Making children suffer our greatest shame

Schools are giant shame machines and are devastating for many children. Photo / Getty Images

The fear of social rejection is a potent form of stress.

Sometimes when I'm stuck, I turn to my ragged purple notebook. I carry it around with me and scribble random lines in it. "All our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling." (Blaise Pascal). On a different page: "In the throes of physical anguish even the most rational philosopher finds himself outreasoned by his feelings." (Dr Peter Latham, 1830s). And, "The main thing in life is not to be afraid to be human." (Spanish musician Pablo Casals who died in 1973. He also said, "Music will save the world.")

Other bits are harder to decipher. "I am an animal in a cage, what kind of animal and what kind of cage?" I also make lists. Find out what "lapidary" means. Look up Social Evaluative Threat (SET): is that like worrying people are sneering at your cheap shoes?

And there are questions. "Is it hard to let go of people even if they make you feel wretched, despairing or confused?" I have no idea where that came from. But as Joan Didion writes in On Keeping a Notebook, the point is never to keep an accurate factual record of what you have been doing or thinking. I haven't kept a diary since I was 10. ("Had an awful ballet lesson, then rissoles for dinner and watched Close to Home and Warship." 1977.) The most recent pages of my purple notebook are all about the same thing: shame.

It turns out Social Evaluative Threat (SET) is the feeling of shame that others will judge who you are as inferior or inadequate.

Scientists have found the threat of social rejection to be the most widespread and potent form of stress for human beings. I feel as though my entire life has been one long attempt to get over this kind of killer shame.

Some methods are better than others. Writing about my shame sometimes dislodges it, like a blood stain in a slow motion commercial, pigment dissolving. Being forgiving of myself helps too. So does being sober. Other attempts to go "boo!" at shame are not so successful because in the process they create gut-clenching new things to cringe at: I have a terrible tendency to want to shock people, or talk loudly about oral sex in stuffy restaurants, for example, which makes me groan at the memory the next day.

Some of the worst, ill-thought-out columns I've written make me want to hide forever. I realise now that the worst thing is to try to shove your shame on to someone else. This is the essence of bullying, or all violence really, including emotional violence. It's practically sanctioned: lawyers are expert at creating shame when they cross-examine witnesses. In his new book So You've Been Publicly Shamed, Jon Ronson writes about social media pile-ins, where we get a kick out of our self-righteousness by shaming others.

Having dithered around for much of my life trying to deal with my shame, like Ronson I wish we could journey to a shame-free paradise.

I would love my children to grow up without feeling embarrassed, vulnerable and humiliated.

Rather impractically, I suspect the best way to do this would be to keep them out of school. Schools are giant shame machines. The combination of competition, conformity, compliance and a culture of unbounded striving are devastating to many children. I know as an anxious child, competition didn't stir me to any sort of greatness. It made me want to hide in the smelly cloakroom. I was already paralysed by my own perfectionism (who knew you can be lazy and a perfectionist!) and felt such a sense of disappointment in my own failure that it was excruciating adding public criticism from others.

I was not the only one kid like this. In possibly the cleverest place on the planet, Palo Alto, there has been a spate of teenage suicides at the local high school. The causes are complex, but the teens speak of their shame in failing to measure up to the specialness expected of them by their high-achieving parents and the school system.

Some teachers say we need to "expand the cultural definition of success beyond traditional metrics." They can't speak normal English, but even so I like the sound of that. The Greek playwright Aeschylus said, "He who learns must suffer." But maybe, more than 2500 years later, we could learn not to make our children suffer quite so much.