I completely agree with you. What you're doing is a wonderful idea.
I've mentioned, I think, that I ran a preschool program school for "dependent and neglected children," for five years (it was a section of the Clinic of a Catholic Home), and told a few stories from that experience. Your post reminded me of something I'd forgotten.
Students from a local college who were majoring in education would sometimes do an "internship" in the school. The college asked those who supervised their interns to attend occasional meetings. I'd go, and there would be discussion among the various preschool and kindergarten teachers, a few first grade teachers, about how to handle classroom conflict situations of one sort or another.
A very common approach among the teachers to bullying (the word was used) was to do absolutely nothing.
"They have to learn to defend themselves," was the rationale.
This included, for example, not interfering when a bigger child took toys away from a smaller one, or knocked down a block structure, or messed up a half-completed puzzle.
I was very upset by this. For one thing, there were children in these classes from 2 1/2 to 5. Some were virtual babies, some were five year old toughs. For another, there were many quite disturbed, aggressive children in some of them.
I knew that in my classroom, if there hadn't been close supervision and strict rules about being mean, and about hitting, certain children would have suffered terribly. And learning idiotic life-lessons they didn't need further instruction on.
The only interference many of these "teachers" agreed was necessary was that to prevent serious injury.
I asked on a number of occasions what lesson, aside from "might makes right," their permitting the stronger children to victimize the weaker ones taught. "To defend themselves" was the only answer ever formulated.
They liked something about the situation, I think. Or maybe they were just incredibly stupid. I really hated those women for what they were allowing, and when I think of it now, I get upset again. These were traumatized children, many of them, whose models in life had already been, often, unkind people. To put it mildly. Very mildly. And these adults had nothing, nothing, nothing to tell them about kindness or fairness or decency.
Some of them were nuns, btw.
I dare say that last sentence will offend some people, true though it is. Sorry.
(I should add that I also knew some very fine, kind nuns.) |
