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.)
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.)