DON'T LAUGH.(The Talk of the Town)(Peter YarrowEs anti-bullying program)

The problem of antisocial behavior among the young has become so prevalent in Britain that a Blair official recently proposed forcing miscreants to wear bright-orange jumpsuits. New York City, on the other hand, seems to prefer, in these post-Giuliani years, to be an avatar of positive reinforcement: the esteem-affirming Athens to London's hard-nosed Sparta. Over the course of the next year, the Department of Education will introduce into all of its elementary and middle schools "Operation Respect: Don't Laugh at Me," an intensive curriculum in character development. The program, which is the brainchild and heart's desire of Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul & Mary, aims to combat bullying by emphasizing the moral lessons of folk music.

"Don't Laugh at Me" (or dlam) was born when Yarrow--a veteran of the civil-rights, gender-equality, nucleardisarmament, peace, and Amtrak-subsidization movements--heard a country ballad of that name at the Kerrville Folk Festival, in the summer of 1999. Moved to tears by its swelling harmonies and first-person testaments to the effects of ridicule--"I'm a little boy with glasses, the one they call a geek / A little girl who never smiles 'cause I've got braces on my teeth"--he decided to incorporate the tune into Peter, Paul & Mary's repertoire. At a gig with the National Association of Elementary School Principals, the group played the song. "The principals gave a tremendous response to it, and said, 'We need this in our schools,' " Chic Dambach, Operation Respect's president and C.E.O., said the other day. "And Peter, being the activist and the organizer that he is, said, 'You won't just have a song but a whole program.' " dlam is now used in at least twelve thousand American schools and camps.

A couple of Tuesdays ago, at a fusty Department of Education building in Brooklyn, Lynne Hurdle-Price and Mark Weiss, conflict-resolution experts, led a dlam training session for about two dozen middle-school teachers, whom they divided into five groups. "I want you all to share a time in your career as an educator where someone did or said something that made you feel like you were not cared for or respected," Hurdle-Price said. Each teacher spent three minutes sharing. "Now do the opposite." Hurdle-Price distributed paper and Magic Markers. She asked each group to draw an outline of a human figure, inscribing negative behaviors ("put-downs") on the outside and positive behaviors ("put-ups") on the inside, close to the heart. Each group ...