Curbing School Bullying

Guangming Daily February 23

Though school bullying has been causing serious harm to the students involved, their families and their communities, a unified and standard strategy to cope with it is yet to be put in place in most parts of China. In many places, the measures are nothing more than sloganeering and short-lived campaigns.

At the end of 2017, the Ministry of Education for the first time came up with a comprehensive definition of “school bullying” and announced measures to deal with, prevent and punish such incidents.

But some primary and middle schools are not actively trying to combat bullying. Neither do they stress the importance of legal education for students nor try to solve the problem responsibly in the aftermath. The biggest reason for this indifference is their preoccupation with students’ academic performance and admission to senior schools. Anything outside this core mission tends to be marginalized. Legal education, which is important for inculcating a sense of discipline and making students law-abiding, is seldom paid attention to on campus. Some schools even cover up cases of bullying, and so incidents that should be brought under legal procedure are casually dealt with within the school. This undoubtedly fuels bullying.

The key to improving the situation is to correct schools’ negligence. Teachers and schools should pay equal attention to both students’ examination scores and personality and sense of social responsibility. Furthermore, schools should be monitored by a third-party committee comprised of teachers, parents, education experts and officials.