Bullying the English Language

A recent op-ed piece in the New York Times laments a growing tendency to “define bullying down.” Now that the bureaucrats and ideologists have twigged to the emotional force of the word “bully,” they are overusing and effectively redefining it out of all meaning. Just as they did before with terms like “abuse,” or “peace,” or “rape.” For rape, they got to the point of claiming that all heterosexual sex was and is rape; similarly, anything a woman does not like is now “abuse.” This rhetorical lying has two unfortunate effects: first, it promotes an extreme form of discrimination, in which innocents can be tagged with words like “bully” or “abuser” or “rapist,” and thereby stripped of all humanity. Second, in the longer term, it obscures and trivializes the original offense, ultimately enabling and promoting rape, bullying, and abuse. While the innocent are punished, the guilty are exonerated.

Helpfully, the article offers a proper definition for “bullying”: “physical or verbal abuse, repeated over time, and involving a power imbalance.” Now let’s take out the already corrupted term “abuse,” and make that “intentional cruelty, repeated over time, and involving a power imbalance.” We should keep that definition always in memory as a touchstone.

Yeah. That ought to do it.

Now, given that definition, where do we need to look to reduce or eliminate bullying in the contemporary public school? Obviously, wherever there is the greatest power imbalance. Not, then, among students of the same age group. Quite possibly older students with younger students. But more obviously, among teachers. The entire school is organized to ensure the power of adult teachers over children. That’s fine, but there is an obvious opportunity, as a result, for bullying.

Worse, the obvious opportunity for bullying that is present at any school will necessarily attract bullies to the profession. And we have developed no formal mechanism to keep them out. Born bullies, once in the schools, are likely in turn to migrate into administration, where bullying chances are even greater, so school and school board administrations cannot be trusted to monitor and battle the problem. Quite the reverse; they can be counted on to support and promote it. There is a reason why office politics in the education field seem worse than anywhere else.

Of course, the prevalence of bullying among teachers and administrators, in turn, rubs off on the kids. If there is one clear lesson taught by the educational system, it is how to bully.

It is unsettling, then, that all the attention, in the current anti-bullying frenzy, has been on giving teachers greater power in order to stop the bullying of kids by kids. This is more likely to increase than to decrease bullying in the schools, since it increases the power imbalance and gives potential bullies access to a new and powerful form of cruelty: branding young children as “bullies.”

They are sure to grab for it, just as teachers have recently embraced opportunities to stigmatize young children as violent for such grave offenses as pointing fingers and saying “bang,” or blowing bubble with something shaped like a gun, or biting their sandwich into the shape of a gun, and so on.

It’s going to get ugly.