After the Columbine massacre, which actually had nothing to do with bullying and everything to do with random evil (as per the bestselling book, an informative but thoroughly depressing and frightening read) as well as a rash of similar incidents around the country at that time, schools were supposed to have become super-sensitive to bullying. In practice, they’re not so good at it:

At today’s press conference, Scheibel provided stunning new details about the intensity of bullying Prince sustained since last fall. She also said that on at least one occasion, a school staffer witnessed the bullying while Prince was in a school library.

“From information known to investigators thus far, it appears that Phoebe’s death on January 14th followed a tortuous day for her, in which she was subjected to verbal harassment and threatened physical abuse,” Scheibel said.

Of course, educators have other things to do, like teach; deterring thuggery would seem to be something rather low on the list of priorities and something to which they wouldn’t be keenly attuned in any case. I will say, though, judging by my experiences as a parent, that when they do get involved the effort is rather pathetic and dreamy–in the local school district, children are told not to talk back or fight back against their tormentors but to send an “eye message”–that is, glare at them. Forget bringing a knife to a gunfight, this is going to a gunfight armed only with a dirty look, a wink, a nod. I object to the lesson, I object to the onus being put on the victims, I object to teaching passivity. If they really had zero tolerance for bullying, they would teach children techniques for, in the words of FDR, quarantining the aggressors, and give them more tools with which to respond than batting their eyelashes.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 29th, 2010 at 2:34 pm and is filed under Random Bloviating. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.