Oh dang Lynda Barry is always posting a thing that is true.
What I think that this week's miserable business about Karen Klein goes to show is this: there is a critical mass of people in our society who remember what it was like to endure childhood bullying, and they burn. Her internet vacation fund became enormous because so many people felt so deeply, saw the donation link, and thought, if not in so many words – something has to be done; this is something; therefore I am going to do it.
On thinking further about the cruelty of children, though, I began to wonder if it is not, in fact, an artifact – but a necessary artifact – of living in a modern society.
Kids are mean; we are told this all our lives. We certainly remember it for ourselves. Even the most pathetic among us were nasty to other children at least once, whenever we happened to spot a weaker little bird to be pushed out of the nest. The cruelest bully I remember was also the smartest and the nerdiest. As soon as he moved to my school, he took up the business of tormenting me, simply so that there would be no mistake as to which of us was lower. His plan worked. I soon left that school, but at the last I had heard of him, he had made himself huge and joined the football team.
This dynamic, the caste system of childhood, is a part of what growing up has been like for any of the billions of people who underwent some kind of a schooling situation at any time in the past, oh, three thousand years. It is only natural that most of us suppose it is part of childhood itself.
Is it? Why do we suppose that it is natural and healthy for children to keep company chiefly with people of their own age? Why are we surprised when their tiny, hothouse societies are rife with cruelty, ignorance and madness?
I have no children and no education in pedagogical theory. Still, I like children; they are capable of much worse things than adults, but also much better things, and I never forgot what it was to be one. I particularly remember how much friendlier adults and older teenagers were to me than most children my own age. Children, in general, deserve better than what we expect of them, which is that they are only fit company for their own peers. Children need to become fully adapted members of their species, H. sapiens sapiens. They need to be taught how, exactly, to be human. This isn't really unusual – it's much the same with other primate species. How can children learn how to be fully human when their daily lives are ruled by the whims of other children?
There is no real solution to this problem, if there ever was. What could we do – eliminate schooling? Go back to apprenticeships and tutoring and so forth? Even if it were possible, it wouldn't be worth the price. A world without school, without the mixing of young people with each other and with ideas, builds a naturally slow and conservative people. What would have become of me in such a world, where I was raised to learn only at my mother's knee, and trained to be a tradeswoman, a servant or a wife? I'd have hanged myself long ago – if I'd ever been born, that is, because my mother would have hanged herself long before that.
Perhaps the roughness, isolation and bullying we associate with childhood are prices we pay as a society for our system of education – for the daily separation of children and families, which makes possible social and intellectual mobility for individual children. If this is so, children will always have to face bullying, to know this fear and this cruelty, because that is simply part of how we build a world worth living in.
(Naturally, I am no historian, and a hell of a lot more data and analysis would be required to determine whether any of this is tenable.)
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