A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline and Other Lessons

On bullying, discipline, and power in school and beyond.

What does it mean to be a bully? What does it feel like to be bullied—to be a victim, a pariah, a scapegoat? What are the techniques, patterns, and languages of bullying?

Intermingling memoir with literary criticism, philosophy, and sociology, A Physical Education attempts to answer these questions. A highly original examination of the uses and abuses of power in the education system, it explores how bullying and discipline function, how they differ from each other, and how they all too often overlap.

Taylor interweaves his own experiences with reflections on well-known literary representations of bullying and school discipline, alongside sociological, psychological, and philosophical theories of power. He discusses the transition from corporal punishment to psychological forms of discipline that took place in the UK in the 1980s, and he also investigates the divergences and convergences of physical, psychological, and linguistic bullying.

Above all, A Physical Education sets out to understand bullying and discipline from an experiential perspective: what these things feel like from "within," rather than "above," for all those involved. There are horrors, tragedies, and cyclical traumas, certainly—but there are also absurdities, contradictions, grotesque comedies. Sometimes, beneath the Gradgrindian tyranny, there is trickery, laughter. And sometimes there are chinks in The Wall, through which other possible worlds might be glimpsed.