It has been reported in the news this week that a Dinner Lady has been sacked for telling a girl’s parents the details of a bullying incident at her school. (For one report use this link to The Telegraph.) It would appear (and I stress, appear as we only know what the media tells us) that the school didn’t tell the parents the full story of the incident. The Dinner Lady was merely commiserating with the parents in an out of school situation, about what she considered to be a very unpleasant instance of bullying in the school playground.
‘Bully’ means ‘to bluster, use violent threats, swagger, intimidate, abuse’ (Sh.OED) and it is a word that should not be bandied about lightly.
I want my sons to grow up to be able to handle themselves in difficult situations, to be able to stand up to other people, to have the ability to assess situations and react sensibly and appropriately. I want them to learn to understand the difference between teasing, playing rough and bravado, and genuine threats, intimidation and abuse. Above all I do not want them to grow up with a victim mentality; there is nothing a bully finds more attractive than a dyed-in-the-wool victim, whether as a child or an adult.
There are several problems with this aspiration. We live in a culture where we are actively discouraged from taking responsibility for our own actions, everything is someone else’s fault. If we crash our cars we are told on no account to admit liability. If we fall over in the street, it is not an unhappy accident it is a dangerous paving stone. Children are told, right from the word go, that if anything unpleasant happens or their comfort is threatened in any way, they must immediately tell a teacher or parent who will intervene on their behalf.
A huge proportion of children have little or no unsupervised time with their peers in which to fall out, sort it out and make it up, on their own terms without an adult leaping into the fray and solving everything. There is, of course, another group of children who receive so little supervision that they have no guidelines whatsoever and are forced to make everything up for themselves and the solutions to that are complex indeed. But we need to find some middle ground.
In order to allow our children to develop into capable, sensible adults, we have to first teach them some values about how we treat people and how we conduct ourselves, with courtesy, dignity and compassion. We have to show them love and kindness when they hurt themselves but not make too much fuss so they learn to put a brave face on things. We should reward them with praise when they achieve, not shower them with gifts which I suggests sends the message that achievement for one’s own satisfaction is not enough in itself. When they make mistakes, make sure they take responsibility for them and help to point out the changes that need to be made.
We give them these tools so that they can manage by themselves, make informed decisions, assess risk. This way, when something serious does happen, we as adults will take them seriously and know when it is appropriate for us to intervene on their behalf. We must not disable them.
Schools no longer have the freedom to operate appropriately for the cohort of children in their care. Teachers no longer have the freedom to do the job for which (we hope) they have been highly trained and have a passionate vocation. Head Teachers are not free to be leaders. League tables, SATS, OFSTED, Government initiatives, random knee-jerk policies – these are the Leaders of our schools and the schools are terrified that if they manifest one single area of perceived ‘failure’ they will lose funding, drop in the league tables or in some cases be closed altogether.
I would suggest that this could be why the school in question failed to report, what appears to have been a very unpleasant case of genuine bullying, because it was terrified of the wider repercussions. The Dinner Lady reasonably assumed that the parents had been informed and she was ashamed that such an incident had happened at the school in which she worked.
I sincerely hope that the school gave the perpetrators an industrial strength dressing down and appropriate punshments. I hope that the parents of the bullies supported the school in chastising their children again when they got home. I also hope that the parents of the bullied child not only took the school to task for failing in their duty to communicate, but spent some valuable time helping their own child to develop strategies for avoiding such a situation in the first place.
Wartime Housewife 