I put quotation marks around “SAFE,” because school safety has three overlapping and perhaps inseparable aspects: physical, emotional, and intellectual.  Most public attention is on physical safety—school shootings, ‘Active Shooter’ drills, arming teachers, ‘hardening’ school entrances to keep shooters out,and so forth–but a ‘fortress mentality’ is insufficient and, from my perspective, harmful.  A school that devotes its energy to keeping all ‘the bad guys’ out without paying sufficient attention to what goes on inside its walls is probably not much more than a prison.

Of the three aspects of safety–physical, emotional, and intellectual–the easiest to address is the last one. In a school that is intellectually safe, it’s cool to be smart, and even cooler to be curious. In these schools no one is embarrassed to say “I don’t understand,” because intellectual safety means it’s OK to admit ignorance and ask for help. What’s discouraged is hiding one’s confusion or ignorance, because curiosity is a great virtue.     

Inside an intellectually safe school, ‘smart’ is not narrowly defined by grades or test scores, and neither is ‘excellence.’  In many schools, the focus is on achievements–doing well at what others expect of you–but in intellectually safe schools, the focus is more likely to be on accomplishments, reaching goals that matter to the individual and that may also benefit others. 

Making it safe to be smart and eager to learn happens best if the adults in charge are committed to continuous learning.  But, in my experience, many educators seem to feel that their job is to pour knowledge into their students’ heads, not to engage in discovery and growth, their students’ and their own.  

So adults have to model the appropriate behavior–but not just the educators.  An anecdote makes the point.  One spring day quite a few years ago, my friend Kathleen stopped by on her way home from retrieving her 12-year-old son’s backpack, which he had accidentally left in his classroom at school. She told me that her son Joey, a bright, thoughtful, somewhat quiet boy, was the target of relentless bullying by the jock majority on campus, who picked on him because he loved to read and was often seen carrying a book.  So, in that school, it wasn’t cool to be curious; in fact, it was unhealthy.

Perhaps you’re thinking, “That’s too bad, but isn’t a little bit of bullying a normal but unfortunate part of growing up? Isn’t it something that kids work through, and maybe even manage to build some character in the process?”  In other words, isn’t this natural behavior, no big deal?

Well, there’s more to the story.  When Kathleen was in the school, she ran into the mother of one of Joey’s classmates, who noticed  that Kathleen had only her younger child with her. “So where’s Joey?” quipped the woman. “Home reading War and Peace, or something?”

So the bullying that Joey was enduring wasn’t ‘the natural cruelty of children,’ but learned behavior modeled by a parent.  

Learned behavior can be unlearned,  but adults must step in and actively work to stop bullying.  When they fail to do the right thing, they are enabling the bad behavior, and their enabling becomes a serious–and sometimes deadly–part of the problem. At the very least, their willingness to ignore bullying creates a vacuum, in which a vulnerable child stands alone, and into which a bully (or a gang of them) easily steps and begins to fill the void with cruelty.

The fact is, most bullying between students is verbal, rather than physical. It’s the so-called “normal” teasing that kids inflict on each other. So how does bullying begin? Usually it starts in an atmosphere lacking in emotional and intellectual safety.  As a reporter, I met students all the time who talked openly about being teased:

“They call me stupid, stuff like that, because I get nervous and start stuttering,” said Carlos, a Maryland high school student, describing how other students reacted when he tried to read aloud.

“I’m just sick of some people making fun of me because of the color of my skin, or because of what I wear,” said Jessica, a young white girl in a nearly all-black middle school in New York City.

“Kids would make fun of my ears, because they’re big, and I just hated it,” said Charles, 17 years old and about 6’2”, recalling painful years of merciless teasing by classmates.

“They’d go ‘Hahaha, A.D.D. boy, you can’t do anything right. You’re so stupid,’” said John, who’d been diagnosed with ADHD and was on Ritalin.

I often asked, “What happens if you complain to teachers or to your parents?” The usual response from adults: “Get tough. That’s just normal, so get used to it.”

Deborah Meier, founder of the world-renowned Central Park East Secondary School, told me that most teachers and adults dismiss teasing as something children just have to adapt to. “We turn our backs,” she said, “because we don’t know what to do about it.”

Meier believes that non-violent teasing and other emotional cruelties are directly connected to physical violence. Adults have a duty to become involved and to intervene on behalf of those being harassed, she said, because “a truly safe school is willing to tackle the tough issues.”  In emotionally safe schools, she said, “Teachers are confident enough and powerful enough to say ‘Stop everything! We’re not going to move until we have made sure this isn’t going to happen again.’”

The internet and the ubiquity of cellphones have made bullying more pervasive, unfortunately. So-called ‘cyberbullying’ is harder to spot, but, once detected, adults are compelled to act, just as they must when the bullying takes place in their presence.  In other words, on-line behavior that causes a significant disruption at school or makes some students unsafe is actionable.  Cyberbullying, often combined with in-school behavior, often results in academic failure, student withdrawal, and in extreme cases, suicide.  As the NIH has reported, “Suicide is the second leading cause of death for adolescents and young adults in the United States. In-person bullying is known to raise the risk of thoughts of suicide and attempts for both victims and perpetrators.”

In early November the Washington Post reported that it had found nearly 200 incidents in recent years when a bullied student took his or her own life. Some schools are paying out millions and changing policies, the Post reports. The article is worth your full attention, because it’s clear that schools are not doing enough, despite Title IX, despite anti-bullying laws in most states.

For clarity, think of bullying in all its forms as child abuse, and act accordingly. 

The awful paradox that it’s not safe to be smart and curious in many schools should give us pause.  If schools don’t celebrate learning, who does!   The fact that many of us look the other way when we detect emotional abuse is deplorable, and here we need leaders to model and reward doing the right thing.  School leaders cannot split hairs and decline to get involved. It’s their job, like it or not. How they respond matters, and the key is to be proactive, not wait until something awful happens.

America is an increasingly diverse country, and many schools enroll students who do not “look like us.” Now more than ever, adults must protect those who are different. They must not turn a blind eye toward teasing and harassment of any sort, but particularly not to the kind that involves a student’s faith or ethnic background. Passions run high today, and ignorance must not be allowed to rule the classroom or the playground.

In public schools today, physical safety is the tail wagging the dog. 

That has to change. Physical safety becomes far more likely–perhaps almost inevitable–when schools are intellectually and emotionally safe. 

(The Previous Steps: Looping, Play, Practice Democracy, Business Cards for Teachers, Involve Outsiders, Multiple ‘Talent Nights’, Extended Homeroom, Ask the Right Question, “Education Grand Rounds”, Looping (revisited), and “Making Stuff”)