Brick-gate, the powerful and mostly vitriolic reaction to a woman mad enough to proclaim in one of Britain's biggest bastions of sexism that she is cursed by being so damn good-looking, started making me think about my students for a number of reasons. We have all read lamentations about the desperately low self-image of teenage girls, leading to the perils of anorexia, self-harm and promiscuity. But when a woman comes and tells us she's beautiful and she knows it, the world throws up its hands in horror.
Personally, I am fairly horrified by Brick and her attitude. It's all very well to be pretty (and even confident), but you don't need to be arrogant enough affirm it to all and sundry. Leave that to the hordes of men (apparently) slavering over you at every opportunity. However, the most disturbing thing that the whole storm threw up for me is that the Internet has decided that it is OK for fairly nice, normally polite people to hurl vicious insults at each other publicly and without repercussions. This is incredibly relevant to us as teachers, as we and our students navigate a world increasingly dominated by computer screens.
Celebrities, the general public and, of course, journalists have weighed in on Samantha Brick's much-vaunted appearance, with comments ranging from the vaguely amusing (‘Dear DM, sorry but you have obviously printed the wrong pictures for this article…’) to the frankly abhorrent. We might say she deserves it. She certainly does't seem to mind the publicity. But the fact is, it's not just people like Brick who are on the recieving end of this kind of open internet abuse. It's everyone.
Just yesterday, Gabby Logan tweeted about the kind of sexist abuse she is dished out on a daily basis. Instructions to get off the screen and into the kitchen were one example of the kind of charmingly phrased advice she has to ignore on a daily basis. But, even though it’s no excuse for the people who spend their online lives insulting her, she's an intelligent, successful and presumably resilient adult, with the added advantage of a husband who could presumably crush anyone who dared say it to her face.
But what if it's a young, easily influenced and possibly secretive person who is being constantly taunted? What if it's a child?
There was a boy at my first PGCE placement school, let's call him Kenny. Kenny's mother uploaded a video of him performing in his living room to YouTube, much in the same way, presumably, as Justin Bieber's mother did five years ago. Unfortunately, Kenny was no Justin. The video of him squeaking along to ‘Beautiful’ went viral (at least around a few estates in South London) and Kenny was vilified on Facebook and the ubiquitous BBM for weeks.
We might say Kenny, or his naive mother, was to blame for the online bullying that followed. But we have to ask ourselves, what makes our students feel they have the right to get away with incredible cruelty on social networking sites that they know they would never get away with at school and, I hope, in society? Perhaps it is the heat of the moment, perhaps it is the anonymity of the medium, perhaps it is safety in (virtual) numbers.
Whatever it is, it is wrong, it is dangerous, and as we have seen this week, it carries great momentum. And it does not help that public figures are doing it all the time over Twitter. Celebrities have weighed in publicly to insult Samantha Brick’s looks. Not her attitude or her opinions – just her face. Charming. Online mud-slinging seems to have become a bit of a national occupation for the great and the good, and it is not showing our children any kind of example about name-calling and bullying. I am glad that the teachers in North Wales were forced to quit their jobs for their Facebook insults of the children and parents at their school. The fact that they could have been so unbelievably stupid as well as insensitive shows us how little people think about the consequences of their online actions. They deserve to be punished for openly mocking their students on a public forum, regardless of however and whoever they intended their comments to be construed by.
The fact that a typed word lasts forever, for anyone to see, is something we need to impress upon everyone, including our students. It is much easier to smooth over a verbal incident than to deal with a 'cuss' that is there for posterity.
Of course, the rise of the Internet is a wonderful thing for education and for the world in general. But there's no excuse to use it as an excuse to say something you'd never say in person. And we need to show our children that as well as tell them.
