International Journal of Educational Research Open (Jan 2022)
Does school bullying show lack of effective multicultural education in the school curriculum?
Abstract
The negligence of implementing a decisive approach against bullying and victimization has caused schools and parents a lot of pain. Many scholars have argued that the school's lack of practical teaching of multicultural education can lead to an increased rate of school bullying, oppression, prejudice, assault, victimization, and discrimination, invariably causing grave catastrophes in the academic institutions such as shootings, sexual molestation, deaths, etc.The secondary data used for this current study was adopted from the Education statistics database (2015–2019) measuring specifically the issues of bullying and victimization of 6th -12th-grade students. A descriptive quantitative research methodology was applied in exploring the variables of the study, and SPSS software was applied in analyzing the data. The study revealed out of the 24,650,000 bullied and non-bullied students, male students were the most participants with 50.9%, and female students were 49.1% having the Mean, SD, and Variance for gender at 4.23, 0.223, and 0.174 respectively. For grade, Mean = 6.87, SD = 4.24, Variance = 2.54, race/ethnicity Mean = 2.97, SD = 3.05, Variance = 1.23, household income Mean = 2.7, SD = 3.86, Variance = 2.77.The result deduced that few bullied students reported their experiences due to the possible threats from the bullies. However, 20.2% of the reported bullying cases is considered abysmal given the total population of the bullied students at 4,986,000.Stringent punitive measures were highlighted by numerous scholars as means to control and eradicate assaults on the school premises. Nonetheless, multicultural practices and multicultural education were recommended as the perceived anti-dote to foster a healthy learning community that is free of victimization and oppression.In conclusion, the study posited that multicultural education practices can be a pedagogical tool to teach students the dangers of victimizing and bullying a fellow student.
