Once upon a time, schools were like tiny societies with their own natural order, as neatly balanced as a tightrope walker’s act. There were jocks, nerds, bullies, and bookworms all coexisting in their little educational ecosystems. But then, in a well-intentioned bid to create a utopia of kindness, bullies were bulldozed off the playgrounds. The result? The pendulum swung too far, leaving our schools with more tension than a detective show cliffhanger.
The narrative we so dearly held—that bullies are to blame for all school evils—has been turned on its head. It is an uncomfortable truth today’s progressives conveniently sidestep. Now, the evidence is clearer than a midday movie matinee: Bullies, not nerds, have played significant roles in school violence, contradicting the myth of the misfit nerd plotting behind notebooks.
Research shows that many school shooters were, in fact, bullies themselves, not merely victims of bullying. For instance, both Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, the infamous Columbine shooters, were known to have bullied others. The evidence suggests a complex relationship where bullying and violence often overlap, contrary to the idea that removing bullies led to increased violence in schools.
And then there’s the nostalgia for those classic movies where bullies played the rough-around-the-edges characters. Take Biff from “Back to the Future.” He was a well-known bully character in the trilogy. Though he wasn’t maintaining societal order, Biff certainly represented the kind of hierarchical social dynamics that can contribute to cycles of intimidation rather than stability.
In this upside-down world, once full of jocks and pranks, past-time bullies were far from heroes. They did not serve as adherence officers for norms. Instead, bullying tends to foster environments of public humiliation and antagonism. A little balance, after all, might have kept the peace better than any bully-imposed hierarchy or nostalgia for an imagined past. Perhaps we shouldn’t have been so quick to paint a romantic picture of bullies as keepers of any sort of social order.
