It will be a small comfort for the grade 10 pupil who was assaulted by eight boys at Milnerton High School that October is “National Bullying Prevention Awareness” month.
As the school scrambles to slam the stable door shut on a long-departed horse, and while education officials wring their hands and issue too-late “we need to” platitudes, it’s worth pointing out that what happened to that unfortunate pupil is not bullying but straightforward assault.
He was, according to the videos filmed by his peers who did nothing to help, beaten with hockey sticks, a belt, and perhaps a hosepipe, all while being mocked amid cheers and exhortations from onlookers.
Parliament’s select committee on education, sciences & the creative industries stepped right into the fray with a statement that claims the boy was beaten with “golf bats [sic] and pangas”. The committee blamed the school and its governing body’s “laissez faire attitude”, which, it said, could “only” be motivated by racism.
It is difficult to refrain from being sarcastic on hearing experts say schools are microcosms of society. Who knew? But golf bats and pangas aside, the education committee both makes and misses the point.
Schools are bubbling swamps of intrigue and jostling for survival, micro-towns with their hierarchies, leaders and proles, the popular, the invisible and the oppressed, and all those trying to survive low-grade psychopathy otherwise known as “school tradition” and get out of there alive.
It seems highly unlikely that teachers and the administration do not know what is going on. If, as some accounts claim, the Milnerton incident was part of a wider “initiation”, then why has it not been stepped on?
School bullying and toxic locker rooms are neither new nor a Lucky Country speciality.
But schools are supposed to be safe places for everyone in them, not just for the “heroes” who are fond of punching down.
