“Bully” – Long Overdue Action, Watch For The Overreaction

This week’s TIME School of Thought column takes a look at the new film “Bully” opening tomorrow.  This is a serious issue – particularly acute for certain groups of students such as gay and lesbian teens – and attention to it is long-overdue.  But we’re actually doing better – according to some measures – over the past decade.  And we should be careful that inaction doesn’t get traded for overzealous and thoughtless action.  We’ve seen that movie before, too:

 The new documentary Bully, which opens in theaters tomorrow, is powerful stuff. (Try to get through even just the opening sequence without tearing up.) Hopefully it will wake up parents, teachers, and school administrators. But let’s also hope they respond thoughtfully to this searing film. Because too often in our rush to address a problem, American educators and politicians have a well-intentioned overreaction that minimizes commonsense in favor of blanket solutions…

You have to wait until tomorrow to see “Bully” in theaters but you can read the entire column today via this link.  No popcorn but no ticket price either.

4 Replies to ““Bully” – Long Overdue Action, Watch For The Overreaction”

  1. This is a movie, I would like to see even though I don’t work with high school students, I still see it in elementary schools. I have a particular student now who is a bully and I want to see this movie to find insights into how we can avoid bullying and what to do to overcome this issue. I see in the papers each day what bullying does to students and I think if we can prevent this issue when they are younger then we wont have when the students get into the higher grades. Does anybody have solutions now to bullying in the younger grades and what strategies are teachers out there using?

  2. I agree that bullying is a major problem in most high schools across the country and that something needs to be done. I also hope that the reforms that do occur are not blanket “quick fixes” because they seem to cause more problems than solutions. The school I work at has an anti bullying program but it seems very ineffective. The students still are mean to each other in the halls and I have had to have several parent conferences about students being bullied on their way to my class by other students in my class. What suggestions do you all have for some better strategies and programs to eliminate bullying?

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