JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

I support the idea.

However, the main problem with bullying has always been teachers and administrators who do not pay attention to what’s happening under their noses and are reluctant to step in when they do see something.

Schools are communities, and the authorities of the communities are the adults. Children look to them for safety, but in so many cases today they look in vain.

The anti-bully programs with slogans and videos and t-shirts we have today are little more than a way for administrators to cover their behinds. Window dressing.

Maybe the legislation will change the situation somewhat.

Of course, there are more than a few teachers who themselves are bullies, but you just try getting anything done about them. Impossible.

I do hope the generally spineless McGuinty sticks to this, but in view of past efforts, I’m not hopeful.

We had zero-tolerance on violence – a good thing for the safety of the entire school community – but as soon as one ethnic group found its students in trouble more than others, the policy was dropped like a hot potato.

Yelling prejudice about stats is a pretty sad way to destroy a good policy.
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“Bullies learn from their closest role models – their parents.”

I don’t think that is accurate.

First, every serious study ever done shows clearly children’s closest role models are their playmates and peers.

Parents, despite their many hopes and pretensions, have remarkably little influence outside of supplying the necessities of life and a relatively safe place.

I’m sure the parents play a role, but I’m convinced that role is largely through genetic endowment.

Time after time, we find the parents, or at least one parent, of bullies are themselves bullies.

That fact has a lot to do with the school authorities being so reluctant and irresponsible in taking a bully child on: the results will be a confrontation with bully parents, and in our education system today, parents who make lots of noise are paid attention to.

We must remember that all the principals and superintendents and others administering public education are themselves teachers – many of them teachers who just wanted to get out of the classroom and all of them people who never rocked the boat.

It is a perfectly closed system, guaranteed to produce the results we see.

So while expectations of parents are important, expectations of the very teachers who are in the schoolyards, halls, gyms, and classrooms have to become a whole lot higher with regard to tolerating abuse.

Holding parents legally responsible is just passing the buck, and almost certainly leads to further abuse at home by bully parents – not a solution helpful to society.

We must provide mechanisms to support, and indeed demand, the removal of genuine bullies from the regular schools. I say genuine bullies because just about all children sometimes tease or call names, something which must be corrected by authorities but equally something that does not identify a genuine bully.

A real bully is someone who enjoys inflicting discomfort on others – doing so is a basic part of his or her personality. It likely is a mild form of sadism or psychopathy, or, in some cases, not so mild.

When such people are identified, they really need to be removed from the general school population, and we must provide special, tougher disciplined schools suitable for them.

None of this removes the basic responsibility from teachers and administrators. They must correct all the children just indulging in the taunts and teasing most children engage in at some stage, and they must identify the genuine hard cases which need to be removed from the general population.

Anything less solves nothing. McGuinty’s ridiculous 1-800 number to report bullying is a costly administrative nightmare, useful to no one. It is just a way to cover his behind. If the authorities inside a school are already ignoring their responsibilities, what is the use of a report form from an anonymous telephone call center in Bangalore India, or indeed anywhere else?

Absolutely nothing. It’s just busy-work to defuse a problem.

So unless you are prepared to support genuine reform, holding school authorities responsible for what happens under their noses and giving them the authority to act, this problem will continue forever, only becoming larger with a growing population.
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“I am a teacher and unfortunately, many of the teachers that I have worked with throughout my career have been bullies. We need to address bullying from the very top down–including administration, as many of them are bullies, too…”

Indeed.

We’ve all known them, bully teachers, but what is anyone to do about them?

A teacher pretty well has to be caught stealing or committing sexual abuse to be dismissed.

I can still remember the names of a couple of genuine bully teachers more than fifty years after experiencing them – a good measure of their bad effect.

Virtually all other inappropriate behavior, as well as downright incompetence, is tolerated and protected in our public schools much as pedophile priests have been protected by the Catholic Church for ages.

The teachers’ union protects the day-to-day creeps who do not reach such excesses as theft and sexual abuse, but still make many children miserable through their careers and teach them little worth teaching.

This issue of bullying is very interesting, opening as it does, the whole set of issues confronting public education.

Serious reform is one of our greatest needs in society.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY ERIN ANDERSSON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

I truly do not know why anyone writes anything about bullying anymore, except for personal publicity or reward or just taking credit for being on the side of the angels.

Almost all of the stuff purchased at considerable expense and robotically disseminated by the school boards is of that nature.

This piece of pulp fiction by Erin Andersson is just one more large serving of the same unhelpful stuff. It is filled with arguable assertions and incorrect statements which reflect the dogmas of the Church of True Believers in Public School Ethics.

“Zero-tolerance policies on fighting, as cases in Canada have shown, do not solve the problem either, often leading to punishment without investigation, and little follow-up.”

An absolutely false assertion: zero-tolerance on violence was an excellent policy whose effects would make our schools safer places and benefit society in the long term.

It was dropped for one reason only: a disproportionate number of those treated under the policy came from a particular ethnic group, the false assumption for dropping it being that the policy was unfairly employed.

Dropping the policy made teachers and innocent students immediately more vulnerable to the small percentage of people who are violent.

“Research consistently shows that bullying is linked to depression, poor school performance and anxiety, for both victim and perpetrator.”

Here is the classic use of “research says” to bolster a pathetic argument. Of course bullying is related to mental problems, but then so are almost all forms of crime. Tests have repeatedly shown that prison populations are full of people with serious mental and emotional problem.

So do we stop arresting and imprisoning people for crimes? Of course not.

And just so, violence and bullying in schools.

“When left unchecked, bullies can destroy lives…”

Another insipid bromide. Of course violence destroys lives. Isn’t that the very meaning of violence?

The problem in our schools is easily understood, but not so easily corrected: no one is responsible for anything. No one even wants to assume responsibility. Acts of bullying occur every day in plain sight and are ignored. Teachers and principals and superintendents are afraid of parents who are themselves bullies.

So they set no enforceable standards and speak with the kind of psycho-babble terms and meaningless educationese with which this article is replete.

When a robber assaults you in your home or store, you want the police, and you want the courts to dispense justice. And that is just what the victims of true bullies want, only they do not get it, learning from their painful experience that there is no justice nor agreed-upon way of behaving in society. That is a mighty poor lesson to be teaching.

I think if we are not prepared to do what it takes to protect students from bullies, we should just shut up. It truly is tiresome to read useless, thoughtless stuff like this article.