Intentional acts

New approach needed in effort to discourage bullying

I’m not convinced that bullying at school has gotten worse, but schools have gotten worse at dealing with it.

In their well-intentioned anti-bullying efforts, officials import everything from inspirational puppets to percussionists pounding on buckets. These programs conclude with students on cue saying the right things. Then the presenters leave for their next gig, and students resume their former behavior, good and bad, as if the visiting intervention never happened.

NEA Today recently spotlighted a teacher who dedicated April as Random Acts of Kindness Month. National Kindness Day and Week are already scheduled in February, not to be confused with November’s celebration of World Kindness Day.

Please don’t misinterpret my cynicism. I’m in favor of kindness. It’s the sixth virtue identified in the Boy Scout law, a litany I recite whenever our weekly spelling list includes “obedient,” the seventh Boy Scout virtue, and one that’s at least as endangered as kindness but that hasn’t been granted a special day, week, or month in any school I know of.

Like most anti-bullying programs, RAOK relies on a grab bag of suggested activities, from watching kindness videos to keeping kindness journals in which students record what they did, whom they did it for and how everybody felt about it. Children can post sticky notes on a classroom “kindness board,” deliver “kindness presentations” and distribute cards notifying students that they’ve just received a kindness and are now obliged to be kind to someone else. Students can also post their daily RAOK on a “kindness tracker” app and receive medals that appear on a “worldwide kindness leaderboard.” These exercises are designed to benefit “students’ character and sense of self” and help them “redefine their mindsets.”

Like all shiny education ideas, RAOK purportedly crosses curriculum lines. Along with their writing journals, students can identify kindness in social studies and current events, and incorporate kindness into math by creating RAOK pie charts and bar graphs. Posting those charts and graphs online connects kindness to technology.

Apart from many activities’ contrived, gimmicky nature, they reflect advocates’ troubling understanding of public education’s purpose. Proponents allege a research-based connection between “helping others” and the development of “respect, responsibility, perseverance, compassion and kindness.” Experts contend these “soft skills” are “more important to a child’s future success than hard skills like reading, math, and science.”

I try to demonstrate kindness and compassion toward my students, and I expect decency from them toward each other and toward me. I agree those soft skills are more essential to living a good life than literacy, general knowledge, and mathematics.

The trouble is teaching hard academic skills is what school is for. Teaching virtues, the soft skills, is what everything else, like families and communities, is for. My good behavior, like my students’ good behavior, is just what’s supposed to happen as I teach them English and history. I take that moral responsibility seriously, but it’s not why I’m in my classroom.

In the same way, learning virtue isn’t the chief reason my students are there. They should learn good character at home, and if that’s something American children can no longer learn at home, we’ve got problems schools can’t solve.

The hypocrisy that often accompanies anti-bullying campaigns is even more disturbing. Schools require students to engage in canned social skills exercises. Predictably, the wellbehaved children in our classes do their best to participate constructively. Just as predictably, the children who cause most of the problems typically don’t participate constructively or just go along for the moment.

And when the exercise is done, and the bullies once again disrupt, torment, and assault their classmates, the students who lose their class time to disruption, or their emotional well-being to torment, or their physical safety to assault aren’t officials’ chief concern. No, in a perversion of decency and reason, schools reserve their compassion for the bully, the disrupter, the tormentor, the assailant.

We meet around big tables, and we dwell on the bully’s problems, his issues, and his trauma. And when someone at the table, usually a classroom teacher, pleads the cause of the other children, the feckless response from the assembled experts and advocates commonly is, “They’re not our concern here.” Truly. Sometimes the tormentors do suffer at home and are the victims of horrific trauma. They deserve appropriate care, but compassion for their plight in no way should license them to traumatize other students. Yet in many schools, officials safely distant from classrooms grant that license every day in the name of therapy and compassion. And entire classrooms suffer.

Then there are those students who simply delight in tormenting others. Malice exists in children, just as it does in adults.

When adults at school deliberately choose not to protect children from another child’s malice, we abet malice.

When we bow to bullies’ threatened lawsuits, we are cowards. When we fail to support our schools against such lawsuits, we fail as citizens.

Every time we permit students to throw chairs and punches and curses with impunity, every time we knowingly condemn students to another student’s aberrant conduct and serial mistreatment, every time we place the rights of the tormentor above the rights of those he torments, we are complicit and guilty.

We tell our students not to be bystanders.

We are worse than bystanders.

Our failure is intentional. And despite what we tell ourselves, it isn’t an act of kindness.

Peter Berger teaches English in Weathersfield, Vt. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.