Bullying in Schools

The below piece is an excerpt from,"To Parents Whose Child Is Being Bullied at School," by
Gary North, Ph.D.
Cathy

"SPINELESS ADMINISTRATORS
Here are the problems with bullying in school.

First, the administrators are spineless. They are caught on the horns of multiple dilemmas, and they will do almost anything to avoid making a decision. They don't want lawsuits from parents who are outraged their hoodlum kids were expelled. They also don't want lawsuits from parents whose children are the victims of these hoodlums. They want their budgets increased next year. They want to keep all bad news out of the newspapers. They want to have all their sports teams win. They want things happy, happy, happy. But the world of Phil Robertson is not available to school administrators.

Most of the efforts of school administrators are put into keeping the lid on, but above all, the public relations lid.

They want to avoid making decisions. They have been trained not to make decisions. They have been bureaucrats all of their lives. They went from public school bureaucracy as students through public school bureaucracy as teachers; now they are administrators.

Bureaucrats want to avoid responsibility. The goal of the bureaucrat, above all, is to get next year's budget increased, but the second goal is to avoid a lawsuit. The rest of it doesn't matter.

Maybe a parent goes to the school administrator, and tells this story of woe. The administrator has an obvious reaction: to promise to clear it up. Then he has the second reaction, which is simple enough to explain: to sweep it under the rug. Things get cleared up by being swept under the rug.

If the school administrator can delay a decision long enough, the kid will graduate, and the parents will go away. So, delay is the order of the day. Only when parents are adamant will they be listened to. But even then, they probably will not be listened to much.

Anyone who does not understand this is willfully blind. Any parent who does not understand this is living in a fantasy land, because the parents grew up in this system. It is just the way it was in Back to the Future. Biff runs the show. There's a working relationship between him and the vice principal, because the vice principal is unwilling to expel Biff and his buddies -- bad publicity -- so Biff knows just how far to push. The vice principal knows just how far to go through the motions as if he were doing something to stop the problem.

Should we be surprised that children get bullied?

I would not let my child become a victim.

I would enlist him in a defensive program. It is defensive against the bully. It is offensive against school authorities.

The goal is to put more pressure on the principal than he is willing to bear. The pressure is imposed from below, meaning the parents, and from above, meaning the superintendent and possibly the school board.

Ultimately, the pressure is imposed by a lawyer."

To read the whole article, go to Ron Paul Curriculum.com.

Cathy

"Eighty-one percent of American eighteen-year olds are unprepared for college coursework." Crimes of the Educators How Utopians are Using Government Schools to Destroy America's Children