If you grew up in the 60s and 70s, you send your kids to school with a vague sense of unease. Sure, Kindergarten looks gentle and fun, but there are those bigger kids barreling through the hallways. If you got to a K-8, the eight graders look ready to go to war or bear children. Or both at once. You remember things you wish you didn’t. Moments that hurt you in ways that nothing before or since ever have.
Maybe you’re one of the lucky ones with no such memories; the strange thing is, most kids have them—how is it that everyone was a bullied nerd, and no one was the bully? (During World War Two, every Frenchmen was in the resistance, too.)
Most of us reading this blog have horror stories. Beatings and fights and wedgies. The kid who sat next to me in high-school hung himself halfway through the school year, and I spent the rest of the year in my assigned seat, with Joe’s seat empty beside me, as I contemplated following him into oblivion. We carry this stuff around with us forever. There’s a reason the High School film is a box office staple. School is the place where often, for better or worse, we define ourselves.
So you pack your kid off to school, wondering. Do we have to move to the suburbs? Is a private school necessary? Should we home school? Could we afford that…would it drive us crazy?
School seems different, where we are now, at any rate.
We toured the schools (our district has School Choice) and found them changed almost beyond recognition. Gone the grids of desks bolted to the ground facing the blackboard wall. In our school, the Mr. and Mister have been dropped. Say Hello to Principal Bill! Every room, K-4 has a carpeted area where kids gather for the morning meeting, and sometimes sit reading books. Desks are pushed together in pods; teachers move from Pod to pod working with kids moving at their own speeds, some with specialized curriculum and affordances.
Kids with ADD have little toys they can fiddle with. Two out of ten kids have pull-out instruction and IEPs; they get extra help with math, reading, their handwriting, and there are so many of them there seems to be no stigma attached.
And in many places, The Lord of the Flies, don’t ask don’t tell attitude towards bullying is a thing of the past.
The girl who bullied my kid on the bus was kicked off that bus for a week. This gets a parent’s attention, as they must know make arrangements to get that kid to and from school themselves. She had to write a two page essay on bullying, and have her father sign the document and return it. Bullys and their victims meet with a vice principal and are led through a conflict resolution process; witness are called, competing versions of what happened are reconciled, and consequences are meted out.
In Oscar’s case, it turns out that he’d been saving up incidents and not reporting them, so as they spilled out, it was hard to sort out what had happened when, but eventually the girl, who denied everything, was confronted with witnesses who made her acknowledge what she’d done. New to our school, I have no doubt that what she thought, and did, lurks in the hearts of many of the kids around Oscar every day.
But, when push comes to shove, bullying Oscar just isn’t worth the hassle.
For one thing, he doesn’t turn on himself. Call him a name and he responds with a shriek of even-more-foul-obscenity. Frequently his language is itself a violation of school policy, as it was on the Bus last week. (Oscar’s teacher once informed me that while she knew that ‘rules were different in our house,’ but we needed to tell Oscar that in school there were words he couldn’t use. Um. Thanks.)
“We decided to let the language go this time,” the Vice Principal told me. “We wanted Oscar to feel supported. We knew this was hard for him.”
Going through the motions of the therapeutic give and take I’m sure means nothing for many of the kids, no more than does sensitivity training or court-ordered AA. But these are all consequences. So they matter.
If you think about it, the fact that fighting—assaults—between children were more or less shrugged off in our childhoods, and that verbal abuse was considered just a part of growing up, is odd, because these are things adults do not tolerate among themselves.
If a coworker punched or spit on your or grabbed your underwear, there would be consequences. Even in the 60s and 70s adults wouldn’t dream of tolerating this, among themselves.
If your kid is being bullied, please go to Google and type ‘Bullying resources,’ and see what pops up. There’s help out there, and in the end, there are legal recourses in many states that can create consequences for schools who turn a blind eye on bullying, by punching the institution in its pocketbook.
All that’s required is that we stop thinking of bullying as a part of growing up. Because it only is if we, collectively, let it be. Once a critical mass of concerned parents act, bullying recedes. It may never be completely eliminated, but it no longer has to be the defining experience of childhood.
Childhood should be fun.
