Editorials

No other article in the Daily Planet has produced as much response from readers as our recent article on a child who experiences bullying in a Berkeley public school. Many of the letters were heartfelt reminiscences about the writer’s own childhood struggles with bullies, or were from parents whose children have been bullied. Our piece was written primarily from the perspective of the victim and her anguished parents. Today’s commentary page includes a letter from a Berkeley Unified School District teacher and administrator who is trying to work on ways to solve on-going problems. 

Our readers have offered many answers to the question of how to defeat bullying. Today’s letter describes staff development days, videos, class discussions and other forms of exhortation, and points out that no school district claims to have solved the problem. At the other extreme, martial arts proponents have written in claiming that self-defense training protects kids from being harassed.  

I’ve always had a bit of trouble with the latter theory since a good friend of mine, a martial arts champion, was murdered by a hitchhiker he picked up. In general, I think preventing or derailing dangerous confrontations is safer than encouraging adults or kids to fight back physically. But how to do it? 

The school district’s approach, as described by the letter writer, seems to be trying to change the hearts and minds of the bullies, although, as she points out, this is hard when kids grow up surrounded by a culture of violence. But bullying has always been part of the human condition. The Old Testament, which describes a culture at least as violent as contemporary Berkeley, is full of stories about people being bullied, and how they responded to it. Folklore from around the world has many tales of how clever animals (or people) outwitted bullies: the third little pig in English folktales, Br’er Rabbit in African-American legends. One thing that all these stories have in common is that force alone never overwhelms the bully. It takes more than that, and what kind of more is what the stories are all about.  

Another reason that martial arts training is not the right way to deal with bullying in schools is that it’s a form of blaming the victim. The ethic of frontier America said that real men and real boys needed to learn how to defend themselves, a concept that many now want to extend to real women and real girls. But children in modern urban America should not be taught to “fight back.” They should be taught how to avoid fights if possible, and how to get adult help if they need it.  

There’s always a temptation to blame the victim in such cases, since our common culture frowns on whining, but school administrators have the responsibility of preventing this response in employees who work with children. The “solution” described in the article of keeping the bullied child indoors during playtime is worse than no solution. What it teaches the victim is not to complain, and if kids don’t complain the problem can never be solved. 

In a school setting, the single most important factor has always been to provide enough adult supervision to nip problems in the bud before they start. That means having a good adult-to-child ratio, and making sure particularly that playground supervision is adequate. Teaching kids how to ask for help, and then responding immediately and decisively to change the environment where the negative interaction takes place, almost always works, but it requires enough funding to pay for the needed personnel 

It’s hard, in a state which just elected as governor an actor who has made a career of portraying bullies on the screen, to hold fast to the goal of trying to promote harmony and tolerance among our school kids, but we need to continue to try. We adults in Berkeley shouldn’t waste our time and energy in arguments over whose fault bullying is. We need to do many things simultaneously. For the long term, we should work in the political sphere to try to get enough money in the school system to pay for enough adults to supervise kids at play, which is the surest way to prevent bullying. While we’re working on that, we need to educate kids in today’s schools about how to complain about bullies, which means making sure that complaints get results, which means educating staff as well.  

Finally, and this is the hardest, we need to work on teaching kids to want to be kind to one another, starting in kindergarten, not in junior high. That’s the hard one. 

This week celebrates the major holidays of two branches of the majority U.S. religious tradition, both of which have frequently tried to teach humans to love one another, but both of which have frequently failed to do so. 

Becky O’Malley is executive editor of the Berkeley Daily Planet.