More then-and-now:
Niceness ineffective against bullying
By Dale McFeatters
Apparently just now catching up with two centuries' worth of memoirs, coming-of-age novels and childhood reminiscences, the guiding lights of education have decided that schoolyard bullying and teasing is a serious problem.
In 1857, Thomas Hughes wrote a novel called "Tom Brown's Schooldays," about a shy, homesick kid who is unmercifully bullied at England's famed Rugby school.
Brown and his picked-on chums turn the tables on the bullies in satisfying fashion.
Brown went on to Oxford, and the worst of the bullies, Harry Flashman, went on to be the thoroughly reprehensible hero of a dozen delightful novels by George McDonald Fraser.
Now Brown and Flashman would be taken aside to a "peace corner," where a trained interventionist would gently lead them to recognize the error of their ways and set them on the path to niceness, perhaps by sitting next to each other at lunch for a week.
And the British Empire would have collapsed a hundred years earlier than it did.
Modern-day American schools are styling themselves "Ridicule-free Zones," where gossiping, name-calling, dirty looks and forming cliques is forbidden conduct.
Nobody ever said childhood was pain-free, and grade schools have their own social Darwinism that favors the strong, the good-looking and the popular. You can't choose up sides without someone being chosen last.
Anything that can take unnecessary nastiness out of growing up and, although it's unfashionable to say so, teach good manners is all to the good.
But one wonders what an anti-bullying campaign will be like once the education establishment fully embraces it.
Sniper-eyed Wall Street Journal trend-watcher Andrea Petersen has taken a look at this trend in "The 'Re-Engineered' Child," and it looks as if the establishment will go overboard as usual.
She said some schools have "You Can't Say You Can't Play" policies, meaning the kids have to play with anyone who asks them, including kids they don't get along with.
At one time, before the era of "feelings," this was known as "gym": "Line up in alphabetical order and count off by threes!"
It wasn't fair, but no one tried to con us into thinking it was a desirable form of human conduct.
In other schools, "dirty looks"- and kids make weird faces all the time - are interpreted as bullying and subject to punishment.
In a school described by Petersen, the enforcement is left in the hands of peer groups that sound a lot like a fourth-grade version of Cuba's Committees for the Defense of the Revolution.
They mete out punishment that "can include Saturday detention or eating lunch alone for a week." (This seems counterproductive because one of the goals of the movement is to stop children from being alone.)
In a certain middle school, she said, perpetrators of teasing are forced to write "reflection" papers and have their parents sign them.
This smacks faintly of the old communist re-education camps, where those thought to be ideologically suspect were made to write papers of self-criticism and read them aloud to their peers.
One wing of the niceness movement is "Don't Laugh At Me," founded by folk singer Peter Yarrow, who wrote a song of the same name to inspire kids:
I'm a little boy with glasses, the one they call a geek
A little girl who never smiles 'cause I've got braces on my teeth
And I know how it feels to cry myself to sleep
Don't laugh at me . . .
It's moving, and we hope it works, but in the spirit of Thomas Hughes and Rugby, Yarrow should have written some additional verses, in which the little boy grows up to be an all-pro linebacker and software magnate and the little girl grows up to be a famed cover girl and heart surgeon.
They return to school and rain torment on their tormenters.
Today's kids need to dream, too. Today's picked-on child, tomorrow's Tom Brown.
* Dale McFeatters is a columnist for Scripps Howard News Service, 1090 Vermont Ave. NW, Suite 1000, Washington, DC 20005; e-mail: mcfeattersd@shns.com. |
