(Cont'd)

Zoe, while highly imaginative and verbal, is also both aggressive and fearful. The combination soon has some of the boys teasing her at recess while other weaker members of the class also become targets. Play becomes increasingly disrupted by power struggles, bullying, and teasing. "When they are most vulnerable and least confident of the positions they strive for," Katch observes, "each of these children is most determined to keep a newer child out. Must exclusion, I wonder, be the price of a secure place in the group?"

As part of her quest, Katch interviews kids from a program for troubled high school students. The stories and insights of these teenagers‹a punk girl named Ashley, a boy continually beat up by his peers, a girl of mixed race who has opted out of groups entirely‹slowly transforms Katch's thinking and her classroom work. She sees, for instance, how her tendency to identify with the child who is being teased discourages dialogue among the children who might learn from one another.

Katch's exploration is filtered through her own painful memories of exclusion, including the intense teasing she endured at the hands of her older brother and the awkwardness she felt at school when she didn't seem to fit in with the group. "I still dream that I am at a cocktail party," she reflects, "finally looking great in a slinky black dress, only to look down and realize I am wearing the red tie shoes of my childhood, caught again in the act of pretending to belong."

Ultimately Katch sees that the only way to address social cruelty is to create moral schools in which the school community invests in an ongoing process to clarify its expectations for how people treat one another. Adults, says Katch, must work to help children develop language to talk about their feelings, even seemingly unacceptable ones. "It is the essential, ongoing conversations with adults and with children about what is fair and what is moral that will, over time," she writes, "help children resist the impulse to tease and bully and will help them have the language and the conviction to resist it when it does occur."

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