What to do about bullying | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Beaufort County Schools has recently announced the creation of a new "hotline" to report bullying. When I first heard that I had to wonder if there is a major problem in our schools. But I take some consolation in an article in this week's (3-12-12) Time magazine. Click here to read the article if you subscribe. If you are not a subscriber, here's what it says.

    There is a major crusade sweeping our nation's public schools. It is a crusade against bullying. But it is having unintended consequences. In many cases schools, teachers and parents are reporting that the "cure is worse than the disease." That is true because of the time, energy and resources being expended to try to cure a problem that is not only not being cured, it is actually being made worse by the attention being called to it.

    The author reports on a study that shows that bullying, in most schools, is no worse than it has ever been and all of the money being spent is not eradicating even what is there. Bottom line: Kids will be kids and kids have teased and bullied one another for ages. It is a natural part of growing up and the social engineers are not likely to have much of an impact on it.

    We suspect there is more here than meets the eye. The Beaufort Observer has previously reported about the nationwide movement by the gay and lesbian movement to influence school instructional programs to promote their agenda and "anti-bullying" initiatives are but a part of this movement.

    Interestingly, what the study found was--you ready for this--that many alleged "victims" of bullying were actually themselves bullies.

    Back in an earlier life I was fortunate to serve as an assistant principal in a middle school in the first years of full desegregation. I spend 10-14 hours a day dealing with discipline problems. A good portion of those cases involved some form of bullying, although we didn't call it that back in those days. But I do recall that the normal and typical conflicts between adolescents were not such that one party was guilty and the other innocent. The reverse was almost always true. There was usually guilt on the part of all concerned, even in many instances on the part of "witnesses" or onlookers. And you don't have to do a job like that very long before you learn that often there are third parties that actually caused the problem who don't get identified as either the perpetrator or the victim. Some kids have even made it an art form to get other kids in trouble. It is a game.

    Another phenomenon I learned very quickly was that while many of these adolescent conflicts were "absolutely horrible" today, the next day the odds were just as great that the kids involved would be best friends, and sometimes the metamorphous took minutes not days to occur.

    It is all part of growing up.

    Yes, of course some conflicts are not typical adolescent maturation. Some are indeed very serious. But of those I learned another thing. You can't hardly ever predict which ones are what we called "nuclear" and which ones are simply growing pains.

    The point? Bullying is as old as adolescents. It has always been with us and it will always be with us.

    We don't object to the schools trying to be more effective, but we do think the author of the study cited by Time has a good point. The unintended consequences of the schools' efforts may be worse than not implementing all these new approaches, spending all the money and time on staff development and fancy materials that are just making someone rich, or generating more grants to produce more studies which will make no difference in the long run...except waste resources and distract from more important thing...like teaching kids.

    Finally, at the risk of revealing just how old fashioned I have come to be, I will suggest that the basic approaches adopted by the schools that use such things as a "hotline" for reporting bullying give me pause. I can tell you many a war story about tattlers. Tattling is not an effective "intervention strategy" in many cases. Kids need to learn to deal with typical 'interpersonal conflicts' and that is all part of growing up...and the life of a middle school assistant principal.

    Delma Blinson writes the "Teacher's Desk" column for our friend in the local publishing business: The Beaufort Observer. His concentration is in the area of his expertise - the education of our youth. He is a former teacher, principal, superintendent and university professor.