tldr: just answer the title I suppose. Age of children was 4-6 years.
Context(english is not my first language):-
So this happened a while ago when I was 4-6 years old. It was a big private school. I can't exactly remember the exact age but 100% can say that I and everyone else in my class was in this range of age at the time. There was this girl in my class who for some reason was treated as an "untouchable". Now, I never found out how it started, I was always a child who generally lacked awareness of his surroundings so maybe thats the reason I don't know.
Kids talking terrible stuff about her was an everyday thing. If someone had a conversation with her then rest of the kids started avoiding that kid for a while as well. But the most cruelest part was that she was treated as an infinite reservoir of some kind of "impurity" or "infection". If a kid, even by accident, touched the girl, then he/she was considered "infected" as well, and everyone used to start maintaining physical distance from that kid. The infection had to be "transferred" to another kid by touching him/her, so after that the next kid will transfer it on to someone else. As you can imagine, it used to become a game of tag. It was, in a messed up way, one of the common pastimes to spend the lunchtime for our class(lunchtime had to spent in classroom for kids our age). The poor girl endured such cruel treatment almost the entire year(classes used to get shuffled every year in that school).
Now, why am I asking about this even though I am already done with school? This entire phenomena had a very deep impact on me. For some reason I have always been someone who analyses everything he finds interesting in the slightest, be it math, science, history or people. People back then didn't interest me much but behaviour which my brain interpreted as "unusual" sure did. The very first concept I thought of back then is how even though if something is not true, it will still be treated as truth if there is societal pressure to accept it as truth. I thought how everyone deep down knew that the practice is completely baseless. But it was still practiced because some enjoyed it and the rest did it because they themselves did not want to be boycotted. This thought made me feel "helplessness" against this "senselessness". But even more surprising to me was that even though the teachers knew about this, they didn't really do anything to fix it. I remember quite vividly thinking in the class one day "Ah!! So that's how the adults in the real world are. They will ignore the problem if they don't really have to fix it. Doesn't matter much if she suffers huh...".
I personally was a kid with good grades and with many talents(sports and music), so I was well respected by teachers, friends, relatives etc. Many of my disciplinary mistakes in school used to be forgiven because of my reputation. I enjoyed that very much, but back in my analysis part of brain which is for some reason is constantly trying to make a "working paradigm" of the world, I also thought how values matter less than success. I became cynical about society and leaders. Thinking that values are just lip service, success is what the world truly cares about. This became my subconscious belief since a very young age(since the age of 4-6). Which later emerged as firm belief in power and wealth. I later started considering knowledge as most satisfying and contending(that was a completely different journey btw) than power and money but even then my cynicism towards society in general remained.
But later in my life I actually met people who followed higher values to the fullest and saw how they are so happy and contended. I too have started to now value virtues like gratefulness, compassion, humility, honesty, integrity etc in life and now wont give them up for any amount of money. I now firmly believe that it should have been top priority of a teacher to fix that. But I still wonder about how if I was the teacher, I could have fixed the issue mentioned above. What would you have done?