Bullying is a huge problem around the world. Countless schools have a problem with students bullying their peers. 

Here's a little background information on bullying. Bullying is defined as “any conditions or acts that create a climate in which individual students and teachers feel fear or intimidation in addition to being the victims of assault, theft, or vandalism”. Before it was considered a problem, bullying was onced considered a “childhood ritual or a normal part of development”. Therefore, it was overlooked and dismissed as just child's play. However, as it developed into more, school boards started to pay more attention to it and started to shut bullying down. 

The World Health Organization quantifies, 29.9% of students were reported to have experienced moderate to frequent involvement in bullying, 13% being the bullies, 10.6% being the victims, and 6.3% being both bullies and victims. 

There’s broad grouping of bullying but it can be divided into three main groups that occur between people, physical, verbal, or relational. Physical bullying is what the name suggests. It is the one type of bullying that is paid attention to the most. This kind of bullying includes hitting, kicking and anything physically violent. 

Verbal bullying does not hurt the victim physically but can deeply scar and traumatize them. This sort of bullying can include many different things such as name-calling, threatening, degrading and many more. 

The third type of bullying is relational. This consists of gossiping, exclusion, and other attempts to change peer groups. 

Both bullies and victims become affected by the aftermath of what had happened. Victims could suffer depending on the severity from the aftermath of the bullying. This includes self-isolation, depression and much worse to having trouble with their self-confidence and having fewer friends. Bullies could potentially have problems with the law when they get older or could have trouble socializing with other people. 

All of this is a major problem which Confucianism and Legalism can help fix and or prevent. 

Confucianism is a Chinese philosophy, founded by Kong Fuzi, that believes that the natural order of the universe should be reflected in human relations. Confucianism is big on the idea of the five relationships and filial piety. The five relationships are ruler and subject, parent and child, husband and wife, older brother and younger brother, and friend and friend. The relationship between older brother and younger brother and parent and child is what is going to help with the bullying problem. Filial piety is devotion of the child to his parents, which could help with bullying as well. 

With the older brother, or sibling, being a good influence on the younger brother, again or sibling, they can teach their younger sibling how to be a good person and how bullying is wrong. They could also teach them how they could help people who have been bullied or are a bully and lead them on the right track. With this, children would be influenced early on to be a good person and treat everyone with respect,or even teach others that bullying is not the right thing to do. 

Legalism is another Chinese philosophy, founded by Han Feizi, that believes in strict laws and strong punishments. They believe that the laws should be heavily enforced and clear and that if anyone breaks them they will be heavily punished vice versa. If you do something good you will be rewarded. Shi Huangdi, ruler of the Qin dynasty, adopted the legalist philosophy and with it united the entire kingdom. 

Using legalist virtues, schools could enforce strict laws against bullying and heavily punish anyone who breaks them. This would scare all the bullies and get them to not bully their peers. With these super strict laws and the school boards rigorously enforcing these rules, the bullying percentage would decrease significantly. 

In conclusion, bullying is a big problem around the world in schools. The Chinese philosophies Confucianism and Legalism could help solve the problem by pushing their beliefs into the school system.