Ben's Bifocals Episode 1: Bullying Reimagined starring Emma McClure and Thomas Sharrock

Nicholas and Anjali host the podcast "Ben's Bifocals" for the Pennsylvania Post. In their first episode, they discuss modern bullying with Emma McClure and Thomas Sherrick. Emma's article focuses on the expanded definition of bullying, while Thomas disagrees and believes in building people up instead of tearing them down. They also discuss their motivations for writing the articles and their definitions of bullying. They later answer specific questions about their pieces. Hello and welcome to Ben's Bifocals, the Pennsylvania Post's very own podcast platform. I am your host, Nicholas Skola, and I'm Anjali. Today we're going to kick off our podcast with a discussion between two of our editorial writers, Emma McClure and Thomas Sherrick. Emma is a freshman in the college studying criminology from Columbus, Georgia. Emma is also the social IV editor here at the Pennsylvania Post. Thomas is a sophomore in the college studying international relations and francophone, Italian, and German studies from Winchester in the United Kingdom, and he is also the arts and cultures editor for the Pennsylvania Post. Welcome to the podcast, Emma and Thomas, we are very happy to have you here for our first episode. Thank you for having us. Thank you so much for having us. Of course. So you guys both recently wrote articles about modern bullying, and whether or not the stronger response we have to bullying today, as opposed to, say, our parents' generation, is beneficial to younger generations. So Emma, could you start us off by telling us a little bit about what your article was about and your take on the issue? Yeah, absolutely. So my article was about the call to quote-unquote bring back bullying, which is mostly kind of like a colloquialism and a joke, but there is a more serious backing behind it in that we've really expanded what we mean when we say bullying. Historically, bullying has always referred to a power dynamic, and oftentimes the threat of physical harm and severe emotional harassment, and I wanted to be extremely clear that that is not at all what my article is promoting, but rather the fact that we've expanded the idea of what bullying is so far beyond this, to where anything that might sound remotely judgmental, mean, or insensitive, we now are very ready to deem bullying, when in reality it is more of a social correction. Children are not always the most articulate, and a lot of the things that they say can come across as very mean or insensitive simply because they don't have the ability to eloquently and sensitively word everything. So we might think that they're being mean when they say, that's so weird, but really they're correcting behaviors that they are able to recognize as deviant from the social norms and the standards for how children in their own age group should behave, and when we tell people that it's not okay to correct socially deviant behaviors, it leads to more deviant behaviors down the road, and ultimately to an inability to recognize social norms, which is something that's very important for future success. Awesome. And Tom, can you share a little bit about your piece? Yeah, I'd love to. So, I mean, the first thing I want to say is just to really pick up on the prompt, which was that these are pieces about modern bullying, and I think while the piece that I've written addresses the world today and where bullying sits in society, I think that the definition of bullying is fairly stable and has been for a long period. So I would define bullying as something that is targeted and repetitive. So I really took my article and took it as a response to what Emma wrote. I felt that the term of social correction felt warringly fascist, social Darwinistic, because I really think that the way that we help people develop successful, strong bases of character and of social behavior is by building them up instead of breaking them down. So that's kind of where I took my piece from to begin with. I mean, if you all want to go read it again, then that would also be very highly encouraged. Thank you. Yeah, thank you both for sharing. We also have some specific questions that we'll get into later, but before we do that, we want to hear a little bit about your writing process. So Emma, if you wouldn't mind sharing first what were your motivations behind writing the article and what were some challenges you encountered during the process? Yeah, actually, I think it's a really funny story how Thomas and I wound up writing against one another for these side-by-sides, because I actually did not propose to bring back Bullying Peace. It was an anonymous pitch, and Thomas saw the pitch in our tracking sheet and sent out a message to all the editors asking what it was about, and we got into just a casual conversation about it and somehow wound up writing pieces against one another. And I thought that we both had really interesting kind of ideas about it, both of us ourselves having been the victims of some kind of modern bullying in our childhood, if I'm not mistaken. I think we talked about that. So for me, the main challenge was kind of coming up with where to get started on it since I wasn't the one who proposed it, but once I got started, I felt like there was a really interesting idea to discuss with the idea of social correction and how we have changed our definition of bullying over time when I started looking at definitions of bullying in different sources like family blog posts versus what it's defined as in laws and on government websites. There's a very interesting divergence that's only occurred very recently, and that's where I got started with it. Very cool. Thomas touched on it a little bit, but could you both provide us with a definition or your definition of what bullying constitutes? Sure. Do you want to go first, Thomas? Yeah, I can take that. So yeah, like I said earlier, bullying for me is something that's targeted and repetitive. Kind of encompassed within that is the idea that this is negative behavior perpetrated against someone. Okay. Yeah. I don't disagree with either of your points. The definition that I use in my piece is from StopBullying.gov, which of course is a government website, and the definitions they provide is unwanted aggressive behavior among school-age children that involves a real or perceived power imbalance. The behavior is repeated or has the potential to be repeated over time. And I think most legal definitions, including the various state laws and county school district statements on the issue, also similarly emphasize power imbalances and physical harm or the threat thereof as the key characteristics of bullying, and I think that's really important to emphasize when you're talking about it. Okay. So now we're going to get into some specific questions. We have some questions tailored to both of your pieces. Those are with Thomas. Yeah. Do you think that all criticism by peers should be considered bullying? Absolutely not. 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I think as society continues to change and move towards accepting people, the idea there of social correction will also continue to change with it. Again, I think it's more of a behavioral issue. If you're behaving in ways that are very deviant, indicative of difficulties becoming accustomed with social norms, then there's something that students can do there as far as saying that's not normal. I think that's really the extent of where I'm going with it. With regard to social norms, you obviously said that social norms change over time. What do you think are the most important social norms that Gen Z should be inculcated with? The most important social norms that Gen Z should be inculcated with. Okay. I think a lot of it ties directly back into socialization, like learning how to have conversations and act in a very rudimentary way, how people are expected to behave. Some of the examples that I mentioned in my article are, and these are not at all to call any individuals out as these are the only examples, but two of the ideas that I put out there in my article were warrior cats, kids, and wolf kids, because those are two of the very common examples that I hear in day-to-day life when people talk about the idea of bringing back bullying as just a part of them, because these are groups that when you talk about them, you're talking about people who are not acting as humans are expected to act, that are trying to emulate animalistic behaviors, who are you know, when you're hissing at other kids in class, that's very much not socialized behavior, and if that behavior isn't corrected, you're going to have a very hard time adapting to the workforce, which very much does not care about how you individually feel, it cares about how you work, and when you go into things like networking, which is very prominent here, you need to be able to know that things like hissing at people is not a normative behavior, and I think any kind of typical social interaction like that is what's really important to be inculcated, especially since these are the kinds of trends that have been more prominent in our generation. So for the behaviors that you mentioned, do you think that what you're calling social correction is more, would sort of expedite the process of the correction rather than just time, because it's not something that we necessarily see for many years after I was at elementary school, but even if it does happen, do you think that social correction through bullying in this way is necessary for it to change? Well, I think the main reason that we don't see it very often past elementary school is because by the time you reach fifth grade, most people are corrected in those kinds of behaviors. The examples that I've given are more prominent in younger children, but then as you continue to grow and mature, and the majority of your age group ages out of those kinds of behaviors and is able to look back and say that's not normal for this group, this is against our norms, and they correct it. That's why we don't see it continuing on. And of course, I have to admit that this is anecdotal evidence. There's not a whole lot of very strong research into these kinds of trends, especially considering how current they are. So this is all anecdotal, but I think as we've moved to become a lot more accepting of this, and we've started telling teachers and peers or students that they need to accept everything, we're seeing it progress more and more and more, and I have seen a lot of examples of this very recently, of students as far up as eighth grade who think that they're cats, and their teachers have been told, you know, you can't correct this behavior, you have to accept it, and so they're sitting on the floor of their classroom rolling around balls of yarn, and I've seen kids have breakdowns because there were, quote unquote, too many humans around, and these are human children who haven't been corrected, haven't ever been told you're a human too, these are the norms that you are going to abide by to be accepted, and as a result, these beliefs and these behaviors persist, and then when people start having breakdowns because nobody has corrected it by that age, you're seeing real emotional damage, and that's only going to worsen, and if you are having breakdowns because there are too many people around simply because you haven't been told you're a human, these are your norms, you're not going to find success, or it's going to be much harder for you to find success when you get out into the working world, because the working world is significantly less accepting than a very controlled environment like school, where your administration, your school district can say, this is no longer acceptable for you to correct, you have to be accepting of everything. The working world is not like that, and these are going to be issues that continue to pop up if people don't start to say, okay, we have to have some level of norms for people to abide by. To switch over to Thomas, in light of the fact that roughly 20% of children report being bullied sometime during their school years, how can young people learn to accept differences better? Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think accepting differences firstly comes from a place in which we find ourselves in environments where there are lots of differences. That really, I feel like, goes in a very different direction for me, which is to talk about diversity and inclusion, which is maybe not the central topic of these two papers, but it's an idea which I feel very strongly about. I think that it's very important to have diverse communities, especially where children are being brought up, because that's what allows people to understand and engage with different cultures. That would be the first thing that I would try to perpetuate or bring to young people. Secondly, I think in order to be accepting of differences, you have to be able to understand, firstly, the idea of individualism, which Emma's touched upon a little bit, and to be able to accept that you also might be different from other people. That means not trying to decide, here are social norms which have been prescribed, we must abide by these, but trying to develop behaviors, perhaps in line with those around you, in line with maybe the culture which you come from, and developing those with yourself. I think, really, it's something that's taught by engaging with people from different cultures, from people who have different backgrounds, and that's how you accept differences. What is one critique that both of you have for each other's pieces? I'm happy to jump in with one first. The one that I struggle with is really the premise of Emma's argument, which is that there are social norms which we can prescribe. The problem I have with that is someone has to prescribe those social norms, someone has to say here is what's normal. I feel like there inherently is a power dynamic that I'm personally not very comfortable with, where someone is instilled with the power to say this is what's normal. To add to that, I feel like this is where bullying has its stronghold, is where different groups of people decide something is normal and something is not normal. Firstly, that might not resonate with everyone. For example, often there are, I'm just drawing on my own experience, in communities there's often a minority of LGBTQ plus people, and so therefore the majority of people might decide that that kind of behavior is not natural. I'm kind of uncomfortable with the fact that someone is given the power to decide what social norms are. Awesome. I think you draw upon a really interesting idea, but I have to say that I disagree with you about there being something inherently wrong with the idea of a power dynamic because the person who's prescribing these social norms is not a person but society as a whole, and society is continuing to change all the time. I think what you're drawing upon is really the role that activism plays. Over time we've seen the way society has changed to accept different norms, different values, and we see that reflected in our laws and in how the Constitution has been amended and reinterpreted over time. This is something that's ever changing and ongoing, and I think that over time you'll find that the same people who were once considered against the social norm now no longer are, and what you're moving towards is just activism and promoting individualism, promoting differences, and we've seen that all throughout history. I think no matter what, there's always going to be a power difference between an individual and society as a whole, but when enough individuals can stand up and say, this is bad, we need to change this, I'm a person too, which is true. You are a person too. Everybody is. When enough individuals stand up and say that, you see change, and those social norms are going to continue to change because they're not prescribed by one individual, they're prescribed by society. To respond to that briefly, I feel like the way that that argument sits with me is it says that 200 years ago when being gay was wrong, it was wrong in that time, and we just accept that. I feel like there's a problem with that because, at least from my perspective, I would say there is homophobia is always wrong throughout all of time, no matter what. I feel like the idea that social norms can develop in such a way and be prescribed in absolute terms means that something that I like, one of my beliefs is that that is okay can be not okay in one time and okay in another. I don't really agree with that. I think also, to add to that, there are some of the behaviors which were touched on in your article. I feel like for some people, those of us who might identify as introverts and struggle to be around lots of humans, that's something which I would say is I would definitely accept that behavior. I feel like that's something that a lot of people struggle with. It's just to expect that to develop over time when maybe a minority of people struggle with that instead of trying to understand what they're going through and support them in that. I find that difficult to understand, but I appreciate it. Thank you. I also want to clarify, the person who broke down about being around too many humans, not an introvert, didn't believe they were a human. I think that's an important distinction. As an introvert myself, I get not wanting to be around people all the time. I see that and I still believe that there's more value in trying to understand what that person was going through and trying to learn more about where these feelings come from than just deciding that they're wrong, point blank. I agree with you entirely that we should be focusing on that because there's clearly something going on there that needs to be addressed, but at the same time, there's also some value in saying, to some degree, you're a human. These are norms. I also think that there should have been some kind of parent intervention, teacher intervention, somebody there caring for that person and working with them through that because clearly that's an issue that needs some help. I think we can both agree on that. I'm going to go ahead and choose one. Critique for Thomas' piece. It would probably be the idea that victims of bullying have been told that what they've experienced is character building. I don't necessarily think that's true and I don't think that when you see something like what I've been writing about with social corrections, I don't really think that that is something people are told is character building. I think for most of time that wouldn't have ever been deemed bullying and that's the root of what I'm writing about is that this wasn't considered bullying. It doesn't really fit into the legal definitions of bullying that we've always seen throughout time. It's been kind of a weakening of the definition and colloquially we've expanded it to include more things. The people who experience this kind of quote unquote bullying or social correction aren't really told that it's character building because it's not something that you're going to continue to push against. The entire idea is to socialize people and just bring them back to norms to help them catch up with the rest of their group. Usually that isn't really considered character building. I wouldn't say that that's very accurate to this kind of thing that I was writing about. To respond briefly to that, I think at least for me bullying has always been associated with character building. I think the idea of curtailing the definition of bullying and trying to decide where there's a point where here's where bullying ends and here's where it's acceptable to perpetrate that sort of behavior to people, I think it's just difficult to try and find that line. I personally am more in favor of expanding that definition to include more of the negative behaviors which hurt people on the day-to-day even if they're struggling with things which we might not be able to understand immediately. I feel like I always come from a place where support is better than trying to take people down but coming at people front on. I completely agree with you also that support is always the better answer. I don't think that being mean is ever the right answer. I just think that sometimes we are quick to deem things as mean that aren't maliciously intended but rather just aren't eloquently articulated. Can I jump in really quick? From research that I've done, roughly 11.5% of kids start school without proper behavioral skills. With that information, do you think that maybe this problem can be solved by having mandatory classes for younger students in order to inculcate some of those social skills? Mandatory classes to inculcate social skills to me sounds a little bit extreme because socialization is an extremely normal process that we all go through and just being around your peers is very important for that. Of course a lot of students are going to start school without all of the social skills already there because for the most part people just aren't around other people in their own age group as much outside of school. School-age children get the majority of their socialization with their peers during school hours. I think a lot of that is really taken care of during school, especially because your earliest years in school, while they of course are very formative to basic building block skills, you're learning the very beginnings of math and how to read and write. You're also learning all of the very beginnings of how to interact with other people in your own age group and those are also skills that continue to build upon one another. I think that's a big reason that we emphasize so much things like recess and getting to talk at lunch. That's why having lunch is a big punishment. It's something that we all need. We need to socialize with other individuals and that is something that comes with going to school. I don't really think that classes are necessary for that just because being in school in general gets you there. I think I'd also like to touch on it. I think that that comes from a place where there is a much larger societal problem. For example, I spend about four hours a week volunteering at an elementary school down the road. The further you go into West Philadelphia, the more likely you are to see children who come from slightly difficult backgrounds, parents who maybe have been involved with crime, parents who have to work 24 hours a day somehow to earn income, which then doesn't pay for all of their food. I think some of the socializing that we're talking about, which might normally happen in families, can't happen because governments don't support families well enough. Be that people who are struggling to find jobs. That could be people who are coming out of being in prison and need help finding their feet. We need to approach that question specifically from a much broader context of trying to support parents in picking up children and making sure that there are, for example, much better paid teachers throughout all of the countries in the world who can provide and are incentivized to provide that extra care to students as well as supporting parents as much as we can. Would you say that the standard of what constitutes bullying should be different for younger children who might not be aware that their criticisms are indeed bullying? I definitely don't. I think in the same way that Ella is saying that we should have these social norms and they should be given to children from a very young age, I conversely believe that the definition of bullying is constant. There's no change depending on how old you are and that we should immediately instill children with an understanding of what bullying is and why it's such a negative behavior. So I don't think that it changes depending on what age you are. Thomas, I think you hit off something really interesting there that I think we should have these social norms. And I think you make a really interesting case saying that social norms are bad, but we can both agree that social norms exist, right? Right, right, right, right. That's the basis of my argument. It's not simply that social norms should exist, but rather they do exist and they're extremely important and they've been identified as a key player in future success. The Harvard Business Review put out something a little while ago that I referenced in my article. I think they said 80% of employers use social norms as an extremely important skill for success in the workplace. We can't deny that these social norms exist. And the argument that you're making against social norms, while I think it's an interesting one, I also think it's completely unachievable. In today's society, social norms have always been a part of society and I don't really think that there's a way to get rid of them unless we just blow up the world and start from scratch. I don't think that it's really a feasible idea to get rid of the social norms and that's why I think it's really important that we continue to emphasize individuality and diversity and we continue to emphasize activism and moving towards a more accepting society while also recognizing that social norms are important today. I think that's a really interesting point. One of the things that I like to pick up on there is that I think that social norms exist differently in different spaces and in different cultures. I feel like one of the premises for your argument, which I think is works within the space that you're trying to articulate it, that we are all destined to go into business and we're all destined to go into the workspace and there are norms which are expected of us in the workspace. I feel like this comes from a place where obviously we're a pen. A lot of us, 95% of us want to go on to work at Bain or BCG or whatever it happens to be but that's definitely not everyone's dream and I feel like these quote unquote social deviants, I feel like the way that they behave is valuable but maybe not in the space that we are ourselves trying to get into. I feel like that's why I believe that understanding them and trying to find out where their skills and their positive attributes fit best is more important. You're completely right. That's one of the reasons that I do agree with you that individualism is such an important part of our society. Not everybody's going to go into consulting and finance. I recognize that I did write my article in a very pen-centric kind of way. I referenced networking and the Harvard Business Review. Outside of what we are thinking of when we say the workplace with consulting and that kind of field, social norms are important in our everyday interactions with other individuals. They give us a baseline of how you treat other people and that is something that expands so far beyond just typical Wharton graduate business and consulting and finance and law and all of those kinds of fields. If you're going to work in the restaurant industry, in any kind of customer service, if you're going to work in sales or you want to run a small business or marketing or literally anything under the sun, you're bound to some degree by social norms. Of course, it's important that we let people be individuals. I don't think that everybody needs to be exactly the same. We should absolutely be promoting people going into fields where individual characteristics and interests are going to be best suited when they're able to shine but we also still need to be able to interact with other people because we live in a society. I agree and I would say that just to tack on to that, that some people maybe when their style of interaction doesn't work with how we interact with other people doesn't necessarily mean that they can't interact well with other humans or people who share the same identity that they do. I feel the social correction that is being advertised, which I think comes from, I think you're coming at it from definitely a place of well-meaning, is something that if you have behaviors which are inappropriate for working in a restaurant, then you won't be hired by the restaurant manager. I feel like that's their decision to deal with that when it gets to that stage and not their peers' responsibility to decide which social norms should be corrected and at which point for people who are in that class, for example. But on the alternative side of that, do you think that the peers have a responsibility to always accept behaviors no matter how deviant they might be from the norms? Do you think peers should always, no matter what, accept behaviors that are off-putting to them or so far against that they don't strike them as befitting to be friends? Going back to just the ideas that I put forth in my article of if you're howling, do you think that peers have a responsibility to be friends with the student that's howling on the playground? Yeah, I definitely don't think that anyone has to be friends with anyone else. That is never something that I would advertise. I think we choose our own friends. I do think that behavior at which someone might personally decide doesn't fit their values, their social norms, is something that they should try to accept in this space and let, if it's a classroom, the teacher deal with in the way that they see fit, the way that they've been trained to deal with that instead of fixing it themselves and trying to take it upon them to do that. Like I said, I think no one's forcing you to be friends with the person that you don't share the same ideas with. But I definitely think that accepting them in that space as who they are is important. Let me echo something that Emma said. Do you feel if someone, let's say age five, is hissing and another five-year-old goes up to them and criticizes them for that, does that constitute bullying? I think it would constitute bullying if it was repeated and targeted. So that's how I interpret the term. I think if this person is hissing at someone in a malicious way, then that behavior itself could also constitute some form of bullying or harassment. I also feel like if you're in a classroom, it's not your responsibility to deal with that. You go to the authority figure and the authority figure will deal with it in the way that they've been trained to do so. Got it. And a question for both of you. What do you think is the role of the authority figure, of the teacher to police what constitutes bullying? I definitely am not an expert in education policy, but I have no doubt that teachers receive at least some form of training in how to deal with such situations. And so I think their responsibility really aligns with what training they've received and the remit that they've been given by their culture or their managing teacher or head teacher. I think that students are in some senses a more valuable manner of immediate social correction because, like I said, they're more engaged with one another for longer periods of time in a more one-on-one social setting than teachers. And because they're of the same age group, so they're more able to very distinctly recognize what is or is not part of the norms and standards for that age group. I think that teachers can play a really important role, especially whenever behaviors are very serious, repeated, or indicative of some kind of emotional distress or maybe a difficulty at home. I think that teachers absolutely have a role to play there in addressing those issues. But I don't think that teachers should be the primary method of that because education policy does change a lot. And something that I touched on before is that a lot of teachers now are being told, you have to accept this behavior. You cannot correct this. And that's something that's very unique and individual to different states, to different counties, to different schools even. I think there's so much difference that in a lot of ways students are more capable of recognizing and appropriately addressing those. And ideally that would be in a kind manner. Got it. Thank you. Shifting from critiques that you guys both have for each other's pieces, what's something that you appreciate about each other's work? I can definitely dive into that. I really appreciate the fact that Emma has come at this from definitely there's a place of kindness. I think that you clearly value finding yourself in a successful society and you definitely value being supported by your peers. And I think that though I disagree with your take, you're coming at this from the perspective that people should all be able to support each other and help each other reach success. So I appreciate that value even if I don't agree with the method that you're doing that in. Thank you. Very similarly, I really appreciate the emphasis that Thomas puts on kindness and acceptance. I think that's very important and I love the emphasis that you have on it there, that it's not simply just like all bullying is bad, very baseline argument. But I really appreciate how much empathy you come at it with. I think it's very important that everybody encourage kindness and respect above all else. And I completely agree with you in that kindness should be the way that everything is handled ideally. And I agree that there should never be any malicious intent behind social correction. Thank you. Thank you guys. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having us. Thank you for tuning in to Ben's Bifocals. I am your host Nicholas Skola. Catch us weekly on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you like to get your podcasts. And remember, if you disagree with us, join us. ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...