A Principal Reflects on Shame and School Bullying

It is the business of the school environment to eliminate, so far as possible, the unworthy features of the existing social environment from influence upon mental habitudes. It establishes a purified medium of action. Selection aims not only at simplifying but at weeding out what is undesirable. Every society gets encumbered with what is trivial, with dead wood from the past and with what is positively perverse. The school has the duty of omitting such things from the environment which it supplies, and thereby doing what it can do to counteract their influence in the ordinary social environment. [John Dewey, 1916/1944, p. 20]

“We may not be able to stop all the evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another is entirely up to us.” [A high school student]

Educators in schools are always trying to balance the needs of the individual with the needs of the group. Creating a profound sense of community as a foundation for students to learn about the world and learn about themselves is an essential goal of any good education. Understanding the tensions between the sometimes conflicting and sometimes complimentary needs of the person and the public, the self and society calls on school leaders and classroom teachers to appreciate how culture influences individual behavior and how individual behavior, in turn, influences culture.

When problems arise in schools, and they inevitably do, it is important for leaders to be able to understand and have the analytic, social, and psychological skills to address the loving and hateful feelings people bring with them into school each day. A worldview that can take into account the relationship between the broader dynamics of social systems and structures and the feelings and meanings that are evoked in the people who are living in relationship to those specific systems and structures, can provide a lifeline of support for vital institutional strategic thinking and action. This worldview is i