Jay Kuten: Backward ideas promote bullying

A few weeks ago, Alan Davidson, the erstwhile Act Party candidate, published an opinion piece on bullying.
He was a guest here and custom dictates that guests are accorded wide latitude and are to be treated with kindness.
As he's a politician those rules don't necessarily apply. Certainly if one were to judge any Act member by the light of his party it's easy to see where they want to lead us. Back to the 19th century is where, where every man knew his place and stood there, cap in hand, head bowed while the gentry rode by in their finery. And women and children knew better than to disobey or to speak up, or to say, "Please sir, may I have another?"
Throughout Mr Davidson's piece is the reek of nostalgia, a yearning for that lost time - a time that never was - when there was order and moral clarity.
The Davidson essay is mainly a defence of corporal punishment. His claim is that the abolition of corporal punishment resulted in "a rapid increase in disruption and low-level disobedience; and then smaller class sizes, dumbing down, illiteracy, truancy, gangs, violence, vandalism, expulsions, juvenile crime, bullying, thuggery, hand wringing, and all kinds of unhappiness".
That is a breath-taking generalisation. It's one that would be very hard to prove, easy enough to counter. It could only mean that taking away from teachers the option of their becoming bullies and laying on the rod when displeased was historically tantamount to the Expulsion From The Garden of Eden.
But countering would require introduction of fact and that, according to his essay, would displease Mr Davidson as he disdains "research".
There are ideologues here and elsewhere for whom research, which is the collection of evidence - data upon which a conclusion or judgment can be made - is deemed unnecessary and an interference with their progress towards their authoritarian goals. Strangely enough this is where the far right and far left agree: Don't confuse me with fact, I've made up my mind.
For the rest of us, still with hope of solving today's problems with the best that we know, there is evidence from peer reviewed research that can be brought to bear on the problem of bullying and its surrounding issues and effects.
Bullying is part of a constellation of problems that also include child abuse, spousal violence and a class of personality disorders. The common thread is deficiency in empathy.
Part of the problem with the eye for an eye approach is that it fails the fundamental utilitarian test: it teaches nothing except the blinkered backward notion that might always makes right.
Instead we can take a preventive approach, one that actually enhances coping skills. For example, 20 years ago in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the students at Rindge-Latin were increasingly fighting. It was at a time when school violence was widespread; some schools had introduced metal detectors and some schools required permanent police presence.
The Rindge-Latin administration tried something different. Ten students were selected, five by the faculty, five by their peers. The students were given basic training in negotiation skills and in faculty-peer pairs set out to mediate conflict before it escalated to violence.
The rules they were taught were simple but elegant: You can't interrupt; you can't call names; and you have to want to solve the problem.
Before the system had a chance to be tried, a local columnist from a right-wing tabloid ridiculed the idea. She wrote: "These kids ought to be learning facts, like the capital of Arizona, not wasting taxpayers' money on 'negotiation'." The answer, of course, is that my computer can tell me the capital of Arizona but negotiation is a human skill, applicable everywhere. And you can try it at home.
P.S. The experiment worked and the kids at Rindge-Latin did not need policing. And contrary to Mr Davidson, in the absence of the rod, Western Civilisation did not crumble.