Homeschool News & Views
Issue 4, Bullying and Banana-ing

Greetings.  This is Dan White with Homeschool Helpers.

This week there was another school shooting.  An 18 year old boy shot
three times at close range and killed a 17 year old boy in a hallway of
a high school in Tacoma, Washington.  The 17 year old boy was the father
of a boy himself, an 18 month old by his 16 year old girlfriend.

There are many more of these school shootings than we realize, and they
have become way too common.  Of course, just one is too many, but these
school shootings are reported now as “another school shooting.”

This causes a number of parents to consider homeschooling their
children, not out of a duty to God but just for safety reasons.

The fact is that humans act differently when they are in a crowd.
Gustave Le Bon wrote one of the most famous books in sociology, titled
The Crowd.  He said that “by the mere fact that he forms part of an
organised crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of
civilization. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd he
is a barbarian.”

LeBon thought that because the individual members of the crowd become
submerged within the crowd, they develop a sense of anonymity and lose
their sense of responsibility.

That is generally accepted as a valid principle of human behavior.  We
can recall a crowd which had the chance to free a man who had never done
anything wrong in his life, whom they had seen heal a number of people,
and they had heard that He had even brought one man back to life.  Yet
when they had the chance to free him, instead they yelled for him to be
executed.  Pilate asked them, “Why?  What’s he done?”  Then they
hollered all the more, “Crucify Him!  Crucify Him!” like a bunch of dogs
in a pack, as they were stirred up by the leaders of Judaism.

Big schools are crowds.  They may not be mobs, but they are crowds.
Over the past decades there has been a strong movement to bigger and
bigger schools, because those schools supposedly give a better education
than smaller schools.  These bigger schools are more expensive and have
more expensive equipment in them.  Of course, they have a greater number
of students who have to share those facilities and equipment.

The web site whatkidscando.org, speaking of small schools versus big
schools says that often students “languish in teachers’ peripheral
vision, victims of anonymity and low expectations. For them, high school
becomes a time and place where they lose rather than sharpen a sense of
purpose, where too many give up and drop out.

It’s not that teachers don’t care; the numbers tell the story. Seventy
percent of today’s students attend schools with more than 1,000
students. In large urban districts, where the majority of students are
poor, enrollments of 2,000 and 3,000 are commonplace. Between 1940 and
1990, the average school size multiplied fivefold.

From such bleak statistics sprang the current educational campaign to
break large high schools into smaller units, such as
“schools-within-schools” or academies based on special themes or
approaches like technology, the arts, and service-learning. The idea is
that in scaled-down, more manageable settings, teachers are better able
to create personalized learning environments, those that more easily
inspire and support all students to do their best work.

This drive for small schools is backed by research remarkably
unequivocal in its findings. More than 100 studies conducted in the past
12 years show that in schools with fewer than 600 youngsters, students
do better. They drop out less and attend more. On college-related
measures—entrance exams, acceptance rates, grade point average—students
from small high schools match or exceed those from large ones. Small
schools also report greater student participation in extracurricular
activities and fewer problems with discipline, gangs, and teenage
pregnancy. Parent-teacher relationships are closer in small schools,
too.”

Let’s see now.  The government educational bureaucracy has spent the
last six decades moving kids into larger schools so they would “get a
better education.”  The premise was that bigger, more expensive schools
give a better education than smaller, less expensive schools.  Now that
they have all these bigger schools they are beginning to break them down
into smaller schools within the bigger schools, so that they students
will get a better education.

I bet that will cost a lot more money, too, don’t you?

Back in the 1950’s, I began school in a two room school in a coal camp
in West Virginia.  It was a brand new two room school, which had just
been built to replace the old two room school which my brother had
attended.  The new two room school had a bathroom.

I had to walk about a couple hundred yards to get to that school from my
house.  It took me a few minutes and I walked home for lunch every day,
except when the school had a hot dog sale to raise money for the PTA.
For the upper six grades, I had to take the school bus to a three story
school two miles away.  Later that school was torn down and a new one
built about a mile farther on.  Later, way after my time, most of the
high schools in the whole county were consolidated into one big school,
out in the country in a central location, and wasn’t really close to
anybody.  Now the students who live where I lived have an hour bus ride
to and from school every day.

I have heard of some kids who have a two hour bus ride to and from
school every day.  Just that bus ride is far more time than they will
spend each day doing things with their parents.

All around the country, the schools have been consolidated into bigger
schools.  Bigger schools make crowds.  These crowds make the students
act worse than they would otherwise.

People, kids included, have human nature wherever they are.  But some
settings concentrate and multiply that human nature.  Cities do that.
Crowded housing projects do that.  Big schools do that.

The simple logistical fact is that it’s hard to closely watch hundreds
and thousands of students in a school, especially when the students
don’t want to be watched and when the teachers don’t really want to
bother.  So the big schools create the situation where the students
naturally act worse and where they are harder to supervise.

Of course, most schools never have shootings.  That extreme violence,
although we hear about it a lot, does not actually reach most public
schools.  What all these schools do have, though, is bullying.

It is so common now that it is often discussed on TV programs.  Bullying
undoubtedly has led to some of the school shootings, where a kid just
got tired of being picked on.  I saw an article in the local Springfield
newspaper about a seminar being held to teach students how to handle
bullying.  A teacher/counselor was giving all this enlightened
information to the young kids about what they should do when somebody is
bullying them at school.

I was immediately struck by how stupid that is.  The ed bureaucracy sets
up this system which has gotten out of control and has mini-thugs
patrolling the halls of schools all over America, then they ask the kids
to handle the bullying problem.

Here are some points from the web site of Education World about
bullying.

1.  Almost all bullying occurs at school.

Aha!  That might tell a parent right there what to do about the bullying
problem in the government schools.  Don’t go.  That’s like the drug
problem.  If you don’t want your kids exposed to the drug culture, don’t
send them to the public schools.  If you don’t want your youngsters to
be bullied, don’t send them to the public schools.  Almost all bullying
occurs at the public schools.

2. Large numbers of public school students are affected by bullying.

The US Center for Disease Control says that 36% of high school students
have been in a fight in the previous twelve months.  That sounds
awfully, awfully high.  They are saying that a third of the students
have been in a fight in the last year, and I just have trouble believing
that stat.  I know that when I went through school, I only got into a
fight in the third grade.  And that girl never ever bothered me again.

Regardless of that statistic, I can believe that the schools have gotten
much more violent.  And I do know there is a lot of talk now about
bullying in the schools.  Somebody’s persecuting somebody.  

There are a lot of angry young people out there, understandably so.  I
used to run basketball games for a little Christian school.  We had
about ten middle school boys playing ball, and every year we always had
one or two who just got mad every time they played ball with us.  They
didn’t get fouled or anything any more than the other boys did, but
every week they would up fuming over something.  After some time I
realized that the fumers had lost their fathers.  They were from busted
families, and they were mad inside, and it came out during the stress of
a ball game.

America now has more busted families than together families.  The big
schools are full of these troubled kids.  You might say that the schools
did not create that problem, but really they did, by the Godless
approach to teaching which they have been following for a half century
now, which has helped tear down the American family.  These angry, hurt
young people need particular individual attention, and instead they get
thrown into a crowd in a big government institution.

3.   Many students skip school sometimes because of bullying.

Of course.  Why would you want to go where you’re going to get beat on?

4.  Most bullying is out of sight of the teachers, and most bullying
does not get reported to the teachers, because of fear of the bullies.

The institution is too big to be properly supervised.  It is like a
Nimrod system.  The name Nimrod means rebel, and by his physical power
he became the first emperor after the flood, controlling the lives of
others.  In a Godless society, the meanest and most daring tend to have
the most influence.  Kids are not going to tell the teachers about
bullies today when those bullies will knock their heads tomorrow.

The big institutional setting of the schools is the opposite of this
Bible passage:
Isa 30:19-21, World English Bible
(19)  For the people will dwell in Zion at Jerusalem. You will weep no
more. He will surely be gracious to you at the voice of your cry. When
he hears you, he will answer you.
(20)  Though the Lord may give you the bread of adversity and the water
of affliction, yet your teachers won't be hidden anymore, but your eyes
will see your teachers;
(21)  and when you turn to the right hand, and when you turn to the
left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, "This is the way.
Walk in it."

In most government schools, the teachers are hidden, and no one hears
those who cry inside.

5.  Incidents of school violence are increasing.

You bet they are.

Going back to that meeting which was held for the students in
Springfield, where the educators were telling the students what to do
about bullying -- What should the students do about bullying?  Well,
they shouldn’t have to do anything about bullying.  They’re kids.  They
should feel safe.  They should be safe.

How can you learn history when you’re in danger of being history?

Bullying is not a prevailing problem among Christian home schools.  My
wife did stick a peeled banana into my forehead once, but she was
pregnant at the time and very bored, so that doesn’t count as bullying.
That’s banana-ing.

Let’s compare public school bullying to the home school behavior I have
noticed over the past three years.

Walk with me into homeschool coop classes, in a church and gym on a
Thursday.  Over a hundred young people are in this gym, and in rooms
upstairs, and in rooms in the basement of the main church building.
They are spread out in many different classes, ranging from physical
education to clowning.  The classes are taught by the parents, the whole
system is organized by the parents, and it is all controlled by the
parents.  There are no drop off kids.  Every student who is present must
have a parent who is present.

Looking at this maze of young people, as I often do on Thursdays, always
amazes me.  It is good.

The students are orderly.  They are active and energetic, but orderly.
Wait a minute – let me change that.  They are not just orderly.  They
are respectful, courteous, warm and friendly.  There is no cool school
snarl on their lips, no haughty look of disdain in their eyes. The
girls' midriffs are hidden somewhere behind their clothes, and the boys'
hair does not stick up in purple spikes.

This is a Christian home school group.  It is the most well behaved
group of young people I have ever seen.  I have seen a lot of youth
groups over the years, but those young people, even though birthed by
Christian parents, were raised by an anti-Christian government school
system.  And it always shows.

For some time now, we have put on a Monday night get together for these
Christian home school young folks.  Being young, they have a lot of
energy, so we play energetic games, such as volleyball, basketball, and
even Frisbee football.  This has the potential for attitudes to get out
of control, but in several years of doing this we have never had one
problem.  That is almost unheard of, with dozens of young people playing
their hardest, yet still being considerate of others and respectful of
all.

This is the top of the mountain in education.  Christian home schooling
is as good as it gets.  I have seen the results, and the fruits are
wonderful.  This is how God intended families to be.

This is Dan White with Homeschool Helpers.  God bless the Christian
homeschoolers