One of the common points against home education is that kids are removed from the positive and negative aspects of schools. “But how will they learn to deal with bullies?” is a line too often repeated, often under the assumption that there are no bullies outside of the classroom environment for which children to learn from. This assumption is of course both false and absurd. For starters if the only place to learn how to adapt to bullies is in the school setting then perhaps learning to deal with them is not a useful thing to learn, one that is not really needed in the world. However we know that bullies can be found everywhere and that the chance to be bullied occurs far too often in everyone’s day. You don’t need to go to a special building to find it.
I recently read two articles on bullying. The first dealt with bullying in the schools, this wonderful experience that children not in schools are missing out on. Billy Wolfe, a 15 year old boy, was repeatedly bullied and tortured in school by his classmates. They physically hit him, emotionally tortured him, and humiliated him endlessly with no consequences. After all, kids just need to learn how to deal with bullies, right?
Not long after, a boy on the school bus pummeled Billy, but somehow Billy was the one suspended, despite his pleas that the bus’s security camera would prove his innocence. Days later, Ms. Wolfe recalls, the principal summoned her, presented a box of tissues, and played the bus video that clearly showed Billy was telling the truth.
Though this did not stop the bullying, or erase the torture that had already been inflicted upon Billy. And the lesson was already taught well to the other students who laughed as Billy was suspended and the bullies walked free with bragging rights. Suddenly I have an urge to reread Lord of The Flies.
Of course this type of bullying continues unchecked into adulthood. The second article I read dealt with the adult bullies we so often face in the workplace. The typical bullies, the “cool kids” of school who gain more power by holding down those that they see as lesser than grow into the bosses that torture their employees. Adult bullies learn to adapt their tactics into what will fit better into the adult world. They realize that many of the ways they can torture people as children themselves will not work as adults, so they change tactics. Yet it is still bullying just the same.
This month, researchers at the University of Manitoba reported that the emotional toll of workplace bullying is more severe than that of sexual harassment.
Some may read this and feel that it is a perfect reason to keep kids in school. After all if bullies are so prevalent in the workplace than surely kids need to learn how to deal with them in other controlled settings such as school. Many home schooling families would be quick to point out that bullying also occurs are the park, the play group, the club, and even in the home giving home schooling children many chances to learn how to handle bullies.
For my family we have a different idea. I don’t want to teach my sons how to deal with bullies. In schools students who are bullied have limited options. Too often adults look the other way, bullies continue with what they are doing. Years through middle and high school teach students two things. 1) The bullies will get away with it and rarely punished, 2) those bullied will be punished. Learning to deal with bullies often means sinking to their level and becoming a bully as well or learning to turn away and pretend it is not there. Those values exist into adulthood.
I don’t want to teach my sons to deal with bullies. I want to teach them that this behavior is unacceptable, that hurting others in any way does not make them “cool”, that they don’t have to fit into the crowd and that standing out does not have to be painful, and that they do not have to become the kind of adults that use words that hurt as much as fists. They can be better. If that means keeping them out of the bully-rich environment until they have a solid foundation built up and a strong enough personal base to stand up to those who use power-over, then good. They will be strong er for it in the long run.
For a good discussion on bullies both in schools and in the workplace read both the post The bullying epidemic and the comments that follow.
bullies, bullying