The other newspaper article I reacted to on the way to the beach (see New York Times I ) was called "A best friend? You must be kidding" by Hilary Stout (6/16/10). This article confirmed a suspicion of mine: teachers deliberately try to prevent students from making or having best friends. This is to prevent the formation of cliques and bullying – connected issues to be sure. How to keep someone in the group under control – violence. How to show those who are out that they are truly out – violence. I don't mean physical violence necessarily, could be coercion, intimidation or forms of social violence like shunning.
I was often on the wrong end of these in High School as I suppose is most people's experience at one time or another. I also don’t recall a best friend in High School but that was not the result of a deliberate protocol on the part of the teachers. In grade school I did have close friends from time to time. And thank god for that. What would my life have been like if Martha had not made sure my walks to school didn’t turn into the meandering excursions I was prone to then. Or if Ray had not shared my enthusiasm for exploring the railroad tracks, bridges and riverbanks – though my interest in the explosive mysteries of carbide gave him a 2nd degree burn.
I think close friends are probably important at all stages of development. My best friends today – beyond my partner – are a man who is the older brother I never had and a woman without whose love, support, and understanding I would be sorely bereft. But beyond the importance of close connections at all ages this particular approach to bullying seems wrongheaded to me. Large groups of friends can be a problem as well. We’ve all read Lord of the Flies and think about what Leopold and Loeb could have done if they had had a gang.
Our daughter has been in Montessori programs since pre-school and in that wonderful and successful form of education, community is all. She has learned about and experienced the rights and obligations of community all through school. There are cliques and various shifting groups but no real bullying that I have heard about except some anonymous mean postings on Facebook, where what once was whispered is now writ loud and large.
Tolerance is practiced and taught along with the worth and place of every member of the community. It seems to work; my daughter has an acute sensitivity to unfair treatment of others and will stand up for that person even if it is someone she doesn’t like.
I think the Montessori teachers work to make everyone feel they belong no matter their social or academic status. If there is always a place for you at the table perhaps there is no need for bullying. If resources (or attention) are limited or feel contingent in some way you may need to fight for your place. Perhaps this is exactly what those teachers are doing in promoting group activities but the idea of discouraging close connections to create community feels wrong to me. It is an answer that avoids addressing the actual problem. It is almost as if those teachers feel that bullying is a natural outgrowth of childhood. I don’t think it is.
I’m also not sure that less bullying takes place in large groups. One of the psychologists interviewed for the article — a friendship expert — talked about “normal social pain.” He goes on to wonder if we want children to become skilled in developing superficial relationships or to become skilled in developing close relationships and that no one can find out what it is to have a faithful (or faithless) intimate friend unless they have one. You can’t learn and live through a close friendship gone bad unless you have one that does.
I like the phrase “social pain” and had my share of it growing up in the 50s and 60s — vaguely depressed, a solitary, uninterested in sports and a stutterer to boot. And some of it was painful indeed. But I don’t recall my parents or teachers being involved as mediators. And through my grade school years and beyond my mother was at home and very much involved in school activities that brought her into contact with my teachers. If some aspect of my social life had seemed amenable to correction, it would have been corrected, I have no doubt. It seems almost paradoxical that in this age of hyperactive multitasking, parents have the time to drill so deeply and from so many directions into their children’s lives. The teachers to give them credit are only responding to pressures from the parents, who in turn, are responding, perhaps, to their children experiencing normal social pain.
Once during what we thought was a parent-teacher conference at our daughter’s pre-school — I now realize it was a coaching session — her teacher told us that our daughter would share what she wished from her day and we were not to press her with questions. This was her world and we had to be invited into it. Unlike Vegas what happens in childhood doesn’t necessarily stay in childhood — as therapists can attest – but there is something important about the sanctity, safety and privacy of the child’s own world. And of time spent free of the yoke of micro-management by parents or teachers.
None of this is to say I don’t think bullying is a problem. I do and on many levels schoolyard bullying is all around us. As much as we profess to be a Christian nation — going so far as to having theologians discuss the parameters of a just war—our culture if not explicitly espousing the idea that “might makes right” certainly acts as though is does plenty of the time. And beyond the bullying idea of a preemptive war we have the popularity of reality TV where people volunteer to be routinely and sometimes cleverly humiliated. The people doing the humiliating are often the judges, those with the power to bestow favors and even fame. This doesn’t even touch upon the behavior of the contestants among themselves if it is the kind of show that clearly demonstrates the dictum every person for themselves, and rewards it.
The rejoinder is that this is how the real world works. We often say “real world” as if we mean the stability and constancy of the planets in their orbits around the sun. The real world is nothing more than the world we have made, and allowed to be made for us, and have accepted. The real world can evolve when its defects and shortcomings are exposed and addressed — see Thomas Paine on the divine right of kings for example. Unmaking it or making it into something more humane is not an easy or simple task but it is one that can be undertaken in small ways everyday in every encounter.
I have a friend who is a video director. He is often on location with a crew he has never met working long hard hours every day for a couple of weeks. One of the things he tries to practice is loving-kindness or the golden rule. What he notices beyond the job with its inevitable difficulties going a little bit better is what he calls the ripple effect. From the account reps to the grips to the craft service people, everyone feels better and is happier and treats everyone else better who treat. . .and so it goes. One small step.
An anonymous source in a Montessori classroom once remarked about the group work that she hated to be in groups with people she hated because it made it so much harder to hate them. I hope the group activities promoted to prevent bullying have the same effect.
What my anonymous source was articulating is one of the redeeming aspects of being human. We have the capacity not only to create strangers out of our fellows but to keenly and deeply recognize our connections. That recognition if acted upon forces some behaviors and eliminates others. In a letter to Stephen Spender — whom he had excoriated in an essay — George Orwell explained why it was he could have been so cordial once they finally met. [This from a review of some new Orwell collections by Simon Leys — not his real name – in the May 26, 2011 New York Review of Books.]
“You ask how it is that I attacked you not having met you, & on the other hand changed my mind after meeting you…..because not having met you I could regard you as a type & also an abstraction. Even if, when I met you, I had happened not to like you, I should still have been bound to change my attitude, because when you meet someone in the flesh you realize immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas. It is partly for this reason that I don’t mix much in literary circles, because I know from experience that once I have met & spoken with anyone I shall never again be able to show any intellectual brutality towards him, even when I feel that I ought to, like the Labour M.P.s who get patted on the back by dukes & are lost forever more. “This positive aspect of humanness also explains why so many who should have known better came away from a personal meeting with G.W. Bush saying what a great guy he was — especially if he gave them a nickname.
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