Filip Vodvářka: Utopia: no signs of social exclusion on primary schools
The concept of social exclusion and inclusion is one of the very important topics in the social sciences. Let’s think, how would you explain social exclusion to someone who has never heard about this before? You may come up with many ideas about socially excluded people or groups like people without homes, drug addicts, ethnic groups or mentally ill people or people with psychical disadvantages. If you are very smart, you may even think about wealthy people around you. The truth is, that we do not have to go too far to find examples of social exclusion. If we remember about our school’s day, we may come to conclusion that we were, at least, witnesses of social exclusion.
In this blog contribution I will share with you my personal experiences with social exclusion in primary school. Just to clarify, it was in 6th grade and I was fifteen years old. In this example I would like to show you, how can be dealt with social exclusion and how to overcome, possibly, cruel memories.
When I was in primary school I experienced social exclusion on myself. I was on of the student who did not belong to any of groups made throughout the years. Just to explain, it was of one those groups which were created by “cool” kinds and where everyone wanted to belong. However, the importance of “in-groups” or “out-groups” is not the key question here, even though, not being part of “in-group” can affect or can start the social exclusion, in my case, I believe it had a crucial affect.
The reason why I experienced social exclusion was bullying. The entire class, especially boys, were calling me gay. In the beginning it was just something which they would mention once or twice in a day. The trouble was that I have taken this mocking too personally. The result was dreadful. After week I could not even go to the class with my classmates because every single time they saw me, they were laughing at me. It went even too far that after some time, classmates started to psychically bully me. In the end I had to spend all my break time outside the class.
There are many strong factors which can affect the ending of social exclusion, if we are talking about exclusion in the schools. One o them is the intervention from the teacher’s side. However, in my case, I knew that I could not tell the teacher about my problem because it would even more affect my position. Luckily, I could count on another strong factor – the support of family. After telling my parents about my situation, they decided that I should leave the school and find different institute.
I lived in Ostrava, so I thought that nobody will recognize me as the “bullied boy” in different school, because of big size of this city. However, as I found out, it was not this case. Some of the students were friends of the boys from previous school. After while I had to realize that, eventually, that I will have to carry with me the consequences of the previous exclusion because I will be always tagged as a “bullied boy.”
Nevertheless, I think there are many factors which can overcome the social exclusion, if we focus on social exclusion in the class and its later affects on the individual. One of them can be, as I mentioned before, strong family support. It can play a crucial role in overcoming the consequences of social exclusion. The next factor can be community, in which the individual can identify himself. For example, the catholic communities, where nobody judges others and when all the individuals are thriving to achieve better live by being open and friendly to each other. One of other possibilities is to find someone influential enough to make the “affected” individual to overcome his problem in the spiritual way.