Today’s paper reported on another school girl who committed suicide, allegedly as a result of school bullying.
I don’t know if the claim is true, nor do I know the statistics. But from my personal experience, school bullying is much more tolerated in the UK, than in any other country I’ve been.
I have three kids going to three different schools, and this is the fourth country we’ve lived in. We’ve always lived in similar type of suburbs, and sent our kids to similar types of schools. By all means, my three kids have encountered (fortunately, not first hand) more bullying here than in any of their previous schools.
The scarier thing is not the bullying itself, but the total inability of the schools stuff to discipline the bullies. Despite the fact that a single bully can make life hell for an entire class, school stuff is not given any means whatsoever to discipline them.
As one of the teachers said: “I don’t know why we need to sacrifice entire classes of good student for some hypothetical ideal of giving everyone equal opportunity. It doesn’t work.”
If at school you realize that bullying is not punishable, can we really complain about the level of violence in our streets?
No comments:
Post a Comment