Re: About Bullying--My Thoughts

In the worst schools you can find, there are police stationed in every hall, cameras in every room, illegal searches every month, zero-tolerance policies on any offense, extremely strict age segregation, the teachers exercise absolute power over students in arbitrary and often abusive ways, etc. One should ask whether it is all these conditions which create bullying and other problems in the schools. The answer is yes, to some extent. If you are to look at schools where problems like bullying are limited or non-existent, you'll notice that all of the above is either non-existent or attenuated to a moderate extent (though some of these conditions are directly built into the commonly enforced educational philosophies). The point being that treating kids (or anyone for that matter) like criminals and showing them through constant example that bullying is the way to succeed will create those problems where they wouldn't have existed otherwise.