Phoebe Prince moved with her family from Ireland to begin a new life in the United States and settled  in the beautiful western Massachusetts town of South Hadley.

When she began attending South Hadley High School, she made a few friends who commented on how happy and well-adjusted she appeared.

Under the surface, though, she was concealing an intense emotional pain. On a continual basis, other students at school tormented her on-ine calling her an “Irish slut” and a whore. Fearing she could no longer stand her peers’ abusive taunts, Phoebe took her own life. She was 15 years old.

While schoolyard bullying and harassment have long been problems for young people in our nation’s schools, the advent of advanced information and communication technologies have now allowed this abusive and destructive practice to extend to virtually all aspects of a person’s life.

What has come to be called “cyberbullying,” like “face-to-face bullying” (also termed “real life” bullying), involves deliberate and repeated aggressive behaviors by an individual or group of individuals intended to humiliate and harm another individual or group of individuals. If we are ever to interrupt the vicious cycle of bullying and cyberbullying in our schools and in our larger society, we must challenge and diminish abusive behaviors by adults.

Albert Bandura, preeminent educational psychologist and major researcher in what has come to be known as social learning theory, showed that individuals learn by observing and associating with others. He asserted that the process of social modeling can be enough for young people to incorporate attitudes and behaviors they observe.

Society presents an array of role models, from very positive and affirming to very negative, biased, aggressive and destructive.

For example, what type of message does it send to young people when radio commentator Don Imus referred to members of the Rutgers University basketball team – composed of eight black and two white women – as “nappy-headed hos,” or conservative columnist and author Ann Coulter called then-presidential candidate John Edwards “a faggot” to the loud and sustained applaud and laughter of the assembled audience?

Unfortunately, at times, perpetrators engage in this type of offensive language through online chat blogs, like those of the Iowa State Daily.

A perennial respondent on the discussion board reacted to my article last week, “Notion of ‘Post-Racial’ Society Proves False.” The respondent said that Sen. Harry Reid “was right on point” when Reid stated during the presidential primaries that President Barack Obama could be a possible contender because, according to Reid, he is “light skinned” and “speaks with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” The responded then threw in his own offensive commentary by falsely attributing the following to Reid: “And we need to get jobs for you folk so you don’t beat yo women.”

The respondent then turned his personal attacks onto me and said, “And of course your sexual deviancy issues. You want to label those that have the biological differences figured out for procreation as ‘privileged’ while you, the governor and your activist friends go after bullies who pick on perceived gay kids.”

When a second respondent attempted to challenge the initial respondent’s line of argument, this first respondent racialized the second by stating that his last name, “Sounds Hispanic. When you apply for a job or college loans, do you check the box that says ‘Hispanic?’ Why? Do you get preferential treatment that way? Are you eligible for scholarships I am not eligible for? And yet I am the one that’s obviously racist in your mind.”

Referring to my editorial where I state that Valerie Batts’s “new forms of racism” include white people “dysfunctionally rescuing” people of color, a third responded stated: “Isn’t this the basis of welfare? Isn’t this what black poverty pimps like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton do for a living? When have black activists ever promoted a program to improve the black community based on self-reliance, by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps as millions of immigrants have done and continue to do? Virtually every program promoted by the black community demands cash from the government…”

And in an attempt to impugn my motives, a fourth respondent alleged, “Has it ever occurred to you that these so called ‘social scientists’ like Warren Blumenfeld design their curriculum to create a certain amount of racial, sexual, economic and religious discontent in the college educated population in order to continue to have a job?”

To engage in conversation, discussion and dialogue entails a level of trust and respect, and involves an honest and open exchange of ideas. Once we digress into personal attacks, innuendo, character assassination, name calling and calling into question another’s motives, a critical line has been crossed, a line from civil discourse into (cyber)bullying, and the potential for real education has been lost.

Discussion can advance the development of critical consciousness. Stephen Brookfield, distinguished professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, Minn., and author of 10 books focusing on how people learn, has found that critical consciousness involves a process in which we first discover the assumptions that guide our decisions, actions and choices.

Then through further reading and discussion, we can check the accuracy of our previously held assumptions by exploring as many different perspectives, viewpoints and sources as possible. This will then allow us to make better informed decisions that are based on larger bodies of information than we had previously.

When we sink to a base level, we do a great disservice not only to ourselves, but also to our university, and to our entire community, and we perpetuate negative role modeling for young people that can have very serious consequences.

Warren Blumenfeld is a professor of curriculum and instruction