Reflections on bullying
Your timely editorial commenting on the recent incredible campus bullying cases, as well as feasible policies to be adopted to prevent bullying, serves as a wake-up call for education policymakers, teachers and parents (“Bullies must face the consequences,” Dec. 27, page 8).
Education provides the process of personal development and forming of the general value system. In this entire process, parents, teachers, educational policymakers and social workers jointly influence the shaping of students.
However, the recent news about bullying at Taoyuan’s Bade Junior High School was alarming to our society. The bullying problems of the teenagers reflect the abnormal development of our educational system, creating a formidable dilemma for our current system.
According to the theory of “broken windows,” if bullying on campus is not stopped, it could develop into more serious incidents and on a larger scale.
To stop the bullying incidents on campus, each school should establish a prevention mechanism to let the students know about the rules of law and develop the correct ethics and moral consensus at the same time.
Second, family education is very important. Parents should restrain their children from improper activities and they have to be more concerned about their children. If all parents can do that, schoolyard bullying will not occur so frequently.
It takes the joint efforts of teachers, parents and the whole society to raise our young as decent people.
MARTIN SHIHSPAN
Taipei
Having read much about the issue of bullying in schools in Taiwan — and witnessing my own child go through such a horrible experience — I cannot help but disagree with most or even all the commentaries given by many well-meaning people. For me, a large part in answering the riddle and remedy of bullying is simple. Bear with me.
Former British prime minister Sir Winston Churchill once said, “You can judge a country by the way it treats its prisoners.”
In the context of bullying, I would like to add to this quote: “... and by the way it treats its stray animals.”
That’s right.
In other words, if a person could be taught empathy, there would not be so many stray animals or bullies in Taiwan. In another analogy, look westward across the Strait. What do you see? You see an entity that has no empathy, let alone sympathy, for Taiwan — a classic example of a “bully.” It bullies Taiwan at every corner, classroom, board meeting, film festival, gymnasium, what have you.
Teach empathy. How? One way is to have a live pet in a classroom where pairs of students, preferably in a girl-boy ratio, take weekly turns in the caring and raising of such. At the end of the year, there could be a competition against other classrooms to see who has the biggest, fastest, cutest, most loveable pet, in their class. There should also be lively debate in classrooms about ideas such as sympathy, empathy and equality, as well as gender biases in the media, et al.
Does the Chinese language differentiate between the two words “sympathy” and “empathy?” If so, then in what way? Can elementary school students in Taiwan give instances where they were either sympathetic or empathetic to a cause?
KEVIN R. LARSON
Chiayi City
‘True’ symbol for the ROC
Dan Bloom’s intentions are good, but he should know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions (Letters, Jan. 1, page 8).
Bloom wonders, for example, how “an open and multicultural spirit” can be spotlighted on a logo that is the “logo of just one political party.” Well, this is experienced all the time in democratic societies where, at any given point in time, only one political party rules.
The real question is: Do we want an open and multicultural spirit pervading our nation? We certainly do not need the oppression we get from communist regimes that tell the people how to act and think. On the other hand, open societies corrupt the people by allowing various perversions like homosexuality, contraception, pornography, divorce, abortion and the like.
What we really need to mark the nation’s anniversary this year is a logo that symbolizes objective morality, ie, morality which is “true” for every man, woman and child regardless of one’s hedonistic tendencies. I move that we instill the Cross of Christ on the logo.
NICOLAI TAMAROV
Belfast, Northern Ireland
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