FEAR - An Encounter with School Bullying

Navigating school is difficult enough without the added burden of dealing with school bullies and mean teenagers. When I speak with many people, there is a huge number who have had traumatic experiences during school, both men and women.

For many years I couldn't understand why that would be until I came across some John Taylor Gatto books and started researching the education system for my own children. The predominant method of education in the world is the Prussian mimicry system and the elite schools tend toward the previously praised trivium based learning systems. The main difference is, that one system teaches you how to think, the other what to think.

John Taylor Gatto has argued that school is not a natural place for children. source I tend to agree with him in hindsight and after my research now that I am a parent. Children require adult supervision because when left alone they can descend into a Lord of the Flies-esque situation which we seem to now have in our schools.

I don't wish to go further into what the school system is but I will say that this is the perfect environment to create bullying and foster cruelty.

My Own Experiences

I remember my own time in school and the very long school days and how boring most of it was. Often the grouping of children in different classes often didn't make sense and there seemed to be no flexibility or possibility to influence these things.

At school, I was generally a good kid but very immature and often cheeky and this could frequently land me into trouble. It is one of these times that brings back memories that I still think about to this day.

Fear

I was in detention and there were a few others with me too. Even though not being a particularly tough kid and not part of the "in crowd", I still didn't really have any problems with bullying. I had friends and mixed with different groups.

However, this particular detention had a big fear for me. In the detention was a very tough guy and a known bully in the same year as me. Usually, if you stayed out of his way, things would be fine. However, being in detention together brought us closer than I would like to have been.

Luckily, we were not alone in this detention. There were some guys from the year above us. The detention seemed to go on for a long time and although we were being supervised, the bully started being very mean and aggressive to one of the older boys.

I could see he was suffering badly with this. He was being tormented, occasionally hit if I remember rightly and threatened with being beaten up badly after detention. The other boy was rightly very concerned.

Being a very immature and cheeky boy as I was, I clued-up fast on how dangerous the situation could be for my own safety. The bully was not long transferred to our school and I think he was probably expelled from his previous school for some transgression. He was a walking trouble-maker.

Observing and watching this bullying gave me some of the worst fear that I've experienced in a long time and still remember to this day so many years later. It felt awful to see this bullying take place and it looked like this older boy was going to get a beating after school too. I was highly panicked and agitated as the bully was also indicating that he could beat me up too.

I was relieved that the bully was being generally cordial to me, although I needed to carefully watch what I said and did. His main focus was luckily not on me although the risk was still there. For some reason that escapes me, he really wanted to beat up the older boy who was squirming very badly.

During our detention, I was trying to get hints on which way they would go home so that I could plan my route home undisturbed. I figured while he was beating the older boy up, I would walk very quickly out of sight (as it was late and all kids and teachers would have left the school already) and then run like mad so that he couldn't catch up with me.

Guilt

I still feel terrible to this day that I was so relieved that the focus of the bully was not on me, but on this older boy. Even though he was being so mean, it gave me a terrible guilty feeling to have some sort of relief.

Although it was self-preservation and there was no way I could have influenced anything, except to make myself a target instead, I feel bad about it until this day. The fear of getting badly hurt and avoiding this was my main driver.

The Detention Ends

I was allowed to go a little before the other guys and once out of view I made a run for it as fast as I could. I don't think I tried to get home as fast as this in my life.

I could see back in the corner of my eye that the bully was going to lay some punishment on the older boy, for him there would be no escape. He was a nice enough lad the older boy, I wasn't friends with him particularly, but he seemed nice enough and i liked some of the kids in his group.

The next day I was to learn that the bully had indeed dished out some punishment to the older boy. I could see it in his face.

Thanks for reading.

Resources:
Title made in canva with picture source
John Taylor Gatto source