Catholic Schools Week

As a product of 17 years of Catholic schooling, this article caught my interest. It's basically what the Catholic church, in its very mission, should do to dissuade bullying.

Catholic schools are charged with creating conditions and fostering values that lead to the full intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual development of every child.  This demands creating safe communities that protect girls from indirect, covert forms of aggression that prey on their insecurities (and make them more insecure) and teaching values that are currently countercultural, particularly among teenage girls.

One remedy:

A second step might be confronting the adolescent obsession with popularity.  Simmons notes that “popularity changes girls, causes a great many of them to lie and cheat and steal.  They lie to be accepted, cheat their friends by using them, steal people’s secrets to resell at a higher social price.”  This race for popularity is “as dangerous an issue for girls as weight, appearance, or sexuality.”  A key step is to build authentic community in the classroom, something for which Catholic schools should be particularly well-suited.  Catholic classrooms should seek to build a family-like environment where caring about others is a shared norm, even if students will not always be able to live up to that standard.  Not everyone will be best friends with everyone else, but in this type of environment, friendships will be more likely to have a foundation in compatibility rather than being the product of social ambitions.

There needs to be a constant emphasis that the only close friends worth having are ones around whom each girl can be herself and who share her inclination to keep it real.  By developing real relationships, instead of ones where they use others or are used instrumentally, girls can see the benefits of friendship and trust, instead of losing their ability to trust those close them. 

It should be stressed that Catholicism contains the important message that each person’s worth is innate, rooted in the fact that each person is made in the image of God, entirely unique and infinitely valuable.  This is a hard concept to grasp, but if this message is taught, constantly reinforced, and seen to shape the behavior of teachers, administrators, and others, girls will be able to increasingly disconnect their sense of self-worth from their popularity or coolness.  Given the type of behavior that is inspired by the quest to be cool or popular, this is a very worthy goal.

Now I applaud these concepts. I really do. But I don't think Catholic schools do an innately better job of addressing these issues. They can emphasize a commitment to dignity and love for others, but it all starts at home. If anything, parents need to be educated in this respect. Adolescent popularity contests extend to the generation beforehand, and values like respect, honor, and generosity aren't going to be extended to others if superficiality, cheating, lying, and disrespect are what is exhibited at home. And it is more than that-it is genuine concern about the day, genuine interest so parents know their children are not cheating  on homework, know who their children's friends are, and recognize when those friends disappear due to adolescent cruelty.

It is a tough subject, and angst of these years will exist regardless of what one attempts to remedy it. But the Catholic Church can only do so much, and really, not very much at all. At least it did not in my experience.