Government panel on educational reform releases a list of proposals to combat bullying

Mainichi Shinbun and Japan Today have posted articles on a a list of anti-bullying proposals released today by a government panel. Let’s take a look at the proposals mentioned in the article:

-Clarify the standards for warning and punishing children who bully schoolmates. Seems reasonable, but how exactly are bullies supposed to be punished? In most schools, teachers simply have no means of punishing students: there is no detention, there is no option to send an unruly student/bully to “the office,” suspension does not exist, and physically beating some sense into the bully is obviously out of the question. So I guess they can keep warning bullies over and over, with no actual means of punishing them?

-Convince children that those who turn a blind eye to bullying are also perpetrators. An interesting idea, but how can they seriously expect students in the silent majority to stand up and oppose bullies? They would only make themselves targets for bullying, and as we already know, teachers have no effective means of actually punishing bullies when such a thing happens.

-Teachers who turn a blind eye, spur or get involved in schoolyard bullying should be subject to disciplinary measures. It is simply amazing that a panel had to meet to decide such a thing. You mean to say that teachers who actively bully students should be subject to some sort of punishment?! No way! In the case of turning a blind eye, teachers will simply be able to claim they honestly did not notice the bullying, which should keep such teachers safe.

-’The proposal emphasized that “schools that solve bullying problems are excellent schools,” thereby warning teachers against covering up such incidents.‘ I would think this would have the opposite effect. If schools with no bullying problems are to be viewed as excellent schools, won’t that encourage schools to continue their practice of covering up bullying and avoiding the use of the term “bullying” when talking about problems? If a school honestly reports that it has a bullying problem, it would reflect badly on the school and it’s teachers. I suspect a huge number of schools will continue to not report bullying, since such an action only receives media attention when a student commits suicide, and in most cases bullied students put up with their situation and live on in misery.

-The panel said that schools could make bullies engage in social service activities and study separate classrooms. This appears to be the closest thing to a useful suggestion the panel made. It seems like a good idea to isolate the bullies from their peers, which could humiliate them and encourage them to straighten up their act. Will teachers actually stand up to the bullies and force them into “special” classes? I expect that such a measure would only be employed in the most extreme cases of bullying.

-The panel, however, has dropped the idea of suspending bullies from school, saying that no student should be excluded from an education. I suppose that, as an American, I simply don’t “get” the Japanese ideal of not excluding any student from an “education.” From my own personal experience as an assistant teacher, I can say that unruly students and bullies seem to spend a considerable amount of their class time disrupting the education of the majority of students through their bullying and general “assholery.” Is it unreasonable to conclude that current system, in which “good” students go to private cram schools most nights of the week, is partially due to the fact that their daytime schools cannot provide them with a proper education because the sad state of discipline in this country has made many classrooms more like the Los Angeles of “Escape from LA,” than a safe place of learning?

-The panel called on schoolteachers, boards of education and parents of schoolchildren to cooperate closely in eliminating schoolyard bullying, and recommended that education boards set up teams to support schools’ efforts to prevent bullying. Yes, we need more bureaucratic action to solve bullying, more meetings and panels. How about some actual results?

-Schools and education boards should notify the parents of schoolchildren that students are allowed to move to another school to avoid schoolyard bullying. Wow, sounds like a solution to me! Thanks, education reform panel! I never thought of that one!

I’m not going to claim that I have all the answers to the bullying issue. This is clearly a very complicated problem, and bullying cannot simply be eliminated by stricter anti-bullying measures in schools. However, I do think that Japanese schools could certainly improve the situation by borrowing a few tricks from foreign countries. A few big ones are:

-the ability to give after school/recess detention
-a system in which teachers could immediately send unruly students to a detention room during class
-the ability to suspend/expel students

Teaching in Japan has taught me to appreciate the “zero-tolerance” disciplinary system in place in many American schools, in which students are dealt harsh punishments for even the slightest bullying/harassment-related offenses. It might be a bit extreme to adopt the same system in Japan, but somebody needs to start dealing out strict punishments to unruly students and bullies. The old system in which Japanese teachesers were allowed to deal out corporal punishment might even be superior to the current situation…