We’ve already talked about school and how we can change it in the past. But today I want to discuss a specific topic related to school: bullying.
As a neurodivergent person, I’ve had my own share of bullies pick on me in the past, two of which I was lucky not to get into physical fights with. There are so, so many people who have had even worse experiences with bullying.
In school, children/adolescents pretty much have to be around each other, making it more difficult to deal with bullying.
How can socialism deal with this issue?
While socialism does have any specific doctrine for dealing with bullying, a lot of bullying stems from reactionary sentiments and ideas e.g. racism, ableism, classism etc., so by fighting those you’d be naturally fighting the causes of bullying. Social Darwinistic modes of thinking are fundamentally incompatible with socialism/communism.
Yeah, as a neurodivergent person too, I also faced bullying and it was fucking horrible.
I can see bullying still being an issue on the first generation of people living in a socialist society, but as the individualistic ideology starts fading in favor of a more collective one, it will probably become much less of an issue.
That being said, it’s probably a good idea for said society to actually teach people how to be parents, teach professionals how to deal with bullying at school, etc. I always found weird how school never teaches kids this stuff in my country. If we learned at some point in the educational system how to parent, it would probably lead to a much healthier family relationships in general on society.
There’s also other stuff that can and should be done, like teaching about neurodivergent people, about limits, respect, empathy, etc.
One thing is for certain tho, I cannot see bullying stopping under capitalism.
CW: bullying case that lead to death
Just recently a 13 year old autistic boy died from health complications after being physically bullied in a school in the state of São Paulo here in Brasil and not receiving the proper medical care after being dismissed multiple times by medical professionals that only prescribed some medication. There are videos of the kid crying in pain and having difficulty breathing. This case is utterly fucking revolting and shows how deep bullying is ingrained in our society, specially since the school knew and did absolutely nothing, there are reports of parents contacting the directors on multiple occasions about bullying happening in that school, and nothing ever happened. The toilet he was beaten in was called “the toilet of death” for fuck’s sake.
I don’t see this as a question about socialism so much, and if it were then I’d say it lacks specificity. It’s a question about a hypothetical socialism in an unspecified society with unspecified history & material conditions. You could look into how existing AES’s deal with it, but again I don’t see this as a socialism-specific thing, and what past & present AESes did won’t necessarily translate directly. It might be up to the concrete—not abstract—proletariat, through democratic centralism, to decide how to deal with it, hopefully with input from specialists in child education and child psychology.
The main reason why some children are bullies has to do with the prevalence of abusive parents, usually. So to fight against this trend is to implement collective day care which would have professionals taking care of children for the large part of their early life instead of parents who are not trained to do so.