Unfortunately, as disappointing and demoralizing as it is to say– bullying is not a novel subject for schools throughout the country. It is not late-breaking news that schools everywhere deal with this. To the contrary, it has proven to be a persistent problem even in the face of efforts to bring the issue to light and create formal programs specifically designed to go after the causes and solutions.
This story on CNN details yet another case where multiple students planned, encouraged, and executed an act of violence on another student over a seemingly insignificant issue. Not to mention, as is typical of these cases, this was not the first incident, but rather the culmination of numerous other instances of physical, emotional, and verbal abuse in school.
While the story itself is indeed upsetting, it was as I found myself at the bottom of the article and I read on to the comments that other readers had left that I found the real sadness. I don’t often read those comments, but in this particular story I was struck that many reactions to the piece included statements like: “I see this everyday” or “this permeates the school experience.” For me it drove home, yet again, the importance of not letting the culture of our schools be shaped by chance, good intentions, or accident. Character education at its best has evolved, and is not an anti-bullying approach. It looks at schools as a more holistic system with a culture that has the potential to influence staff, students, and community—for good or for bad.
Still, when the general consensus at the end of a news piece that reports a group of students verbally and physically assaulting another is “this is the way schools are” we must ask ourselves—who determines “the way schools are”?
And then we must face the fact that whether we want to call ourselves “character educators” or not, if we aren’t explicitly and intentionally determining “they way our school is”—then someone else is.
