bullying, and the atmosphere is exacerbated by the other two factors, which I will discuss in the following weeks.
Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.
Originally published in Sunstar Davao.