Bullying

My friend works at a different high school in Mihara. I think I have mentioned before how rigorous the streaming is within my high school, well, the streaming happens school to school too with high, average or low academic academic schools. The kids write entrance exams to determine where they will go. If you go to a low or average academic high school your chances of going to university wane dramatically. Mine is a high academic school so kids are encouraged and motivated. By the sounds of it, at other schools, kids are just given up on, as this story will show. This might be why school kids are so stressed out. At every point in their academic career they are writing bloody entrance tests that, they are told, will change the course of their lives... and they actually do. Its hectic. My friend's school is low academic and the kids are more disobedient. By more disobedient I don't mean drugs and knives. But last week there was an incident that blew up into a full scale drama.

Teachers got wind of some bullying going on in the first year group, no one owned up so they decided to investigate. This involved cutting every period last Wednesday short by ten minutes so that at the end of the day there was a hour or so free. In this time, all the first year students were locked in their classrooms and called out one by one to be interviewed by a panel of senior teachers. When the interview was over they had to go home, missing whatever clubs or sports they had, so they wouldn't get to consort with any possible accomplices. My friend and her supervisor were discussing this bizarrely militant arrangement - her supervisor asking if this was how it was done in America. No, my friend said. In America you could see the bullies quite clearly: they were knifing people in the corridor. Oh, said her supervisor. Then my friend asked, tentatively, what would happen to the bullies when they were found. Would they, you know, get hit? Emotionally, yes, said her supervisor...how ominous.

I spoke with my friend again today and apparently seven boys have been apprehended. The charges were intimidation and stealing money from weedy kids. All seven said they had been receiving instructions from someone higher up (whether in the school or community it wasn't clear) and now the school is expelling them. Of course, stealing from and beating up little kids is not behaviour that should be encouraged. But expulsion? Really? They will have to go to night school now or find jobs, according to the supervisor. No second chances. When my friend asked if there was a school counselor and shouldn't they step in, she was told yes, there is counselor but their job is to protect the good students. So for seven 16 year old boys, that's it. Seems its all fun and games until someone, you know loses an eye or 1000 yen.