The "School" Part Of "School Shootings"

Today I'm going to address a comment "High Akra" made on yesterday's post.

I wholeheartedly agree with everything he says in that comment.  While I am not keen on guns and am not generally a fan of the NRA, I also can see that debating about more gun control or putting more armed guards in school is debating a mere symptom of the problem.  As Akra himself says, we have to "look at the 'school' portion of 'school shooting'".  

The fact that Michelle Rhee referred to children as "assets" is disturbing enough.  But it's not a new attitude at all.  In fact, to some degree, the whole idea of compulsory public education as we know it (at least in the US) is premised on that notion of young people.

They are considered "assets" in much the same way that machines are assets to factory owners and cows or horses are to farmers.  Compulsory education in the United States began roughly around the same time that the Industrial Revolution took root on its shores.  That is when the industrial capitalists whose names are so familiar to us now (such as Carnegie) were building their fortunes. 

What they wanted were workers who had enough skills to do their jobs but not enough to argue with their bosses.   So schools were designed to fill their kids' heads with random, atomized facts but not to help them develop the skills necessary to synthesize those facts in any meaningful way.  

That meant, among other things, dividing the students against each other.  One thing that my years of teaching has taught me is that even though young people learn to accept differences in race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and other traits, divisions can still be created among them on the basis of social and economic class.  

It seems that  Horace Mann and others who helped to start mandatory public schooling in the US had an uncanny understanding of that aspect of young people's psychology.   So, the public schools they created were so divided--internally as well as externally.  On the basis of tests--which, of course, favored the children of the socioeconomic elite--the descendants of poor Irish and Germans (who were most of the immigrants of that time) were "tracked" into vocational or general education, while the Main Line and Beacon Hill kids were steered into classical liberal arts programs. 

 How could such a setup fail to produce alienated, disrespectful kids?  How could it not exacerbate whatever resentments young people might have already felt toward each other?  And, if children are being taught to be, in essence, cogs in a machine, how are they going to learn respect for anyone else, or for life itself?

And, naturally, such a system does not inculcate young people--even those from the "best" backgrounds--with the intellectual or spiritual means for understanding and evaluating what is going on around them.  Because teachers are products of such a system, they, too, never gain such skills unless they have some extraordinary experiences or revelations.  Finally, school administrators are chosen to the degree that they have the means to carry out orders, but not the wherewithal to question them.  

So a kid who knows that he or she has been scorned and shortchanged develops vague resentments toward those who seem more favored, but not a language for articulating his or her concerns, let alone the perseverance to understand them or the strength of character necessary to do what he or she actually needs to do.  All they have are their rage, and thousands of hours worth of images of people who settle things with violence looping through their minds.

Now, of course, I'm not suggesting that everyone who comes out of American schools is a potential mass murderer. But our so-called educational system will turn out more like Adam Lanza, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.