Beating Up on Bullies

THOUGH I HADN'T YET been born during the Great Folk Scare of the early 1960s, I'd like to think that if I'd had a hammer back then, I'd have chucked it at the heads of Peter, Paul & Mary. This is admittedly not a charitable impulse, nor one of which I'm proud. But it can hardly be helped considering the sheer number of musical/political atrocities they have visited upon our culture.

As popularizers of others' songs, they are partly to blame for the careers of John Denver and Gordon Lightfoot. As a solo artist, Noel Paul Stookey is responsible for the ubiquitous soundtrack of every middlebrow wedding, "The Wedding Song (There is Love)," while Peter Yarrow co-wrote the Me-Decade chestnut "Torn Between Two Lovers." With their whole-earth harmonic bleating and self-congratulatory preening, even their album titles ("Peter, Paul, & Mommy, Too," "Songs of Conscience & Concern") make one yearn for a good old-fashioned record-burning. Peter, Paul & Mary--"PPM" to the fans--can take a pro-marijuana song like "Puff the Magic Dragon" (in which Puff's dealer, "Little Jackie Paper," brings the doobie-smoking dragon "sealing wax and other fancy stuff," as they suspiciously frolic in "the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee") and transform it into a sanctimonious morality tale. Yarrow, the song's author, has angrily insisted it's "not about drugs," but rather "the sadness of lost childhood innocence."

Lost childhood innocence is a subject Yarrow knows something about. In 1970, when he was in his early thirties, he pleaded guilty to "taking immoral and improper liberties" with a 14-year-old girl. He did three months of a one-to-three year prison term, and was later granted a full pardon by President Jimmy Carter. Still, even though he's proven a stable family man since, one might reasonably assume that this record would preclude Yarrow from spending lots of time around elementary and middle schools. One would be wrong.

For after 40 years as a political activist, Yarrow has now undertaken a campaign that he hopes will be his lasting legacy. This time, it's for the kids. As freedom fighters, PPM started out strong, singing alongside Martin Luther King in the March on Washington. But as their careers got longer, the issues got smaller. By the '80s, they were singing the praises of the Sandinistas. In the early '90s, Yarrow wrote a song using the words of another King--Rodney, not Martin. By 1996, Yarrow was spotted giving a benefit concert to support continued federal funding of Amtrak.

But in 1999, Yarrow's life and, consequently, the lives of millions of American schoolchildren were transformed. At the Kerrville Folk Festival, Yarrow heard a hit country song entitled "Don't Laugh At Me," which he decided to turn into an anti-bullying anthem, thus launching a movement. While the lyrics had been written by somebody else, they are PPM-pitch-perfect: "I'm a little boy with glasses, the one they call a geek / A little girl who never smiles cause I have braces on my teeth / and I know how it feels / to cry myself to sleep." From there, things really get maudlin, spiraling into the chorus: "Don't laugh at me / Don't call me names / Don't get your pleasure from my pain . . ." Yarrow has said he "shed a tear" the first time he heard the song. It reminded him of his own painful experiences being bullied by a football player: "He would call me [names]. That was very humiliating," Yarrow said. He was in college at the time.

The song, ideally suited to the trademark Yarrow whine, which resembles the slow leaking of air from a balloon, has been rerecorded by Peter, Paul & Mary and incorporated into a video and CD, the latter of which includes other PPM hits like "Weave Me the Sunshine" and "Puff the Magic Dragon." Both the video and CD serve as cornerstones of the "Don't Laugh at Me" curriculum, co-developed by Yarrow's non-profit "Operation Respect" in conjunction with Educators for Social Responsibility and another outfit called Adventures in Peacemaking. The anti-bullying curriculum comes in three incarnations (the Camp Program, Grades 2-5, and Grades 6-8). The materials include festive signs that say things like "Ridicule Free Zone" and "No Dissing Here"--proving that these '60s era holdovers are hip to the kids' lingo, or at least to the lingo they used back in 1992.

While there are any number of similar programs that aim to eradicate bullying in schools, "Don't Laugh At Me" is achieving critical mass. Given away for free, the curriculum has been implemented in over 15,000 schools and summer camps nationwide. The song (which Yarrow calls the "We Shall Overcome" of the anti-bullying movement), the video, and the guides have been given a tremendous push by everyone from state departments of education to the NEA to the National Association of Elementary School Principals.

BULLYING, of course, is a new phenomenon only if you remember Cain's bludgeoning of Abel as if it were yesterday. Bullies themselves have been the stuff of nearly every great coming of age novel and film since time immemorial. From the Victorian-era Flashman in Tom Brown's School Days to the yellow-eyed Scut Farkus in A Christmas Story, the bully has served as a source of fear and object of ire, a mettle-tester and very often a muse. But only recently has bullying been treated as an "epidemic"--studied, pathologized, and in some instances criminalized by both the education establishment and lawmakers. The DLAM program in fact grows out of a generation's worth of activism.

While brown cheese and Lutefisk are Scandinavia's most famous exports, anti-bullying propaganda likely comes in a close third. So it has been since Swedish researcher Dan Olweus, the father of the anti-bullying movement, began publishing a steady drip of bullying scholarship from his perch at Bergen University in Norway in the 1970s. Since Olweus was the first person to study both bullies and their victims systematically, many of his conclusions have become articles of faith: everything from the notion that bullying has grown more serious and prevalent, to the assertion that bullies themselves are much likelier than others to have criminal convictions later in life.

Not surprisingly, with a purported increase in bullying--and with millions of dollars now available worldwide to study and implement anti-bullying measures--there has also been a spike in the supply of anti-bullying consultants. Olweus, like many other anti-bullying researchers, doubles as one. If you, as a school principal, feel bullying is a problem (or even if you don't but your school board does), you might be forced to adopt something like Olweus's anti-bullying curriculum.

In promotional materials for the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program--which calls for measures such as holding 20-40 minute-per-week classroom meetings on the subject--it is suggested that you buy a copy of Olweus's $22.95 book and $30 handbook for each staff member, along with his "Bully/Victim Questionnaire" software at $200 per school. As if that weren't burdensome enough, the materials state that "depending on the school's size," the program "will require a part- or full-time onsite coordinator."

Through most of history, no one needed social scientists to tell them kids were cruel, so bullying was considered an unfortunate but inevitable byproduct of school life--like the poor quality of cafeteria food, or the promiscuity of cheerleaders. But it is now a problem that educationists feel they must Seriously Address. Consequently, the anti-bullying movement has fanned out from Scandinavia, taking root in countries like Australia, Canada, and Great Britain.

Though the United States is a relative latecomer, the anti-bullying movement's flourishing in our country can be traced to a specific date: April 20, 1999, the day Eric Harris and Dyland Klebold took the lives of 13 people at Columbine High School. Indeed, in a strange way, school shooters have become the patron saints of the anti-bullying movement, serving as warnings of what happens when bullying goes unchecked. In the current climate, the horrifying specter of mass murder is, if not excused, at least understood--its gravity downgraded so long as the shooter once received a wedgie from the captain of the football team.

Nearly all anti-bullying proponents point to a 2000 Secret Service study reporting that in 37 school shootings since 1974, two-thirds of the attackers said they felt "persecuted, bullied, threatened, attacked or injured." Though Harris and Klebold weren't available to participate in the Secret Service's post-mortem on account of their suicides, there is little doubt they too had been branded outcasts by more popular classmates. But here, uncomfortable though it surely is, the chicken-and-egg question is in order: Were Harris and Klebold sociopaths because they were ostracized, or were they ostracized for being sociopaths?

Not to excuse any unkind behavior on the part of the Columbine jock class--the one that has become the national stand-in for popular kids behaving boorishly--but for a moment, put yourself in their place. If two guys came to your school in goth facepaint, boasting of mutilating animals, spewing hate toward blacks and Jews, and voicing praise for Hitler (all of which either Klebold or Harris is reported to have done pre-shooting), even from the vantage point of enlightened adulthood, you might not ask them to sit by you on the bus.

Likewise, there's no evidence the simplistic approach of implementing anti-bullying programs can head off such incidents. When Charles "Andy" Williams shot 15 people at Santana High School in Santee, California, in 2001, he, too, claimed he was bullied. But three years before, his school had been the beneficiary of a $123,000 Justice Department anti-bullying grant.

There are, however, bigger problems with taking an increase in school violence as an indicator that bullying is on the rise. To begin with, school violence is decreasing. One statistical analysis after another shows school violence has been on the decline since 1992--a trend that pre-dates our anti-bullying movement by a good six years. Checking the Consumer Product Safety Commission's numbers against those of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), one learns that almost as many children were killed by toys such as non-powered scooters and balloons in 2001 (25) as were killed by school-related violence (38 homicides) in 1998-99. In fact, more people were killed by nursery equipment and supplies (51). According to the NCES, nearly every indicator of danger in schools is trending downward: from the number of students who claimed they were robbed, to those who got into fights.

Nearly every indicator, that is, except one, which perhaps not coincidentally dovetails with the boom in anti-bullying programs sensitizing our kids to the phenomenon: The NCES reports that from 1999 to 2001, students claiming they had been bullied in the last six months rose from 5 percent to 8 percent. Depending on who's doing the asking and how, that number fluctuates wildly (I found some claims that over 80 percent of children report being victims of bullies). This, of course, is a fundamental shortcoming of anti-bullying research, as even the movement's founder, Olweus, concedes. It relies not on dispassionate and objective scientific observation, but on student self-reporting, which is entirely subjective. If one enters the emotional tsunami that is the psyche of the typical 13-year-old boy or girl, then asks whether anyone in these kids' world is picking on them, it's a fair bet that those bullying numbers will rocket through the stratosphere.

The problem begins with the fact that people can't agree on what bullying is. While many would insist--as Justice Potter Stewart said of obscenity--they know it when they see it, the results whenever people are forced to define bullying in black and white are laughable. As specified by lawmakers, bullying now encompasses a lot more than Big Johnny pounding the stuffing out of Little Timmy behind the school gym.

The National Conference of State Legislatures estimates that at least 17 states have passed some sort of anti-bullying measure. Here's a sampling of partial definitions: Colorado says bullying "means any written or verbal expression, or physical act or gesture...intended to cause distress upon one or more students in school." Oregon defines it as "any act that substantially interferes with a student's educational benefits." Vermont prohibits any physical or verbal hostility directed at, among other things, a student's race or sexual orientation or "marital status" (marital status?). Nevada defines bullying as a "willful act or course of conduct" that "is highly offensive to a reasonable person," which would seem to preclude the Nevada legislature.

With lawmakers so willing to institutionalize anti-bullying hysteria (some countries have actually passed national anti-bullying laws), it's small wonder to find all manner of overreaching. The current Miss America has decided world peace can wait: The eradication of bullying is much more important. In Ottawa, Canada, justice minister Martin Cauchon, confessing he'd been bullied as a kid for a family name that sounds like the French word for "pig," launched a multi-year anti-bullying campaign at a three-day conference entitled "Fear and Loathing--a symposium on bullying." The Canadian government supports about 100 anti-bullying projects, such as the one that uses positive role model "Buddy Beaver" to combat the nefarious "Punky" the skunk. So it is little surprise that Ontario Liberal leader Dalton McGuinty proposed $5million worth of anti-bullying programs after his son was mugged--not in school, but on the way home from work.

In Edmonton, police asked the city council to enact bullying bylaws that would enable them to fine bullies up to $250--not just for stealing lunch money, but for "name-calling and intimidation." Here at home, down in New Orleans, school officials have begun levying fines against the parents of kids who fight at school. In Costa Mesa, California, a school district decided that not only was teasing possible grounds for expulsion, but even glaring at a classmate in a threatening manner might get a student bounced.

In Hastings, Minnesota, prosecutor James Backstrom decided that a student who picked a fight or harassed another would be punished with at least one night in jail (one female bully has been locked up 13 times). Now that the hurly-burly of the playground has actually been criminalized, it stands to reason that all sorts of boutique bullying complaints would emerge. These days, stories abound of "e-bullying," as well as "menace by mobile"--kids being bullied through messages left on their mobile phones (messages they're encouraged to save against the event of litigation).

Now pandemic, the anti-bullying movement is even extending to adults. Today, there are books like The Bully at Work--What You Can Do to Stop the Hurt and Reclaim Your Dignity on the Job. For years in Britain, some have been trying to pass a Dignity at Work bill, which defines bullying as "unjustified criticism on more than one occasion." Computer Weekly recently reported that one in five British computer geeks--or "IT professionals," if you prefer--claimed to have been bullied at work in the past year (including 17 percent of senior management).

Read enough of these stories--there are plenty more--and what a "reasonable person" might find offensive is not the prevalence of bullying, but the madness of those overcompensating to correct it in the anti-bullying movement. Which brings us back to Peter Yarrow's "Don't Laugh At Me" program.

COLOR ME CYNICAL, but the temptation when listening to Peter Yarrow warble "Don't Laugh at Me" is, of course, to laugh at him. Just picturing literal-minded second-graders trying to get through the lyric "I'm fat, I'm thin, I'm short, I'm tall, I'm deaf, I'm blind, Hey aren't we all?" makes one titter. But to see if the song passes the laugh test, I run it by my own personal focus group on such matters--my 11-year-old niece.

She goes to a tony private school, and is accustomed to faddish character-education Nerf-speak. She tells me that the kids at her school are part of a "trustworthy community"--so trustworthy, in fact, that they're forbidden to put locks on their lockers. "My best friend Loren just had 20 bucks stolen," she says. When I play her the song, she doesn't get past the first line without erupting in laughter.

This hardly seems enough to go on, however. At the "Don't Laugh At Me" website, there are all sorts of student testimonials to the benefit of such programs. In one, a student writes, "What is hate? Hate is like jealous fish that don't talk to each other. . . . Hate tastes like lemon, and it doesn't taste as good as honey. So, don't be jealous fish, let's be happy monkeys. In fact, let's be hate-busters."

In order to get a better sense of the program--and possibly transform myself from a jealous fish into a happy monkey--I head to Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, for a "Don't Laugh At Me" (DLAM) workshop. On a freezing day, at the Cooperative Educational Services Agency, about 40 teachers, principals, and counselors pack into a multi-purpose room, their voices commingling in a pleasant 'Sconi-flavored hum of "you betcha's" and "Don'cha know's," as they discuss "dose Badgers" and the merits of the local Leinenkugel brewery's "Big Butt" Doppelbock.

Our facilitator, Sherrie Gammage, is from New Orleans, and works with Educators for Social Responsibility, who instruct teachers in all manner of trendy New Educationist theory, from conflict resolution to "emotional learning." Sherrie is a large African-American woman who describes herself as "abundant" (there's no large or small in a DLAM world). She holds out her hand by way of greeting, instructing, "Don't laugh at me." I try not to, but it's hard, since her own wheezing guffaw after every third comment makes me think of Smedley the cartoon dog.

Sherrie, whose students call her "Momma Sherrie," comes off less like the flats-wearing, macrame-haired, Hillary-at-Wellesley type you picture populating her profession, and more like the sassy neighbor on a UPN sitcom. She's squeezing two days of DLAM instruction into a single day, so she tells us not to panic. "Just sit back. Chill. Think of yourself as a pot roast marinating," she says.

"We're gonna have fun today, we're gonna laugh, we're gonna joke." As she says this, she cuts her hand on a piece of paper. A school nurse rushes to her aid, applying a Band-Aid. "I love to be taken care of by the mommies," she purrs. Sherrie uses our input to come up with classroom rules. We are allowed to "burp, sneeze, and cough because those are natural organic qualities." We can giggle. There are no tests. The only thing she asks of us is to "pay attention to what has heart and meaning for you," and to "speak your truth, but only as you feel safe enough to do it." She entrusts us with responsibility, because we are, she reminds us in the self-congratulatory language of the anti-bullying movement, not only adults, but "adults committed to a certain values and way of being. Take care of yourself."

Sherrie makes us watch a video featuring our maximum leader, Peter Yarrow. He brings us greetings, talking about the beauty of "peace education work" and the "heartfelt message of music" that can begin to launch us on "an extraordinary adventure, a pathway to doing something that might seem impossible." With all his world-of-wonder oiliness, he sounds like Willie Wonka without the good humor.

Sherrie gives us a bunch of scary statistics on school violence: One claims that 160,000 students skip school every day because of fear. (I later check the literature for purposes of comparison, but can find no study on how many stay home to watch The View.) Sherrie tells us the importance of defining bullying so we can combat it. While she allows there are many definitions, she settles on one from Olweus: "A person is being bullied . . . when he or she is exposed repeatedly and over time to negative actions on the part of one or more persons."

Glad that's settled, we move on to one of oh-so-many class-participation exercises, some of which I evade more successfully than others. After showing an additional video of Yarrow singing the DLAM song to "put us in a place where we can get in touch with our feelings," Sherrie pairs us off to discuss our experiences of being bullied and how we dealt with them.

My partner is Mike Erickson, a bespectacled middle-school principal with an avuncular, honest face that resembles Garrison Keillor's without all the nosehair. Sherrie tells us to be good listeners, to show empathy, to be conscious of "eye contact, of the way you hold your arms. Think of yourself as a vessel." I am still thinking of myself as a pot roast, but I manage the transition. I almost tell Mike about how I earned my seventh-grade nickname, "Crusty," but then think better of it. "It wouldn't put me in a safe place," I say. "Okay," he answers understandingly, making eye contact.

Instead, I tell him about how, in fourth grade, two classmates decided they'd jump me after school each day. I fended them off for a while, but I was outnumbered. So after four or five days of this, I used my "interpersonal skills," as the conflict resolutionists would say, and rallied the rest of the male population of the class to wait in ambush for my assailants. The next time they lunged at me, my friends rode in like the cavalry and beat the crap out of poor Michael Palmer and Michael Cassidy. They all ended up in the principal's office, while I made it unmolested to the bus. It wasn't my finest hour. But the Michaels never bothered me again.

Sherrie tells us it's now our partner's turn, and Erickson recounts his own travails with bullying. When he was in seventh grade, he says, an older kid would always throw him a sharp elbow as he got on the bus. Every day he dreaded it. Until one day, he came up with a solution: He slugged the bully in the face. "Then I jumped on top of him," he says, with barely contained relish. "Ya hear ya should never get in a fight," Erickson says, "but there comes a point . . . " I ask Erickson whether, as a principal, he ever gives that advice to his students--whether he ever tells them what parents have been telling their kids for ages: to stand up to a bully. "As a parent I might," he says, "but as a principal, I'd never tell them that."

No doubt it would be a great way to get hit with a lawsuit. Still, Erickson is frustrated. "When kids come to me with harassment, it's difficult, because sometimes it doesn't help when I talk to a kid who's harassing another kid. . . . I don't have time to go through an eight-month program teaching them how not to harass kids."

Mike and other teachers throughout the day tell me parents are no longer teaching kids the fundamentals that used to get covered at home. It's not that the parents aren't teaching anything, the teachers grumble. They teach the kids how to be materialistic (most wouldn't even think of letting their kid's 16th birthday pass without getting them a car). They infuse their kids with loads of self-esteem ("They tell their kids they're better than everyone else," says one counselor). They teach them how to be oversexed, so that a gaggle of typical 12-year-old girls walking down the hall in their low-cut butt-cleavage-baring jeans looks like a gang of underfed plumbers.

What they often don't do, complain the teachers, is instill a sense of right and wrong, including the need to show kindness to others. Which is perhaps why we're stuck at an in-service with all this talk of safe spaces, using innocuously assertive "I" messages instead of more accusatory "you" messages. It's quite the balancing act. Especially, Mike whispers, since "what one person sees as harassment, the other says, 'Oh, he can't take a joke'--it's a gray area."

When we head back to the group and share our childhood bullying stories, I notice that a surprising number of successful anti-bullying interventions recollected by these mild-mannered Dairy State teachers end with the victim slugging the tormentor, never to be tormented again. During our "Connections" exercise, in which "we say anything we're thinking, feeling, or just any gifts you wanna give the group," I bring this up to Sherrie. She looks as if I've committed high heresy, and cautions that I only heard the stories people "felt safe enough to share."

This is a key tenet of the anti-bullying movement, whose theme song ought to be not "Don't Laugh At Me," but rather Morris Albert's '70s anthem "Feelings." That's what curricula like this are all about--nothing more than feelings. Knowing yourself. Revealing yourself. Feeling yourself. Even when the curriculum pays lip service to noble traits and actions (empathy, standing up for the weak, and so on), it buries them under so many layers of goo that the altruistic becomes the narcissistic. In the DLAM workshop and teacher's guides, feelings are highlighted in every single exercise. We play a "feelings pantomime," and take "feelings inventories" with 100-word-long lists of feelings--because Sherrie says children need to be able to express their feelings, especially "when their needs are not being met."

Think I'm exaggerating? A typical sentence from a curriculum guide boasts of supporting "the healthy expression of feelings in young people, including how to build a feelings vocabulary, encourage discussion about feelings, reflect back young people's moods, support young people's empathy, infuse feelings reflection across the curriculum, and much more."

Role-playing games have names like "Emotion Motions," "How Would You Feel If . . . " and "The Feelings Echo," in which students complete the sentence, "I feel cared for when . . . " When they are asked to "play mirrors" with another child, they concentrate not on the other person, but on what it feels like "to mirror someone." Kids are instructed to use "journaling" to help them "explore feelings." They are told "all feelings are important," and they are to "brainstorm about how to share what they've learned about feelings with the rest of the school." Ultimately, after signing off on their "Constitution of Caring" (and after closing out the day's session with the recommended rendition of "If I Had a Hammer"), they are encouraged to share their "achievement" with outside officials like the President of the United States, as if he really needs to be bothered because Caitlin is proud of herself for writing in her feelings journal.

In the name of discouraging bullying and fostering empathy, students are told to "use class meetings to talk about feelings," to say "one word that describes how they are feeling that day." Their teachers, after they affirm that "crying is okay--regardless of our age or gender," are to "infuse feelings into [the] curriculum"--for instance, by discussing how figures from history felt about events of their day. At camps using the DLAM program, cabins are to "challenge one another to a game of 'Name that Feelings Tune'" (in which campers compete to "name as many songs as possible that include words expressing feelings.")

.........BY NOW, I admit, I am feeling downright skeptical. To make sure I'm not shortchanging the DLAM program, I go the next day to see it in practice. A school counselor I've met at the workshop, Tali Kempf, allows me to sit in on her DLAM instruction of a group of students at an intermediate school in Eleva, Wisconsin. A spunky, gifted communicator who exhibits total control over a couple of fifth-grade classes, Kempf is hardly the hippie-dippy, peace-and-love type. When I tell her that I'd really like to see her force her fifth-graders to sing "Puff the Magic Dragon" as the curriculum suggests, she rolls her eyes conspiratorially. "I don't think I can get them to do that," she says.

The rest of the way, however, she goes by the book. She tells the kids, with straight-faced understatement, that "this program talks a lot about feelings." She has them close their eyes, then plays the DLAM song. She employs reverse psychology when a good number of kids start giggling. "Sometimes we laugh when something is really close to our hearts," she says. "So don't judge each other if you hear someone laughing." She has the kids sit in a circle on the floor beneath posters proclaiming positive messages like "101 Ways to Praise a Child." A Koosh-ball is thrown to a child, indicating it's his turn to speak. One or two catch it in the face, but that doesn't stop the kids from completing the exercise with gusto. Their task is to mention as many put-downs as they can.

They quickly warm to it. There's all the usual fare. A mousy, hesitant kid with frames as big as his head says, "Some people will call you four eyes." A girl says the tomboys in the class make fun of her for wearing pink. When I interview kids on the side, one tells me he gets called "roly poly oly because I'm fat." Another with a chapped ring around his mouth tells me, "I have a licking problem, and some people call me Licker Lips."

DLAM instructors like to say that there are no wrong answers. And that becomes apparent as the minutes drag like hours. At first sensitized to the whole world of slights that have been directed at them, the kids gradually drift away from actual ridicule and shoot off in every direction. One girl says she is teased for liking somebody. A white teacher joins the fun, and says reverse discrimination against white people is a problem, "even though everyone around this area is very white." A boy says that a good example of a put-down is "maybe when you go to the waterpark, and when you get there, there's not a lot to go on."

"Ohhh, disappointment, yeahhh," seconds Tali.

After the session, I grab seven kids (four girls and three boys), and ask them questions. They seem fairly confused by this turn of events. When asked how many of them consider themselves bullies, all seven say they are. When asked how many of them consider themselves bullying victims, all seven are just as convinced. I'm put in mind of something my wife, herself a former first grade teacher, told me after she taught a required lesson on "inappropriate touch." The next day, little Tyler could not remove a piece of lint from little Ashley's sweater without being accused of "inappropriately touching" her.

Despite the drawbacks, anti-bullying programs like these might still have some value if they did what they purported to do. But there's not much evidence of that, and some to the contrary. Bergen University's Dan Olweus, for instance, claims that after his anti-bullying program (which is less touchy-feely than DLAM) was implemented, instances of bullying declined 50 percent or more over a two-year period. But other anti-bullying researchers say those numbers have not been replicated. Olweus himself has lamented the elusiveness of much anti-bullying work, citing a study that found just 10 violence-prevention programs out of 400 met any specified minimum criteria for evaluation.

Likewise, while much anti-bullying research reads like propaganda, two clear-eyed studies by a couple of Australian professors--who generally support anti-bullying programs--have shed greater light on the discipline. Ken Rigby, of the University of South Australia, examined 13 studies of the effectiveness of anti-bullying curricula from around the world. Of those, 12 found at least slight decreases in some kinds of bullying. But 7 reported simultaneous increases in other kinds of bullying. The University of Western Sydney's Robert Parada reached an even bleaker conclusion. His two-year study, believed to be the largest of its kind, surveyed 4,500 high school students who'd participated in anti-bullying programs. He found that the level of bullying they experienced, despite all the peer support, mediation, and self-esteem-building, "remained exactly the same" as ten years before, he told the Sydney Morning Herald, the only change being the new political pressure to say it wasn't.

What is impossible to quantify, however, is the deeper effect of trying to eradicate all bullying. Richard Hazler, a professor of counselor education at Ohio University, who has taught seminars on curbing bullying, says, "There's a normalcy in this whole process. I don't want to say that bullying is okay. But it's a teaching tool for kids. It teaches them to get along with people, how to use power, the victims--how to obtain power when not in power positions. How do we stop bullying and victimization? I hate to make this case in public. But we don't entirely want to--because if kids didn't have it--how would they learn? These are mistakes they're making. We want a cooperative atmosphere, but we also want to show them how to deal with aggression."

Back in the fifth-grade classroom, Tali winds things up. After a 25-minute discussion of put-downs, we are in touch with our feelings. I know I am with mine. Glancing down the "Don't Laugh At Me Feelings Inventory," I quietly reflect that I am being made "afraid, anxious, and exasperated" by what we are doing to these kids. I am "horrified, nervous, and paranoid" that we are not teaching them resilience, but rather, turning them into human flypaper. Every insult--even ones formerly sloughed off--now sticks, and gets reclassified and inflated, as children are encouraged to nurse the memory of petty hurts. I feel "sad, sorrowful, and suspicious" that we are teaching them to be nervous nellies and lunchroom litigators. That we are teaching them to feel "persecuted, self-pitying" and pusillanimous--the last of which is not on my feelings inventory but is a feeling I nonetheless feel entitled to express.

The whole thing makes me "contemptuous, crabby, and cruel." Until what happens next. As Tali concludes the class by once again playing Peter Yarrow's "Don't Laugh At Me," I hear a fifth-grader say as he exits the room, "What an awesome song!" I have a revelation--that things are much worse than I believed. I feel "grief-stricken, heartbroken, and helpless." For I now see it clearly: We are raising something much more depressing than the wussified children I've just described.

We are raising the next generation of Peter, Paul & Mary fans.

Matt Labash is senior writer at The Weekly Standard.

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