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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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