IL BULLISMO - 2

Bullying at school, particularly cyberbullying, is causing increasing concern all over Italy. Today it is reported that the national helpline set up at the beginning of February is receiving, on average, 120 calls a day. These are mostly from concerned families and teachers, with fewer calls from the pupils themselves, which would indicate that those most affected are still reluctant to talk about it or seek help. The majority of incidents seem to be taking place in middle schools and the occurences drop as the students become older.

In such a family orientated society and one in which most young people seem happier at home and more "open" with their parents than their British counterparts, it is surprising that the problem is so widespread. I watched a 12-year-old boy cuddling up to his mother in the hairdresser's today and reflected that most British children of that age would run a mile from such a public display of affection towards their parents, so infra dig would it seem in the eyes of their peers.

Children, of course, have always been capable of great cruelty towards each other and as a teacher I came across many forms of bullying: physical, verbal and that most insidious and literally soul-destroying kind, exclusion bullying. The sort of cyberbullying that goes on now did not exist when I left full-time secondary teaching in 1996 because the internet was fairly new to most of us and mobile phones were in their infancy; most people didn't have access to one and there were no camera phones or digital cameras. Was it inevitable, then, that once the technology became widely available ways of misusing it would be found just as they have with regard to every invention known to man? Sadly and probably, yes. [And I would be the last person to deny mobile phones to children, a dreadful nuisance though they can be in a classroom. In general they can function as safety equipment for children and the advent of texting was a godsend for some profoundly deaf students I later taught.]

The Italian curriculum does not provide the sort of "pastoral" slots that a British school timetable does: secondary school pupils do not have a "form" teacher and so there is no "form period". [I've always been unconvinced of the value of both; in my experience if a child has a problem he / she will not automatically go to their form teacher but to the teacher they get on with best.] There is no weekly PSHE ["personal, social and health education" or whatever it is called now] period, either. This, in a British school, is where the subject of bullying might be tackled in discussion and a perceptive form teacher [for, whatever his / her subject, it is the form teacher who teaches this period] might become aware of some undercurrents here, though, again, so might any teacher worth their salt during any lesson. So whether the introduction of such a slot in the Italian curriculum would help to combat the problem is a moot point as far as I'm concerned.

Perhaps the most hopeful aspect of the figures released today is the decrease in all types of bullying as the children progress through the education system. [I cannot find any definitive information as to whether this is also the case in Britain but what I have read suggests that it is not.] Italian students learn to debate at a much higher level than British children once they leave the middle school and it just may be that the inclusion of philosophy as a discrete element in the curriculum has an effect on their thinking. [Most of my teacher friends here are appalled that the subject is not taught in Britain.] Whatever type of liceo [upper school] a student attends, he / she will have to have read the Italian classics. A country that teaches some of the ideals of classical philosophy and values its own contribution to world literature has, in my opinion, a better chance of solving the bullying problem than one which undervalues and even ignores them. Certainly, workplace bullying is not as prevalent here as in the UK and, although this may be connected with the different lifestyles and rhythms, I like to believe that it is also an indicator of the acquisition of wisdom with age.