Bullying has been making headlines in recent months and as loathsome as practice as it is, we should not forget that the worst bully of all is the system itself. Both the education system and the industrial capitalist system which it is preparing worker drones for is more fearsome by far than anything a single individual can do. To illustrate my point, I’d like to reference an iconic bully from literature and TV, Nellie Oleson.
When Laura Ingalls Wilder, mother to Libertarian icon Rose Wilder Lane, wrote her series of books based on her experiences growing up in Walnut Grove, she used a composite character Nellie Oleson to represent 3 girls with whom she had rivalries as a child. Nellie Owens, who was the daughter of the local merchant, Genevieve Masters who was tall blonde and spoiled with beautifully tailored clothes, and Stella Gilbert who was Laura’s rival for Almanzo Wilder’s affections were combined to form Nellie Oleson-the bully of Walnut Grove and nemesis of young Laura Ingalls.
The schoolhouse of Walnut Grove is very different from the windowless halls of education we call our schools today. For starters, Laura learned and taught in an area that preceded “The Education Trust”, a group of people who took it upon themselves to organize most educational administrative jobs in the U.S. around 1917. With representatives from Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the National Education Association, their chief end, according to British evolutionist Benjamin Kidd, “was to impose on the young the ideal of subordination.”
So you see, as reprehensible as Nellie Oleson’s actions were, they were just small potatoes. The Education Trust was looking to impose a subordination on generations youngsters far in excess of anything that Nellie Oleson or her 3 real life counterparts could ever dream of in their most sadistic fantasies. And as we look into the large scale bullying of a system that has it’s stated purpose of preventing the “problem of overproduction” we see that this group wanted to create the next generation of workers competing for favor of management. This could only be accomplished with the systemic mass psychological campaign that billed itself as mass schooling.
The Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project was a top down bureaucratic effort to reform schooling after 1967. Consider that this is the world a great many of today’s adults (your humble author included) were born into, and consider that this document was anti-democratic monstrosity, which would focus on undermining anything productive that students would do with their school time (pointless busywork from your least favorite teacher had it’s origin here) while simultaneously changing the system of discipline to one where the teacher was virtually powerless to maintain order.
So, of course, when a heartbreaking video of a young girl showing cards stating how miserable she is when going in for her daily torment at the place where she goes for education goes viral we feel a need to do something. And therein lies a dilemma. What has been done so far as top-down bureaucratic solutions to educational problems does not have a good record!
If the current system is able to create bullies by keeping schoolwork irrelevant and preventing classroom discipline, it can reverse it’s own actions and policies if it truly wishes to do something about bullies!
And it is very important to keep in mind that bullying is not limited to schoolyards. You can be bullyed as an adult. I recently read an article in randi.org (the James Randi Educational Foundation’s website) that accurately labeled the characteristics which makes a bully as a combination of narcissism and entitlement. I’ve had quite a few skirmishes as an adult with people who are best described as entitled narcissists.
Wonderful things happen when adults stand up to entitled narcissists!
What better description of Hosni Mubarek or any tyrant other than a very entitled narcissist. The people of Egypt stood up for themselves at no small cost of life and limb and deserve our support as do the people of Tunisia, Libya, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Afghanistan!
The brave people of Wisconsin just had a bout with an entitled narcissist who found his way to the Governor’s mansion. To their credit, the people stood up and Scott Walker recently had to admit to Congress that his plan was to give away public resources to cronies while using a balanced budget as an excuse to break the backs of unions.
If you have not stood up to a bully as a child, you will find doing it as an adult very difficult. Would Laura Ingalls have written what she did if she did not go through the crucible of confronting Nellie Olson as a child?
Do not forget that today’s bully is tomorrow’s victim and vice versa. I know of a case where a young relative’s acquaintance, a drug dealer, star athlete and all around bully, had overturned his car while intoxicated and was now a quadriplegic. That was five years ago. She (my young relative) was hard hearted towards him at the time. She felt that he deserved that fate and was relieved that he was no longer a malevolent force at her school.
Over time, the kid has probably developed some humility. Over the course of his life, he will probably run into a nurse or caregiver that has a feeling of narcissism and entitlement. Then it will be his turn to be on the receiving end of bullying. None of his victims from year before will be around to witness it, but they will have moved on to a point where yesterday’s bullies are of no consequence.
And rest assured, it does feel like crap to be bullied. But in the process to do something about bullying, let us keep in mind that we don’t want to empower the biggest bully of them all. It is a system that has nothing but contempt for the individual. And it has stated in its origins that they “…shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science.” In Arthur Calhoun’s 1919 “Social History of the Family”, he anticipated a point where the child passes from its family and into a “community of experts”. He also voiced hope that in time we’d see public education designed “to check the mating of the unfit”.
Is high school’s structure making more sense to you now? Is the lack of success when it comes to increasing our educational standards a surprise? The Educational system itself was put forward and advanced by entitled narcissists who were way more malevolent than Nellie Oleson or her 3 real life counterparts. In the process of protecting small children from bullies, there is a danger that we cave into the worst bully of them all.
Any sabre rattling about the state “doing something” about bullying should go be met with extreme skepticism! As much as I feel for the children on the receiving end, they are often twice victimized. Victimized by bullies whom the teachers can’t control because the teachers hands have been tied and by the underfunded understaffed system itself. After all, when it comes to subjugating children, breaking their will and making their lives miserable, I’m sure the people whose policy it is to do just that hate competition!
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