Many Students Experience Hazing in High School, Study Says

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/on-education/2009/04/17/many-students-experience-hazing-in-high-school-study-says.html

Tuesday, April 21, 2009
11:24 P.M.
Jacob Nord

Recently, a survey was conducted that suggests that high schools are not doing enough about hazing in schools. In the survey conducted by researchers at the University of Maine, 48 percent of college freshman reported that they experienced hazing in high school. The activities of said hazing ranged from “silly pranks” to fully blown drinking competitions to restrictions of social interaction. Singing and chanting in public were also mentioned as hazing activities conducted in high school. The previous survey conducted by presumably the same researchers stated that 47 percent of those surveyed experienced hazing in their high school career, not significantly different than this year’s findings meaning that either the schools have not spent enough attention on hazing and bullying or their programs are not working.

Any sane, rational person should realize that hazing is extremely amoral and should not be tolerated; the question is is how to deal with the problem. Hazing not only psychologically damages students but is counterproductive to the learning environment of schools. Many solutions have been proposed and many have failed and hazing has never entirely been able to be eradicated from schools and never will be, that however does not mean that we should not focus any energy on eradicating hazing, by all means we should focus even more energy on this problem. As somebody who has been hazed before, I think that the best solution to combat this problem is to teach students how to recognize hazing; when they are being hazed, when someone else is being hazed and when they are hazing other students. In order for us to compete in the global world, we need to make sure that we have people who are as little psychologically damaged as possible.