maybe the operative word is 'school'...

[keryx]

I'm dreading the impending media rehashing of the school shooting in Minnesota.

Schools have finally almost recovered from their freaked-out paranoia over the round of school shootings over five years ago. Kids can wear black to school and look gloomy again without being immediately sent for 'guidance'. We're not faced with a barrage of 'experts' condemning video games, music, and the popular culture... for a change. [Er, unless you count those freaks and the 'SpongeBob is GAAAAAAAY!' campaign. Duh, of course he is.]

So, yeah, I dread another round of media outcry against the world of kids.

I dread the interviews with verklempt parents and teachers trying to excuse themselves.

But you know the thing I dread most? That almost no one will ever take a look at kids shooting up their schools and actually think about the two words that make up school shooting. I dread the gun lobby continuing to make gun control laws an absolute joke. And I really, really dread the complete silence on the other thing all school shootings have in common: school. By which I mean not only schools per se but the entire system we use to 'school' kids, and the utter disrespect we show them.

Awhile ago there was a brief piece on NPR about a stupid kid who freaked out in the middle of a jewelry store robbery maybe 10 years ago and shot a man who happened to be a teacher. He was, because he lived in Texas, tried as an adult (he was 16 or 17) and sentenced to death. But Texas (unlike Virginia) has actually changed its mind on sentencing minors to death, so the guy's in jail.

NPR went to the school where the teacher had worked and interviewed other teachers. The vitriol! People who work day-in-day-out with 16 and 17 year old kids basically calling them wicked little monsters. We think they can handle their own decisions when it's convenient (if they kill, but $DEITY knows not if they want to vote), but we also think they're stupid enough not to see our thinly veiled resentment.

And we demand they deal with it for 12 years.

I'm not saying schools are designed to breed massacres (obviously the vast majority of students manage never to start shooting at their classmates), but that school as it stands remains designed to keep kids off the street and out of the way - and it's not particularly up to even that task. It infuriates me that we never look at the school environments when these things happen to kids (except inasmuch as we look at, say, kids bullying other kids): we blame the culture, we blame their parents, we blame them, but we never even look at the institutions that hold them for the majority of their waking hours.

Really. How stupid are we?

Comments

[libskrat]

I dunno. I think some of that vitriol needs to be respected, myself. What high-school teachers go through shouldn't happen to a dog.

[keryx.livejournal.com]

But kids don't create that - schools do, by throwing teachers into prison like environments and wardenish mentalities.

[libskrat]

Sorry, I still think the kids contribute. Yes, it's a reaction to the situation, but even so.

Plenty of blame to go 'round here.

[keryx.livejournal.com]

I have a really hard time blaming children for fulfilling our expectations of them. There are just so many fundamentally screwed up things with the way our culture interacts with kids and expects them to behave. And I think it's important when we finally get round to talking about meaningful school reform that we not start where we always start today - with the kids themselves as a "problem" to be solved - and instead start from the environment and how not to create those problems.

[libskrat]

Shrug. I have a really hard time blaming teachers. The ones who want to do well get eaten alive by both kids and administrators. What's left?

I confess I didn't really understand how amazing my high school teachers were until I tried college teaching for three semesters. And, hell, I had it easy-peasy compared to them.

I just get worried when "We can't blame kids!" turns into "Teachers suck!" Because they don't.

[keryx.livejournal.com]

Ah, I think we had a miscommunication there. I'm not blaming teachers for the most part. I mean, that one guy on NPR was pretty much an asshat, but a lot of the wrong thinking of teachers has to do with the nature of the school system. I think most mean to do well, but don't have the power to change things - or think they're doing okay under the current system.

[fierceawakening.livejournal.com]

I have a really hard time blaming children for fulfilling our expectations of them. There are just so many fundamentally screwed up things with the way our culture interacts with kids and expects them to behave. And I think it's important when we finally get round to talking about meaningful school reform that we not start where we always start today - with the kids themselves as a "problem" to be solved - and instead start from the environment and how not to create those problems.

I agree.

bizarro world, indeed

[keryx.livejournal.com]

No... they'll test students discriminately, using the essential criteria "is this kid weird? if the answer is yes, you must drug test!" - cause the way to keep kids from freaking out and shooting people is definitely to make everyone, students and teachers included, completely stressed out. That'll make things better!

And hey, if anyone does get shot, we'll just call up Congress in the middle of the night to decide if they can die or not! Woo hoo!

[crafting-change.livejournal.com]

we blame the culture, we blame their parents, we blame them, but we never even look at the institutions that hold them for the majority of their waking hours.

word. As schools are over-crowded, teachers are underpaid, overworked, and stretched beyond their limit...it really does create a prison like system with more animosity and less education. It is a pressure cooker.

[rackletang.livejournal.com]

It troubles me that they are going to focus on what was wrong with the kid rather than what is wrong with (as my friend autodidactic put it) the fact that there are still 'Indian Reservations' in 2005. But guns make "good" news, poor brown people don't.

I hate this planet today.

[keryx.livejournal.com]

Oh, god, yes. I didn't even touch that, but I had to read the BBC this morning to find out that relevant little gem. ARGH.

[ivyblogs.livejournal.com]

I don't think the schools have ever recovered from Columbine. Most of them still have "zero tolerance" rules for violence and drugs. After reading about the first grader who got suspended for the bag of dirt recently- I figured the schools had given up all pretense of ever using critical thinking again. In case you didn't read about it, here's the link http://www.kfvs12.com/Global/story.asp?S=2919630

[drownophelia.livejournal.com]

i'm in shock. a bag of dirt... a bag of weed... are the same thing?

they're punishing a little girl for making her friend a goody bag present?

this is insane. INSANE, i tell you.

[keryx.livejournal.com]

Oy. How seriously, seriously broken are our priorities? And apparently our rational, thinking minds?

[drownophelia.livejournal.com]

all of this is true.

i was in high school when columbine happened, in school in fact, and on that very day (possibly at the same time..) i had a little bit of a blow-up with one of my teachers (he consistantly refused to help me learn how to do geometry, and that day, kept on calling me the name of a girl who looked nothing like me--and this is a class of 11 students, a school of about 200. i was particularly borderline that day, and told him, as i ran out of the classroom --"you're the reason students kill themselves").

i was suspended for a day, and for the rest of my time there i swear the officials/admin at my school were absolutely certain i was capable of brining in a semi-automtic and mowing down a dozen of my classmates. what they didn't really understand that was if i was gonna do anything to my HS, it would be something terribly embarassing to them--like killing myself in a bathroom, and not something destructive to other individual's lives.

i'm not saying i have/condone the need to shoot your parents, schoolmates, teachers and self, but i understand where the anger and hatred comes from. the school system in this country is insanely problematic. little is done to deal with the fact that all of the Other kids (be they fat or queer or with special needs or goth or a minority race or simply awkward or zit-faced) are literally traumatized by the non-Other kids.

until "faggot" and "retard" are no longer in voge, until it's NOT cool to beat up the fat/slow/queer/dumb kid, until it's not cool to be a queen bitch monster from gossip-spreading hell, until it's NOT cool to be preppy and shallow and sexist and homophobic and misogynistic, our schools won't be safe. and i'm just talking about physical/emotional safety--not even breaching into the hellish waters that encompass the actualy learning/teaching (or lack thereof) aspect of pre-college schools.

school shootings are tragic. but they're tragedies that are the product of the system we/the gov't created. (i mean, how many PRIVATE school shootings have you heard of?). they're products of our society, and the super hyperbolized importance of popularity and fitting in in HS.

bah! i hate high school. & everything about it.

[keryx.livejournal.com]

Understanding you well enough to know what you'd actually do would have required that some adult at the school had the time to build a trusting relationship with you. Which in theory would have happened at such a small school, but clearly didn't happen in practice even there.

I feel a little of your pain, having been a purple haired freak who cried in class during my own high school years. But that was way before the whole school shooting freakout party, and rather than being suspended, I was valedictorian.

[drownophelia.livejournal.com]

when, by senior year, i'd proved i wasn't a ticking time bomb, (and also, possibly to apologize for a few other infringements of my rights: in 11th grade, i was given my own dress code [no short skirts, no tank tops, no cleavage] that only applied to me [the school itself had no dress code of any sort], as well as numerous freak-outs because i was dealing with severe depression and alcoholic parents), they finally realized i was't going to ruin the school's reputation. academically, i probably deseved it too, but i was honored with the title Meritorious Scholar (that is, not Valedictorian or Salutitorian, but still top 5 in the class)--which was way helpful on my resume for the college search.

-lala

[keryx.livejournal.com]

I think of that as a decent example of the system at least trying to accomodate difference (in the end). But it all comes back to the same wrong thinking about kids, doesn't it?

[drownophelia.livejournal.com]

totally!

i essentially had to prove that i wasn't a crazy maniacal killer, rather than them understanding that i probably wasn't a crazy maniacal killer and treating me as such. when i didn't do anything that a maniacal killer would do in the first place! (not to mention that i didn't have access to a gun of any sort, and guns are illegal in the city i'm from!)

bah!

--la