The University of Illinois has completed a national study of over 650 United States high schools, in which the effects of inter-classmate verbal harassment were found to be deleterious to continued learning.
This study finds that one in five students endure put-downs by their classmates, with boys being the targets more frequently than girls. There seemed to be no distinction in prevalence between public and private schools. Christy Lleras, a University of Illinois assistant professor of human and community development commented “I think it’s sort of a wake-up call for a lot of us that this kind of verbal harassment is going on in schools, and it’s contributing to a learning environment that is quite disruptive for kids.”
While I can see this study triggering a lot of alarms for parents and educators, shouldn’t we consider this less of a wake up call and more of an example of social Darwinism?
It’s nearly a given these days that kids will have to learn how to deal with bullying of one sort or another. Physical threatening of one student by another is, and should continue to be, clamped down on. But verbal abuse is something ill-defined (at least in this article). If it’s mere catcalling and banter between friends and acquaintances, then it’s just normal interaction as we’ve likely all gone through at some point. If it’s directly targeted at individuals for the purpose of hurting them, then maybe it’s something the student should learn to ignore.
As with any insult, it’s important to teach our kids that the source is what’s important. Being called a name by someone who doesn’t know you should have very little effect; but a put down from a close friend can be seriously damaging. And though I don’t like to say it, I know of teachers who have been verbally abusive to their students and gotten away with it. Obviously, self-esteem in our youth can be a thorny issue at the best of times, but accepting harsh words as damaging from any direction seems a little coddling to me. We need to get our children to learn how to tune out meaningless noise and concentrate on a positive signal. The world is full of distracting and potentially harmful elements, but that doesn’t mean that we need to pay attention to every little bit of it. We can rise above mere words, and leave the sticks and stones to the jealous and simple-minded who throw them out of ignorance.
