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Can babies teach school kids not to bully?
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Toronto Star (One of Toronto's leading newspapers)
Posted: November 13th, 2012
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/1105553--porter-can-...
Teacher Raya patrols a group of giggly kindergarten students, looking each so deeply in the eye that many squirm and bashfully reach for her toes. Her father carries her in his arms. Raya is not quite five months old. Shes teaching them about being kind and how to talk about their feelings so that later, they dont terrorize each other. Teacher Raya, as they call her, is a volunteer with Roots of Empathy, [Canada's] oldest and largest anti-bullying program. Kids in 900 classrooms around the province [of Ontario] are taking similar lessons from similarly beautiful babies. So are kids in New Zealand, Seattle, the Isle of Man. . . Its such a simple concept: if kids learn to empathize with babies the most vulnerable humans then their antennae for kindness will be turned on. Put another way, once they learn to worry about a babys feelings, theyll start to worry about everyones. Since kindergarten teacher Mary Gordon launched it 16 years ago, the programs effects have been analyzed by dozens of academics. Most of them conclude the program fosters pro-social behaviour and dampens aggression. A Manitoba study published earlier this year concluded the program cut student fights in half immediately and continued to promote optimal social contact three years later. Its one thing to legislate against bullying, as Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty has done with his Safe Schools Act. Its quite another to stop kids from tormenting each other in the first place (the province has provided about $2 million annually [for] Roots of Empathy since 2009).
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