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Gifts from The Morning Star
Class exercise
JOHN GREEN recommends an entertaining, if harsh and instructive, study of bullying, discipline and power dynamics in schools and at work
LABORATORY OF BULLYING: A scene from Ken Loach's Kes [IMDb]

A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline and Other Lessons 
Jonathan Taylor, Goldsmiths Press, £23

 

THIS is an unusual memoir-cum-educational treatise, examining bullying and power dynamics in schools and at work, both at an institutional and individual level, as experienced by the author. He relates first-hand the different forms bullying takes throughout his childhood into adulthood and what it reveals about the culture and society we live in.

Taylor says of this book: “I want to explore the hall of mirrors that is criticism and autobiography... I want to explore the uses and abuses of educational power from a subjective, rather than pseudo-objective, perspective.” 

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