Interpersonal relationships among students

Express Tribune

23-03-2025

The writer is an educationist based in Kasur City. He can be reached at [e-mail]
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The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The pursuit of glittery but illusory grades in our educational journey so far has proved a pyrrhic victory as all other important factors – learners' mental and physical health, their social demeanor, their ability to assimilate their learning into wisdom, and quality of their interpersonal relationships – have been guillotined at the altar of starry grades and academic laurels.
The students cocooned into their comfort zone of studies fail badly to collaborate, empathise and socialise in healthy human relationships. Because education is fundamentally a social enterprise, schools must instil in students soft skills to enable them to contribute their part to the livability of society.
In 2010 the first International Conference on Interpersonal Relationships in Education was held in Colorado. It discussed interpersonal relationships as a lens to microscope educational phenomena.
Interpersonal relationships are divided into two types: acceptance and rejection. In our education system, peer rejection pervades the classroom and school premises, courtesy overemphasis on academics, limited time and space for peer interactions, and the teachers succumbing to the ostrich syndrome.
Out of many reasons for students' disengagement with the learning process at school, one is unabated intimidating peer pressure. School bullying is usually the form of rejection infesting peer relationships. School bullying is caused by taking negatively the mismatch of family background, academic performance or physical strength.
A fellow-seater is snatching the eatables or stationery of your child. Or, a bully on the block is bodyshaming your child. Relationships between diverse age groups or classes allude to child abuse. Before parents and teachers coerce the child into attending the school, first they had better look into the reasons why the child is avoiding the school. Otherwise, he will resort to quiet quitting, internalising the intimidation.
At public schools, teachers' apathy towards deteriorating interpersonal relationships has plummeted all-time low. As a first, they hush up the victims of intimidation, asking them to avoid bullies. Their nonchalance emboldens bullies. Secondly and structurally, they are helpless because government educational policies are silent on punishing or rusticating the bullies.
It is a matter of common observation that behavioural bullying precedes the physical one. Before being physical, bullies put the victims to mental torture and deterrence by trolling, threatening, calling nicknames and snatching the belongings of victims.
Private institutions value education as a merchandise. When teachers report on such pollutants to school management, the latter prefers to sweep the matter under the rug. Apathy of school management and spinelessness of teachers give the spoilers of peaceful classroom milieu the carte blanche to squeeze the space for others. Suffocation of soul is a more heinous act than torturing the body. A teacher backed up by the management can easily rein in the bullies.
Audacity and chutzpah, the early signs of bullyism, are eulogised as boldness of character, while gentleness is seen as feminine. Our students must be brought home that people who love themselves do not hurt others. The more we hate ourselves (low self-esteem), the more we want others to suffer.
Despite the myth that socialising is a centrifugal force for students, research shows that building strong peer relationships actually augments academic learning and makes it constructive and productive. Cloistered education devoid of all human interactions spawns ideological rigidity and extremist bias.
Reciprocity in supportive friendships is closely related to the alleviation of depression. Students who fail to form connections find themselves marooned and disconnected. This physical disconnect births low self-esteem, anxiety, depression and loss of purpose in life. Such students become vulnerable to bullyism either as a target or as a defence mechanism.
Schools are the first places of human diversity where students encounter people from different backgrounds, cultures and mentalities. To protect this diversity is vital in today's globalised world. Teachers must involve students in healthy interpersonal relationships. They must not let a symbiotic relationship between students turn into commensalism wherein one gets benefit while the other neither help nor harm. Nor it be parasitism wherein one gets benefit at the cost of the other. Rather, it must be mutualism which benefits both.
Sometimes, when students change schools because of their sour interpersonal relationships or external reasons, they face unaccommodating and unwelcoming attitude in the form of neophobia in their new habitat. A teacher must acclimatise the newcomer to the new environment by building a rapport with her.
Three major relationship sources sustain students' academic and non-academic lives: parents, teachers and peers. Regarding the persons with whom students share their problems, the sustained research reveals that most of the students, especially girls, consulted friends and adults. Boys usually do not consult others about their problems and, when they do, they only talk to their friends. Students who have no one to consult are least satisfied with their school life.
Studies have shown that the old student-monitor class management paradigm and the new student-prefect class management prove counterproductive for students' interpersonal relationships. Nowadays, one or two students are assigned the duty to manage the classroom in the incidental absence of the teacher. The selected students are even given the carte blanche to punish the miscreant students to discipline them.
This is an unwholesome practice because it develops friction and fracas between students. Sometimes, these chosen students victimise other students out of vendetta, or to humiliate the meek ones. Such students vested with "absolute power" gravitate towards behaving like bullies in the class. Class management through proxy administration is more deleterious for the learning process.
In the absence of a controlling force, human nature by default gravitates towards evil as we see in the novel, Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. At the end of the novel, the good boys, after they fail to outdo the overbearing evil group, are saved by the naval officer.