Bullying in schools – what is bullying?
Prof Rahmat Karim Baig
People of my age – over seventy – who had the opportunity to attend schools of their time know and may give far better instances of their experiences about the school years.
The classroom conditions were very different. I call it different but most of my friends may use the word ‘poor’ for that small scale facility that we enjoyed besides the baton charges of the teacher. That baton was called ‘Maula Bux’ and was used validly as well as invalidly which scared the kids to play truant and got struck off the rolls.
Use of the stick in a normal or human way could by justified by many critics but human activists cannot tolerate it and come out in protest and the teacher has to face a number of punishments under the present education policy.
The word bullying has come from bull or what they call in stock exchange as ‘bullish’ for a better competitive trend in the SM but in education psychology it is used for certain bullish students who intimidate smaller and weaker students in the classroom or in the school to get things of value or money. They are the ones who are aggressive by nature and perhaps have abnormal family life which leads them to adopt intimidating manners and find students around them to express their feelings by using threats to fulfill their internal dissatisfaction.
They do many negative activities but behave badly with weaker students. They get money from them and in case of resistance they use tricks and get their demands accepted by their victims. The weaker students often get frightened due to the presence of the bullies. Some tell their dilemma to their teachers or parents but some fail to disclose their predicament and fall in the grip of the bullies which may lead to distraction and disinterest in their studies.
The teacher has to be very friendly with the weaker students and must ask about their problems. They should also keep watchful eyes on the aggressive students. In class rooms there is always a class monitor who is responsible to be a supervisor and point out the naughtier students to the teacher and note event of such nature and be helpful to the weaker students. When we were in village schools the number of students in each class used to be a small one and was easier to oversee the bullish nature of such students but now the number of students in each class is high and it is not very easy to identify the aggressive students.
The classroom atmosphere should be friendly under the teacher and the weaker students must be given more attention. The parents of such weaker students also must keep liaison with the class teacher or the head teacher to save their kids from students of bullish nature. The presence of inefficient but aggressive students must be identified by the teacher in each class and counseling must be held in the meeting of the teachers. Education is not just imparting information to the students but should also contribute to character building.
important post, yes bulling is a serious issue in the school system of both East and West, urban and rural equally. The teacher of today should be aware of these kinds of issues. In our time moula bakhsh was the major source for a teacher in Chitral to control the behavior of a student – right or wrong, regardless the teachers of today are equipped with modern methods to cope with them