A mother says, “Children remind me of chickens, seeking out the weak and wounded and pecking them to death. They have discovered that my 9-year-old son, who is autistic, is bothered by loud noises, and they scream and whistle in his ear until he cries.”
The school’s most powerful moral influence is how people there treat each other. In a great many schools, adults are making a conscientious effort to treat students with love and respect. But in those same schools, kids are often devastatingly cruel to each other.
Cruelty at the hands of their schoolmates deprives those students of what every young person needs: the experience of being accepted and valued by their peers.
Peer cruelty also interferes with students’ learning. Kids won’t be focused on schoolwork if they’re worried about getting cut down in their classroom, harassed in the hallway, ostracised at recess, or bullied on the bus.
Students who bully are not only hurting others; they’re deforming their own character. By age 24, according to the US Department of Justice, 60 percent of students who bully will have a criminal conviction.
A survey of US schools, using an anonymous questionnaire with more than 200,000 students, found that bullying is most common at the elementary school level.
Among 3rd and 4th graders, 22 percent of students say they are bullied “2-3 times a month or more”. In 7th grade, 15 percent of students report being bullied at this rate. By 12th grade, 8 percent do.
In this study, nearly 4 in 10 victims said the bullying lasted a year or longer. Fully one-quarter of bullied students said they had been bullied for several years or longer.
The damage done by bullying
A 2015 longitudinal study by Duke University’s School of Medicine and England’s University of Warwick found that chronic bullying’s long-term psychological damage — anxiety, depression, and the like — was even worse than the harm caused by having abusive parents.
For students who are regularly subjected to abuse by peers, school becomes a miserable experience. One teenage boy describes what he went through:
“For reasons I never understood, four kids on the soccer team decided to pick on me. Once, after practice, they pushed me into the swamp behind the school. When I tried to get out, they kept pushing me back. When I teared up, they called me ‘crybaby’.
“One day, outside of school, as I was talking to a girl I liked, they came up behind me and pulled my pants down. As they walked away, they said, ‘You can’t do anything about it.’
“They kept this up all through high school. I was constantly afraid of being humiliated. I thought about what I’d like to do to them, but I didn’t have the courage to carry it out.”
Some students subjected to tormenting like this do seek revenge. A 2002 US Secret Service study of school shooters found that 71 percent had been persecuted, bullied, threatened, attacked, or injured by peers.
Other victims of peer cruelty become depressed, even suicidal.
One mother says: “My nice, pretty 7th-grader has no friends. She eats alone in the cafeteria and walks alone in the halls. She does not know what she has done wrong. Last night, she said that she’d like to kill herself.”
In a 10-year national study of 70,000 middle- and high school students, only 37 percent agreed with the statement: “Students in my school show respect for one another.”
Schools have no higher moral obligation to students and their parents than to do everything in their power to prevent peer cruelty and create a culture of kindness and respect.
Can anything be done to make our schools safer, kinder, and more respectful? There is.
Bullying prevention programs that help
Published programs can help. A research review of 44 studies in 16 countries found that the K-12 Olweus Bullying Prevention Program “worked best” in reducing, but by no means eliminating, bullying behaviour.
The Olweus program includes eight components: (1) a school Bullying Prevention Committee; (2) training for all school staff; (3) parent awareness and involvement; (4) clear, consistently enforced school rules about bullying; (5) weekly class meetings on how to respond to bullying as a victim or bystander; (6) supervision of all school areas during lunch and recess; (7) individual meetings with bullying victims, perpetrators, and their parents; (8) assessment that measures progress made in reducing bullying.
In a US evaluation study of more than 400 schools using the Olweus program, the number of students who admitted to bullying declined by 27 percent in elementary schools, 35 percent in middle schools, and 31 percent in high schools. This reduction was significantly less than the 50 percent reduction Olweus reported from its initial implementation in Norway’s schools.
The curriculum Steps to Respect is designed for elementary schools and focuses on friendship. It coaches children on how to join a group, discover shared interests, manage hurt feelings, solve disagreements, and resist pressure to exclude others. Studies find that students with at least one friend are less likely to be bullied and less likely to develop emotional problems from being bullied.
In our own Center’s study of 24 award-winning high schools, we visited schools that had made progress in creating a culture of peer solidarity. One effective strategy: teaching students how to be “peer allies” to someone who has been bullied, by providing companionship and emotional support (“They made sure I was OK,” “They took me to a counsellor”).
Schoolwide character education
Schoolwide character education takes a crucial next step. It goes well beyond bullying prevention to make a positive, proactive effort to integrate respect and kindness into every phase of school life.
An example: At Winkelman Elementary School on Chicago’s north shore — with more than 40 languages among students’ families — put-downs and fights were becoming more common. Students were also frequently disrespectful to teachers and other adults in the building.
The principal and faculty decided to begin the new school year with a home-grown character education program they called, “Let’s Be Courteous, Let’s Be Caring.”
When I walked into Winkelman’s lobby, the first thing that caught my eye was a giant display defining courtesy and caring in terms of observable school behaviours.
“Courtesy” was defined as: (1) Saying please, thank you, you’re welcome, and excuse me; (2) Being a good listener; (3) Waiting your turn; (4) Acting politely everywhere; and (5) Discussing problems.
“Caring” was defined as: (1) Sharing; (2) Respecting others’ feelings; (3) Following rules; (4) Working cooperatively, and (5) Being a good friend.
Winkelman’s teachers all worked to create a classroom culture that taught and reinforced these behaviours. They asked their students, “What rules do we need that will help us show courtesy and show caring?”
When a student broke a rule, the teacher would take the student aside and ask quietly, “Did that behaviour show courtesy?” “Did it show caring?”
Then, in that year’s teacher-parent conferences, teachers said to parents,