the worst dominance-establishing behavior does enough damage that trying to snip that tail off the bell curve could be worth the trouble.
That’s not how the project is perceived by people involved in it, at least that’s what I presume granted the media they emanate. They don’t talk about, and I am guessing they don’t think about, what causes normal dominance behavior to progress into the most affecting kind, and the focus is on getting normal people to report rather than change their social behavior.
Quoting the first three paragraphs of the front page NYT article from August 30, which I didn’t see when I wrote anything above:
Under a new state law in New Jersey, lunch-line bullies in the East Hanover schools can be reported to the police by their classmates this fall through anonymous tips to the Crimestoppers hot line.
In Elizabeth, children, including kindergartners, will spend six class periods learning, among other things, the difference between telling and tattling.
And at North Hunterdon High School, students will be told that there is no such thing as an innocent bystander when it comes to bullying: if they see it, they have a responsibility to try to stop it.
So the focus seems to be convincing normal people to report, rather than suggesting that they are doing anything at all wrong or that they might, by increasing the severity of normal behavior they are already doing, become targets under the new law. There is no push for introspection nor for considering the feelings of others, the worst people are asked to consider of themselves is that they had not been reporting the bad behavior of others often enough—a small sin.
Does anyone have a guess as to when the first article about the use of this law (taking effect September 1) to bully someone will be written?
Delusional descriptions of a problem generally can’t be justified by claims that the description is targeted at the worst behavior or designed to get the most return out of a small investment because an accurate picture of reality is usually the first step to implementing any strategy well, regardless of its resources and scope.
It looks as though I was thinking about anti-bullying programs the way I think they ought to be done, and you had the specific example in mind of how current anti-bullying programs are being described..
I’ve read an account of a school—Great Walstead, a British boarding school in the 60s—which really didn’t have bullying. The head of the school wanted his students to do well, and hated bullying—it wasn’t a pasted-on anti-bullying program. (This is from Frank Schaeffer’s Crazy for God, a memoir which is mostly about growing up in a family which was at the top of the early Religious Right—the description of the boarding school is a minor episode.)
The fascinating thing is that high quality only comes from cluefulness at the top of the hierarchy, and it’s hard to transmit clues.
It seems to me that the anti-bullying programs you describe are an effort to mechanize a process which requires consciousness. Even so, they may be of some use if they limit overt violence. One of the things which is hard on victims is for them to be injured publicly, and for everyone to behave as though it doesn’t matter.
An account from fiction of consciousness-based top-down anti-bullying: One student starts calling another “Stinky”, and an upperclassman shuts it down by saying “nicknames should be endurable”. (Sorry, cite forgotten.)
That’s not how the project is perceived by people involved in it, at least that’s what I presume granted the media they emanate. They don’t talk about, and I am guessing they don’t think about, what causes normal dominance behavior to progress into the most affecting kind, and the focus is on getting normal people to report rather than change their social behavior.
Quoting the first three paragraphs of the front page NYT article from August 30, which I didn’t see when I wrote anything above:
So the focus seems to be convincing normal people to report, rather than suggesting that they are doing anything at all wrong or that they might, by increasing the severity of normal behavior they are already doing, become targets under the new law. There is no push for introspection nor for considering the feelings of others, the worst people are asked to consider of themselves is that they had not been reporting the bad behavior of others often enough—a small sin.
Does anyone have a guess as to when the first article about the use of this law (taking effect September 1) to bully someone will be written?
Delusional descriptions of a problem generally can’t be justified by claims that the description is targeted at the worst behavior or designed to get the most return out of a small investment because an accurate picture of reality is usually the first step to implementing any strategy well, regardless of its resources and scope.
It looks as though I was thinking about anti-bullying programs the way I think they ought to be done, and you had the specific example in mind of how current anti-bullying programs are being described..
Anti-bullying programs don’t seem to have done a lot of good.
I’ve read an account of a school—Great Walstead, a British boarding school in the 60s—which really didn’t have bullying. The head of the school wanted his students to do well, and hated bullying—it wasn’t a pasted-on anti-bullying program. (This is from Frank Schaeffer’s Crazy for God, a memoir which is mostly about growing up in a family which was at the top of the early Religious Right—the description of the boarding school is a minor episode.)
That all makes sense.
The fascinating thing is that high quality only comes from cluefulness at the top of the hierarchy, and it’s hard to transmit clues.
It seems to me that the anti-bullying programs you describe are an effort to mechanize a process which requires consciousness. Even so, they may be of some use if they limit overt violence. One of the things which is hard on victims is for them to be injured publicly, and for everyone to behave as though it doesn’t matter.
An account from fiction of consciousness-based top-down anti-bullying: One student starts calling another “Stinky”, and an upperclassman shuts it down by saying “nicknames should be endurable”. (Sorry, cite forgotten.)