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.
Comments
Jeanne
September 4th, 2009 - 3:34:12 PM
This truly is a sticky subject - one that I believe doesn not really have one answer. I agree whole heatedly that we should should arm our kids with knowledge regarding verbal abuse -vs-verbal banter. Arm them with what exactly to ignor, what's acceptable to "banter back", what to "take" and what to "report, etc....but are parents going to take the time to do that? AND even if they do, will kids be able to "ignor" some kinds of verbal abuse? How much are they getting? I hate to be the reminder of bad news, but kids can be very, VERY mean! I endured many years of mean and horrible verbal abuse from peers from elementary school on up. My parents told me not to pay attention or to disregard the comments, however I was very hurt by those comments. I humiliated, at the whim of peers, many times. Altough I am all for "growing a tough skin" and YES - let's teach our kids that.....we have to remember they ARE still kids. They are still growing, learning and unsure of how to handle lifes situations and trying things "on for size"....things like how to handle being belittled and humiliated like I was. Even if we parents teach them, can they pull it off - this ignoring of hurtfull words? I say yes, let's teach our kids to ignor, to the best of our ability, unwanted verbal advances. To know when someone is joking and when someone has gone too far. But let's also realize that they ARE kids themselves, they don't know what we know yet. They are probably going to get hurt a few times and we can be here for them when they do - helping, teaching and loving.
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