Education Week - September 7, 2016 - 24

COMMENTARY

Bullying the Bully
Why Punishment Doesn't Work

By Alﬁe Kohn
ullying at school has attracted
an enormous amount of attention, spurring academic
studies and popular books,
regulations, and training sessions for educators. By now
its status as a serious problem is widely acknowledged,
as it should be. We can never go back to the
days when bullying was regarded as a boyswill-be-boys rite of passage, something that
victims were left to deal with (and suffer from)
alone.
But as with other ills, both within and beyond our schools, some responses are much
less constructive than others. The least
thoughtful (or useful) strategy is to announce
a "zero tolerance" stance on bullying. Either this phrase amounts to empty rhetoric-rather like responding to repeated
instances of gun violence in our country
by sending each cluster of victims our
"thoughts and prayers"-or else it refers
to a policy of harsh punishment for bullies.
The latter approach is worth our attention precisely because it comes so
easily to us, complementing a punitive
sensibility already well-established in
our schools. Students who break the
rules or otherwise displease us are subjected to suspension, expulsion, detention, enforced isolation ("time-out"), loss
of opportunity to participate in enjoyable activities, and so on.
Making children suffer for what
they've done is often defended on practical grounds, but I've been unable to
ﬁnd any evidence to support the claim
that punishment makes schools safer or
leads the children who have been punished to become more ethical or responsible. Indeed, punitive responses-even
if they're euphemistically called "consequences"-are often not merely ineffective but actively counterproductive. To
cite only one in a long line of empirical
investigations, an eight-year longitudinal study published in 2005 found that
punitive discipline was subsequently associated with more antisocial behavior,
less prosocial behavior, and increased
levels of anxiety.
Interestingly, when many proponents
of traditional discipline are presented
with such evidence, they simply pivot to a very
different defense, one that can't be dislodged
with evidence: They insist that if someone
does something bad, something bad must be
done to that person. He or she must be "held
accountable"; a consequence must be imposed
for moral reasons, even if there are no practical beneﬁts.
But the effects of punishment do matter,
and where bullying is concerned, they suggest
a painful irony: Punishing kids who bully not
only fails to address the source of the problem,
but actually makes things worse. As educator and author Barbara Coloroso pointed out
in her book The Bully, The Bullied, and the

| INSIDE |

DON'T FIX HIGH
SCHOOLS,
TRANSFORM THEM

Bystander, punishment teaches the bully "to
be more aggressive and hurtful. He will undoubtedly master the art of doing his bullying
in ways that are sneaky or 'under the radar'
of even the most observant and aware adults.
More important," she adds, "punishment degrades, humiliates, and dehumanizes the children who are its objects. (Sounds like bullying
to me.)"
Decades' worth of research shows that punishment-even when it doesn't include physical force-promotes aggression. But studies
conducted in the United States and in Sweden revealed another layer to that reality:
Bullies in particular are more likely to have
been raised by authoritarian parents who
rely on punishment. Dan Olweus, a leading
authority on the subject, conducted the latter
study. He, like other critics of punishment, has

Consider: A punishment is a response by
someone with more power (say, an adult) to a
prohibited action on the part of someone with
less power (in this case, a child). Speciﬁcally, it
consists of deliberately making the child suffer
in some way. The intent may be to discourage
the child from repeating the action, but the
more common results of punishment are that
the child (1) becomes angry and frustrated, (2)
learns that you get your way in life by using
your power over those who are weaker, and (3)
becomes more focused on self-interest and less
likely to consider how his actions affect others. Punishment induces kids to ask, "What
do they, the people with the power, want me
to do, and what's the consequence to me if I
don't do it?"
From this perspective, it quickly becomes
clear that the problem with school policy isn't

or stronger. That the larger, stronger people
may have graduate degrees or can spin out
elaborate rationalizations for their actions is
really beside the point.
One barrier to acknowledging this, apart
from our reluctance to admit the intrinsic
unpleasantness of what we're doing and the
harm it may be causing, is the way unquestioned assumptions are built into our use of
language. For example, when we talk about
kids, the word respect typically refers to something they owe us, not something they're owed
by us. Likewise, bullying is a word we're accustomed to using only to describe something
done by students.
Another barrier is the difficulty of shifting our level of analysis. Even if, recalling
certain bosses or colleagues, we concede that
adults, too, may be bullies, and even if we

Punishment in general is
likely a hidden
contributor to bullying,
both because of what it
models and because of its
effects on the students
who are punished."

offered suggestions for what can curb bullying. The key is to "restructure the social environment"-the entire school culture-rather
than trying to target individual students by
encouraging intervention by bystanders, offering advice to potential victims, or, worst of all,
punishing bullies.
It's easy to assume that punitive discipline is
an inevitable part of school life. That leaves us
quibbling only about the details of implementation-for example, how severe the penalty
should be for a given offense. Once we take a
step back and consider whether punishment
itself really makes sense, the status quo becomes very troubling indeed.

HOW ESSA MAY HELP
HOMELESS STUDENTS

24 | EDUCATION WEEK | September 7, 2016 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary

were open to the possibility that they
might victimize children, too, it's much
more disconcerting to consider that
bullying isn't just done by individuals.
Widely accepted practices and policies
may amount to institutionalized bullying. Taking away recess, handing out
zeroes, forcing children to stay after
school, sending unpleasant reports
home to parents, exiling students from
the classroom (or school)-and threatening in advance to do these things to
them if they fail to obey us-may not
have been intended as bullying. But
what matters, and what predicts the
effects, is how these things appear to
André Da Loba for Education Week
the people to whom they're done.
This shift in perspective should
just that punishing bullies inevitably back- prompt us to transform schools from places of
ﬁres. Rather, punishment in general is likely "doing to" students to places of "working with"
a hidden contributor to bullying, both because students, to see kids' troubling actions not as
of what it models and because of its effects on infractions to be punished (where someone
must be made to suffer), but as problems to
the students who are punished.
Dig even deeper, though: Maybe it's not be solved-and opportunities for teaching.
just that punishment contributes to bullying. If we need a simple reason to support these
Maybe traditional discipline is a kind of bully- shifts, maybe it's sufﬁcient that we want to
ing. That's the unsettling implication of Colo- make sure our actions never resemble those
roso's parenthetical afterthought that I quoted of a bully. ■
above. Deﬁnitions of bullying tend to sound
something like this: a hostile action-or a pat- ALFIE KOHN speaks widely on education and is
tern of abuse, intimidation, or harassment the author of 14 books, including The Myth of the
over time-in which those who are smaller or Spoiled Child, published this year in paperback by
weaker are victimized by those who are larger Beacon Press. His website is www.alﬁekohn.org.

'BOOKS, NOT BULLETS'

LETTERS TO
THE EDITOR

http://www.alfiekohn.org http://www.edweek.org/go/commentary

Education Week - September 7, 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - September 7, 2016