What schools need

The Daily Telegraph has asked how we can reduce bullying and peer pressure in schools today. Here's the mail I sent them at "Have Your Say":

Yes - school should be every bit as much about learning for life as learning Pythagorous' Theory and who won the Wars of the Roses.

In my schooldays (1970/80s) it was still sadly more about the latter. I also suffered terrible bullying. I loved learning but I hated going to school. I always knew I wanted to become a teacher. Yet few of my own teachers saw it in their job description to help us manage our teenage emotions. We were left to fight it out ourselves. And that was at an all-white, very middle-class private school in one of the loveliest cities in Britain!

No, we need neither experts nor pyschologists, nor meddlingy nanny-state study groups, commissioned to work out what’s ”wrong” with today's youth, who suffer, I believe, more from peer pressure than public-school-style bullying. We just need a bit more commonsense. From everyone.