Children learn lifelong lessons in elementary school, which is why we need to stop teaching them to be silent. Instilling in young children the importance of speaking up helps better prepare them for when they're inevitably confronted with moral decisions and peer pressures. Yet we consistently fail to do this, and when those confrontations come up, people don't do the right thing.
Such was surely the case at Towson University where Alexander Cantor, now convicted of hazing, forced a fraternity member to drink an unknown substance that destroyed his tongue, esophagus and stomach. Such was surely the case in the death of Timothy Piazza at Pennsylvania State University, as his fraternity brothers watched him injure himself repeatedly without calling for help. And such was surely also the case at Cornell University, where its oldest a cappella group was ousted for hazing rituals requiring new initiates to put Icy Hot on their genitals. And in so many stories of hazing and binge drinking leading to injuries and fatalities. In all these stories, even a single student who had been taught to speak up and report to the authorities could have changed the outcome.
As a sociologist, I teach college students about the power of groups on individual behavior, and the role of authority figures in silencing individual dissent. As a parent, I see it firsthand.
My daughter's lessons in silencing came quickly in kindergarten. "Mrs. B.! Michael is about to shove Nicholas off the slide, and Nicholas is screaming," said my 5-year-old daughter, who was still adjusting to life in school, having spent the first five years of her life at home with us. The teacher, my daughter reported, responded, "Honey, you should mind your own business, and Nicholas will mind his."
Ashamed and confused, my daughter came home and told us about this incident. She couldn't understand why a teacher would reprimand her when she was simply trying to save another child who appeared to be in physical danger. This would not be her last lesson in silencing.
The following year, the teacher's assistant sat the 6-year-olds down to tell them they would now have to fill out a "tattle report" every time they had a complaint. The report required these kids to know how to spell their name, address, phone number (and be able to write it all down). Next, the report asked them to write three "nice" things about the person they were "tattling" on. The last two lines on the report provided space for the student to register a complaint.
A lesson in bureaucratic red tape for 6-year-olds is certainly disheartening, but there was a more sinister lesson learned that day as well. As my daughter informed me, in no uncertain terms, the lesson they had learned was: "If you fill out the tattle report, then you're going to be in trouble with the teachers, because it's bad to tattle on someone." The connections between this early childhood lesson and the under-reporting of sexual harassment, for instance, later on in life are hard to miss. Research on sexual harassment consistently shows that women and girls under-report these incidents, not only from having normalized these experiences but also from fear that they would be held responsible somehow.
I didn't attend school in this country, but given how much I've taught on the topic of bystander phenomenon (people who witness horrible events but don't intervene or seek help), I was deeply struck by these experiences. We had done everything we could to teach our daughter to speak up and speak out. We had taught her that it doesn't matter if someone isn't doing something bad to you--if they're doing it to someone else, you should tell an adult right away. And despite having a large vocabulary and having a younger sister, she had never used the words "tattle" or "tattling"; in fact, she didn't know what they meant since she had never heard us use them. In her first couple of years in school, she had learned that not only did "tattling" exist, it's bad.
Some classrooms use a stuffed toy (a "tattle turtle," "tattle tiger" or anything that starts with the letter T) or a picture (George Washington or Ruth Bader Ginsburg) to which kids can tattle. Many classrooms have posters designed to help children distinguish between reporting (helping someone get out of trouble) and tattling (getting someone in trouble). But, clearly, helping someone get out of trouble sometimes results in getting another in trouble. How are children to make a decision in those situations? The message is clear: Children's complaints don't deserve adult intervention. An inanimate object--a stuffed toy, a photo or a poster--can give them all the help they need.
There are books, too, that teach young children that tattling is horrible. In these books, kids often grow extra body parts as punishment for tattling (a tail or an extra long tongue, for instance), have no friends and are even disliked by some family members. Their redemption comes only after they learn not to tattle. The message, once again, is unrelenting: It's not the person doing something wrong who's at fault; it's the people complaining who need to change their behavior.
What's so bad about tattling? Ask someone who's been in a classroom with young children and they'll tell you that kids complain a lot. Teachers can't handle every single complaint that comes their way, especially when our educational system is increasingly focused on test scores and meeting benchmarks. In this scores-driven environment, with dwindling resources and increasing class sizes, teachers don't have time to attend to the emotional and social concerns of their students. In such an environment, it's easier to believe that kids don't learn independence, self-reliance or conflict resolution if adults intervene in their quarrels with classmates.
But ask anyone whether they learned conflict resolution by deliberately not involving adults in their experiences, and the answer is likely no for most people. Instead, kids learn to shut out adults. They learn that the adults in their lives don't want or need to know about the bad stuff in their lives.
So elementary school kids grow into middle school and high school students who don't tell the adults in their lives about the horrific things they see or experience around them. They also grow into adults who don't tell anyone of the brutal behavior they witness around them.
I think of these early childhood lessons in silencing our children when stories of violence and hazing surface in the news. And these stories surface often. Stories of assault and rape as initiation into a team, stories of underage binge drinking, stories of violence, bullying, and teasing, stories of date rape and assault that go unreported, stories that sometimes end in death. Adults respond to such news with shock and disbelief. We especially wonder why the "good kids" didn't report anything to anyone.
What we really should be wondering is why we keep expecting something different in these situations when we haven't changed the messages kids receive in their formative years. Years of socialization in schools, at home and in sports have taught kids that tattling is bad and that "snitches get stitches."
These lessons are especially damaging when one considers the research from social psychology and group behavior. Experiments in group behavior and obedience show that going along with what everyone else is doing is much easier, even when people know that it's wrong and even when it endangers their own lives. But this proclivity to conform changes if there is a vocal group, no matter how small, willing to question and challenge what everyone is doing. Teaching our children to voice opposition even when most others are not doing so is critical.
There is another insight from social psychology experiments in group behavior: Authority figures can overwhelmingly shape group behavior and expectations. The question we need to ask ourselves is this: Are we going to use the authority we have as parents, teachers, coaches and mentors to tell our children to be quiet and mind their own business?
Or are we going to raise a new generation of children willing to come out of the shadows, and stand up and speak out when they see wrongdoing?
Let's stop punishing our children for "tattling," and instead encourage them to speak up. It could make all the difference in the world in someone's life--including, perhaps, their own.
Editorial on 06/04/2017