Another Brick in the Wall

Really not a Pink Floyd Fan – but their lyrics fit these times.

The School Solution

Whatever is wrong with our society, our “go to” solution is: let the schools fix it.  Kids aren’t getting fed – we feed them in the school.  Worry about child abuse – schools are the designated reporters, the first line of defense for kids.  Schools teach kids how to dress, how to share, how to behave.  Oh, and  there’s that pesky “readin’, ‘riten and ‘rithmetic” stuff.  And now schools are caught in the political crucible between our future diverse society, and our past majoritarian white culture.  Teach too far one way, or the other, and become the local, state or even national political punching bag.

We live in a society of anger and guns, a lethal combination unknown in any other modern nation today.  It IS a problem schools try to address.  They  encourage kids to “open up” about how they feel.  They tell them it’s OK to “tell” on friends who are angry, depressed, or suicidal.  And schools monitor social media, lunchroom conversations, teachers’ intuitions, hallway behaviors.  They are looking for a kid in trouble, or troubled, or a threat to himself or others.  

Lessons of Columbine

There were a lot of “school lessons” from the Columbine High School attack in 1999.  While some of us already knew it, schools “writ large” saw that there were “anonymous” kids floating through their buildings.  They weren’t “cool, smart, athletic,” or even “bad or loud”.  Nothing stood out, but some were leading lives of “quiet desperation” (Thoreau and Pink Floyd).  ). They were “Ciphers in the Snow”, a phrase taken from a 1974 short story.  And some fell into a lethal combination of suicide and notoriety.  A few of those were the ones that would come back as school shooters.

The boys who committed the Columbine atrocities had a “team picture” in the school yearbook the year before; the “Trench Coat Mafia”.  It was a joke, but a joke that had underlying issues that were more than serious.  After Columbine, each school began to look for their own disaffected, to see what might become of them. They banned trench coats, bandannas and chains, and they searched lockers for weapons and drugs.  It seemed that the many of the kids caught were often just looking for some way to get attention and help.  

How Schools Work

Schools are places where we want children to feel safe and comfortable, and less stressed.  That is the best attitude to have in the classroom learning new “stuff”.  The standardized testing regime of the late last century doesn’t help, but teachers learned to help kids deal with that. (Though the real stress may be on the teacher, as standardized testing becomes a large part of their teacher evaluation.  Kids sense stress in the adults in their lives – the tests don’t help).

The proposal is to “harden the schools” (ignore the sexual overtones that every fifteen year-old boy hears) and put armed guards at the “bulletproof” main entrances.   We already have government buildings that look exactly like that – we call them prisons.  They are “hardened”, inside and out.  And we know the attitude that creates with the inmates, trapped in a building with armed guards “watching over” them.   Why does anyone think that kids would feel any different, hiding behind barriers and guns?

The Shooter Equation

School shooters fit in a “mathematical” equation. They are invariably males, disaffected, usually cut off from family and friends.  These boys often have trauma in their life already; abuse and loss or bullying.  They seek out weapons in order to bolster their miserable self-image.  The “ultimate manliness” is the “Warrior”, with tactical body armor and high powered weapons.   They want notoriety, and they usually want to die (Politico).

We miss that last part of the equation.  Almost every school shooter is looking to die, whether they actually do or not.  In a warped mind, the school becomes the place where the guns are – or will soon arrive.  So to “go down in a blaze of glory,” go to the school.  If we put more armed guards there, then, of course, the “notoriety” might be even greater.

Without the disaffection and self-loathing, there’s no desire to “shoot-up” a school.  Without the weaponry, there isn’t the means to shoot fellow students.  The “real” solution to the uniquely American problem of school shooters, is to deal with both sides of that equation. 

Fix the Problem 

There is no question that school shootings are a mental health issue.  Of course:  no mentally sound person would commit such an act.  But only in the United States do we have the junction of mental illness and weapons.  And then we add not just guns, but the most powerful weapons available, for sale, with little restriction or control.

We can make our schools into prison-like fortresses.  We can spend billions of dollars to try to “defend” our kids from this problem.  But that action doesn’t deal with either side of the equation.  It simply says:  we can’t stop kids from becoming school shooters, all we can do is lock our kids away from them.  That’s just, “…another brick in the wall”.  

Or we can face reality, and deal with the real problem:  kids who get in a terrible mental state, and then have access to guns.  Schools can help with the first one.  It requires the will of a nation to overcome the second.