Schoolyard bullying has reached a crisis point, but it is not a new problem. At a time when everyone is asking what has gone wrong with our education system, I would like to contribute a few thoughts from the point of view of someone professionally involved in school social work and psychological counseling.
First, I feel that people should rethink whether bullying can be stopped just by replacing a school principal. In the case of the recent incident in Taoyuan, the school principal was clearly to blame for her failure to deal with bullying and then covering it up. However, handling and preventing bullying are not core professional duties for a principal. The crucial point on which the principal made the wrong decision in this case was her failure to put in place a robust and reliable guidance and support system at the school.
What needs to be kept in mind is that a school principal is not suited to playing a major role in preventing bullying. At the same time, a principal should know how to ensure a school has an adequate and competent guidance and support system. A school’s administration should not diminish the role of the guidance office because this results in missed opportunities to deal with a potential bullying crisis.
The social functions of a schools’ guidance and support systems should be strengthened. A school is a place of education where students attend classes to acquire knowledge and skills. At the same time, a school is a social place. It is a miniature society in which teachers and students interact.
School guidance offices, being subordinate to the school administration, usually limit their work to the confines of a school’s campus. Once students walk out of the school gates, some schools turn a blind eye to their behavior. Sometimes this hands-off approach leads to serious problems and these are invariably blamed on under--staffing or a lack of professionalism.
However, is there really a lack of staff, a lack of funding or not enough qualified people? Is the problem really that schools are unwilling to confront and deal with social problems involving their students? The continued occurrence of bullying highlights the educational establishment’s perfunctory attitude to student guidance. The real problem is that education authorities underestimate the social role of schools.
Schools should value the professional role of both teacher and guidance councilors and ensure that they cooperate properly. What I suggest is that schools’ guidance and support systems should be independent from the teaching administration so that they can do their job without unnecessary interference.
Teaching administrations should respect guidance offices for their expertise and schools should support them with sufficient resources. A guidance system can be set up by professional social workers and psychologists working together. Social workers can bring together related social resources, such as the police, medical and social services, to provide social welfare support where it is needed — not just for students, but for their families as well.
These social workers would be able to help in handling all kinds of problems, including disadvantaged families, homes where one or more of the parents are immigrants and prevention and correction of youth crime in the community. Psychologists would be able to provide psychological support to students and the communities in which they live, and help deal with problems -experienced by mentally and physically disabled people, students with learning difficulties and those needing psychological treatment or adjustment.
If independent and professional guidance systems are set up in schools, they can share the responsibilities of student guidance currently borne by teaching staff. Guidance offices could act as bridges and channels of communication between schools and surrounding communities and, as such, could be a force for stability on campus and in the community.
If the person directly in charge of the guidance system was someone other than the principal, then principals would not have to worry about bullying being seen as a schoolyard affair that could influence their schools’ reputation and their own prospects for promotion. In fact, bullying is clearly a social affair.
In consequence, bullying cannot be solved by educational and administrative measures alone. Progress can only be made if the educational establishment opens its doors and lets guidance professionals step in.
Su Yi-chen is a lecturer at Minghsin University of Science and Technology and a licensed psychologist and social worker.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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