Photo Credit: New York University Press
June 13, 2013
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The following is an excerpt from Jessie Klein's new book "The Bully Society: School Shootings and the Crisis of Bullying in America's Schools," (New York University Press, 2013).
Schools
are microcosms of American society where students are told that
financial wealth and superficial gender markers are compulsory for
social acceptance. They learn these lessons from each other but also
from grown-ups—parents, teachers, and the wider culture they inhabit.
As they prepare to enter the adult workforce and social life, children
come to understand that being perceived as the richest or prettiest, or
the most powerful or confident, could dramatically enhance their
futures—and that without these marks of American success they may
become lifelong outcasts. They also learn to see life as a zero-sum
game, where they can win only if someone else loses, rise only by
ensuring that someone else falls. These values are at the core of
bullying behavior, and they are also the foundation upon which much of
the economic, political, and social life of our nation is built.
Not
all cultures are so obsessively focused on winning. In the Southwest,
for instance, coaches say that teams of Hopi Indians want to win but
that they often try not to win because they don’t want to embarrass
their opponents. In some traditional cultures, the game isn’t over until
the two sides are tied. They work hard to make sure no one loses. Even
in Europe, as T. R. Reid writes in “The European Social Model,” some
core human needs are seen as everyone’s birthright rather than as
something to be “won” through competition with one’s compatriots. “To
Americans,” Reid writes, “it is simply a matter of common sense that
rich families get better medical care and education than the poor; the
rich can afford the doctors at the fancy clinics and the tutors to get
their kids into Harvard. But this piece of common sense does not apply
in most of Europe. The corporate executive in the back seat of the limo,
her chauffeur up front, and the guy who pumps the gas for them all go
to the same doctor and the same hospitals and send their children to
the same (largely free) universities.”
In the United States,
however, hardcore competition and striving to be the best are generally
considered vital to keeping people motivated and functioning at optimal
levels. Harsh inequalities are considered, at best, an unfortunate
consequence. Yet gender pressures—and especially the expectation to
embrace hypermasculine values and behaviors—are seldom examined in
the context of the larger socioeconomic forces that shape them.
In
one of my criminal justice classes, I asked students to tell me what
words they associated with capitalism. What qualities do you need to
be successful in our society? The board filled up quickly:
competitive, aggressive,and
powerfulwere
some of the first suggestions. At that point, we were discussing
white-collar crime and the unprincipled behavior that had produced both
the Enron scandal and the economic meltdown of recent years. Later in
the course we discussed school shootings and their relationship to
gender, and I asked my students to list some words they associated with
masculinity. The same list emerged—
competitive, aggressive, and
powerful.
Without intending to, my students had highlighted the link between
the values of masculinity and capitalism.The school shooters, for the
most part, grew up in the 1980s or later. The rise in school shootings
roughly coincides with the Reagan administration’s restructuring of the
American economic, political, and cultural landscape—a period that
glorified unrestrained capitalism and reemphasized an “up by your own
bootstraps” ethos. Following a landslide reelection in 1984, Reagan
promised an America rich with freedom, individualism, and financial
reward for those who skillfully met the standard, coupled with a
lower degree of support for those who did not. Increasingly, success
was defined in terms of power, economic attainment, and social
status—the same barometers increasingly used, at the high school level,
to assess masculinity.
Capitalism is hardly new to the United
States, nor is the system’s relationship to core American values. But
as former labor secretary Robert Reich observed in his book
Supercapitalism,
in recent decades the power of unregulated, unrestrained capital has
increased to such an extent that it has outstripped democracy as a
primary foundation of our society. According to Reich, Americans
became identified more as investors and consumers and less as
citizens and members of a community.
Further, in this same
period, a slew of books documenting America’s increasing social problems
hit the shelves. The titles alone explain why Americans are more
stressed, broke, unhappy, and doing whatever they can to survive:
The Overworked American (1993),
The Overspent American(1998),
The Cheating Culture(2000), and
The Lonely American(2009).
Another set of recent titles document the new plagues with which our
children are grappling—increased anxiety, depression, materialism, and
even narcissistic personality diagnosis:
Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers(2004);
The Road to Whatever: Middle-Class Culture and The Crisis of Adolescence(2004);
The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids(2006); and
Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before(2007).
Couple these telling titles with the alarming statistics depicting the
United States as scoring highest on almost all of the worst social
problems in the industrialized world (including murder, rape, and
infant mortality), and it becomes less surprising that school bullying
is so common here, or that its vicious and fatal retaliations in the
form of shootings are more prevalent in the United States than in the
rest of the world combined.
What is a Compassionate Economy?
Competitive
and punishment-oriented schools mirror the combative workforce. In the
larger world, adults are given little support if they meet hard times
and are unable at some point to work at their best, or work at all.
Similarly, as adolescents struggle to find their identities and their
place in the world, the emotional ups and downs of their journey can
undermine academic performance. Even students who tend to do well risk
failure, and their confrontations with widespread cliques and bullying
only add to the stress. Children’s understanding of this antagonistic
culture feeds their fury and fear as they find that their every move
in school so profoundly affects their future prospects.
In his book
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond, Mark Ames writes:
“The
kids are stressed out not only by their own pressure at school, but
by the stress their parents endure in order to earn enough money to
live in [a prestigious] school district. ... Everyone is terrified of
not ‘making it’ in a country where the safety net has been torn to
shreds.”
Children who might otherwise look forward
to a life after high school see, in the model of their parents and the
larger society around them, a similarly brutal environment.
While
their safety nets are weakening as well, in most European countries the
government still takes some responsibility for ensuring that everyone
has basic health care, education, housing, food, child care, elder
care, and even indefinite unemployment if necessary. There are real
limitson work hours (in Finland, for instance, a six-hour workday), and
mandatory paid vacation and holiday time is often four to six weeks.
In
contrast, even before the start of the latest recession, workers in
twentieth-century America were losing some of the gains they had fought
for in the earlier part of that century. The eight-hour day (forty-hour
week) that Americans finally won in 1938, under President Roosevelt’s
New Deal Fair Labor Standards Act, is a dim memory for most Americans
today, who tend to toil more often at fifty to seventy or more hours
per week.
Americans once hoped to achieve the demands made by
the Welsh social reformer Robert Owen for eight hours of work, eight
hours of leisure, and eight hours of sleep, but most now have little if
any leisure and much less sleep. We are working much longer hours than
our counterparts in other industrialized countries. John P. Walsh and
Anne Zacharias-Walsh write in “Working Longer, Living Less” that the
average American works seventy more hours per year than his or her
Japanese counterpart and 350 hours or nine more weeks per year than
Europeans. Americans tend to work more hours and then spend money
paying others to do the services they don’t have time to do because of
they are working.
Because we Americans work so much, it becomes
more difficult to take care of our children and our homes. In many
European countries, the government pays mothers as well as fathers to
stay home with their young children so they can return to work when
the children are older. In the United States, middle-and upper-class
adults make money and often pay other people to do these tasks; many
small children in the United States are under the care of nannies
or some other form of child care worker. Rather than a system
designed to meet human needs, our economy prioritizes profit. Instead
of opportunities to nurture ourselves, and our friends and family, and
larger community, our time is managed by someone else’s drive to make
money. Walsh and Zacharias-Walsh write that “to argue that an
expensive factory should be left idle because workers are tired or that
production should be organized using a less efficient but more
comfortable process—is considered absurd.” Yet the “overworked
American,” to use Juliet Schor’s term, does not necessarily generate
more profit. As Anders Hayden notes,
“Several shorter-hours innovators in Europe—Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Norway—are actually more productive per hourof
labor than is the United States. Higher hourly productivity in these
countries is almost certainly due, in part, to shorter work-time’s
beneficial effects on employee morale, less fatigue and burnout, lower
absenteeism, higher quality of work, and better health.”
European
economies tend to prioritize family and community as a primary value.
The notion of “time affluence,” not just “material affluence,” is
important—a concept that is less common in the United States. Instead,
Americans work longer and live with their family less. Walsh and
Zacharias-Walsh write about one mother of two young children who
summed up this collective quandary: “This is the only job I could
get that paid enough for me to take care of them, but it never lets
me be home when they need me. I can either feed them or be with them,
never both.” The increased workday also prevents participation in
community life—politi- cal organizations, social clubs, sports leagues,
religious institutions—as well as family life, leading to what
Robert Putnam called the “Bowling Alone” phenomenon; other research
also notes a related plummeting of social connections and increased
loneliness and isolation among Americans.
In recent decades,
the U.S. government has taken less responsibility for people’s basic
human needs. Life has become a struggle for many working parents,
especially single working parents. In addition to lacking the
government-supported universal health care that is available to
citizens in virtually all European countries, the United States
does less than any other industrialized country to support parents,
who receive no legally mandated paid leave when a child is born or
adopted. Among the168 nations surveyed in a 2004 Harvard University
study, 163 have paid maternity leave, while the United States stands
in a category with Lesotho, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland.
The
lack of economic support for American citizens means adults are
under more pressure and stress to keep their jobs and succeed in
them in order to support themselves and their families. Driven to
succeed, with dwindling access to community, adults end up forming
similar social cliques to those that fester in children’s schools.
Workplace massacres, then, tend to have causes that parallel those found
in school shootings.
Jessie Klein, PhD, MSW, M.Ed., is the Author of The Bully Society.
She is assistant sociologist/criminal justice professor at Adelphi
University where she specializes in school violence, friendship, and
gender. Her work has appeared in USA Today, Newsday, and The New York Times,
as well as scholarly journals. During her more than twenty years in
education, she also served as a teacher, councelor, guidance
administrator, and social work professor. She lives in New York City.
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