|
¡@
The police won¡¦t solve the problem of
bullying
By Allen Houng ¬x¸Î§»
In order to eliminate the problem of schoolyard bullying, Vice Premier Sean Chen
has announced the establishment of an interdepartmental anti-bullying platform
that will implement a plan to prevent such incidents, while Minister of
Education Wu Ching-ji (§d²M°ò) has pledged that he will treat schoolyard bullying
in the same way as SARS and aims to mobilize the entire nation.
The Ministry of Education has also broached the idea of letting the police onto
school campuses and military instructors back into junior high schools.
These schoolyard ¡§bad elements¡¨ are young people, not even 16 years old, who for
various reasons have developed deviant behavior. They bully and hurt their
fellow students, and are guilty of many other wrongdoings.
However, schools are not military barracks, nor are they police stations; they
are educational institutions and it is part of their duties to educate these
young people that government officials perceive to be bad elements.
The current wave of reports about school bullying has angered the general public
and caused a cascade of complaints. In response, all that the government¡¦s
educational bureaucrats can come up with is to let police onto school campuses
and military instructors back into junior high schools.
It is clear that in the minds of education ministry officials, the police and
military instructors are more capable of solving the bullying problem and are
better positioned to educate these bad elements.
This makes one wonder why we need an education ministry. How can the minister of
education even think that he can simply pass his troubles on to the police and
the military?
What it comes down to is that bullying is an educational problem and the
ministry cannot pass this problem on to the military, police or the judicial
system.
We cannot give up on any child and the ministry should propose an effective
educational solution instead of trying to come up with programs to deal with
criminals.
Also, the Cabinet should not just put on a show with a ¡§platform¡¨ that only aims
to gloss over things to placate the public, but accomplishes nothing.
What is even worse is that they now want to let large numbers of police and
military into school grounds.
Educational problems should be solved with educational means. The education
ministry has no idea how it should deal with the bullying problem and the main
reason is the attitude of the ministry¡¦s officials.
You don¡¦t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that junior high school
students are emotionally unstable. We cannot only focus on knowledge and
learning, we also have to focus on personal development.
To be able to care for the personal development of junior high school students,
schools need sufficient psychological counselors and social workers.
My personal experience of junior high school students in the US shows that there
is one psychological counselor for approximately every 200 students.
If the education ministry doesn¡¦t want to face up to the fact that there is a
major shortage of psychological counselors and social workers at our schools,
they mights as well set up an anti-terrorist department and install permanent
anti-crime and anti-terrorist teams at every school and be done with it.
Allen Houng is a professor at National Yang-Ming University¡¦s
Institute of Philosophy of Mind and Cognition.
¡@
|
