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Michael Rose

Child, Adolescent & Family Therapist, Youth in Need

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How can we help to prevent bullying?

As a society that revels in TV series such as Honey Boo Boo, Jersey Shore and other "Reality" TV shows, how are we supposed to stop bullying within schools?

If we preach what to do or what not to do when confronted by bullying behaviors, but never follow through with consequences, how can we expect our students to continue to have faith in the faculty's true want to get rid of bullying.

How can we expect our children to stop bullying if we, as grown ups, are watching these shows.... making fun of the people on them, judging them, calling them names?

How can we change the structure of learning to help increase education, not only in the academic sense, but also in the sense of what it means to be a human being?

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  • James McGuiness

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    Mar 15 2013: This is a deep issue and can not be seriously addressed with remedial action around the edges of education or some token sensitivity training within. In my view, the model of education, which still is largely grounded in the Industrial Age's "factory system" treats humans as relatively uniform "units" to be processed through a system of compromises which make it easier for the institution to get through its processes at the cost of acceptance that many children will fail. The very idea of herding children into this industrial meat-grinder is unnatural, We are not "created beings" that come out of heaven on a conveyor belt all with the same basic ranges of capacity but instead come into the world one at a time in a bag of guts as a result of natural genetic compositing processes which rarely if ever match perfect gene sources. There are also factors called "epigenetics" which relate to environmental differences even in the womb where gender assignment and sexual preference determination result in part from hormonal variation in the mothers. All this adds up to the fact that all human beings are unique. One need go no further proof than nature's vocalization of this in the fact that none of us look exactly the same.

    Add on top of this the knowledge that each person is not static in capacity but has a neuroplastic dynamism at work which governs capacity growth and the ability to advance much taster than the rate of classroom pace. Experiments in educational autonomy are proving that education could be holding more people back than facilitating the ready and capable. Thus education must be reformed--not just on the social development assertions of my previous post but to embrace neuroplastic dynamism which turns acceptance of a "hit or miss" modality into a potential "no miss" one where each student is a client interacting with a range of age students. Bullying is "mob" behavior. We must cease being the assemblers of mobs and making education easy on ourselves.

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