Yet another school shooting today, the headlines scream; nine, maybe ten people dead. Bombs recovered both at the school and elsewhere.
So. More students died in school this year from student on student violence. Why?
Who really cares why it happens? I’m sure each student killer has a different excuse why they are justified in killing other students, other people. None of their justifications hold merit.
The truth of it is violence isn’t the availability of weapons. The truth of it is the value we put on violence and death.
Look at the movies, the T.V. docudramas, the games, books we read, all repeating the theme of murder. Who are we fooling? Why do we glorify this?
I have a solution. No, it’s not banning guns. That’s not only stupid it doesn’t work, just doesn’t make any sense at all. A murderer at heart will kill with anything available; knives, guns, rocks, bombs, nerve gas, and other, more deadly bioweapons, whatever. Guns are actually pretty low on the list of things that can kill a lot of people quickly. I spent four years in the military. I’m educated. I raised a family of my own and have gone through the angst of teenage years eight times in addition to my own. I’m an author with an imagination. I can destroy worlds. A handful of teenagers? I could do that with pie and ice cream. Shut up! Murder is stinking easy and most thoughtful people will nod and say yep, that’s so.
So, what is this solution?
Ban schools.
What? Are you nuts?
Nope. Ban schools.
Schools are the place of school violence. They are the breeding place of gangs, bullies, and generate a sort of “gladiator mentality” for both students and teachers. Who is tougher? Who is most popular? Who can we get to do . . . whatever. Who will be the “King and Queen” of the school this year? Who has time for all the petty weirdness that goes on day after day as we devalue some and enthrone others? What sets the school parent off that flies in with a list of “F-bombs” for why their precious . . . whatever and why ever they are offended, proving with their own vernacular that they are themselves toxic, abusive parents? Who educated them?
We cannot keep our kids safe at school because they are the source of most of this violence. How often do the principals get called out on the carpet because of something happening to precious? Over something between two kids deciding that they don’t like the look of the other. Why is it the principal’s fault? Or the teachers? Or the parents? It could be that a few kids just don’t like someone. What does all our social conditioning tell the students that they should do for instant glory or a permanent fix? Look at the media. Grab a headline and let that be your playbook. Everyone wants to be a victim, a star in their own reality show. Ban the schools.
It’s obvious that we are creating a generation of social monsters capable of mass murder. They are being fostered, nurtured and exploited in public schools. Stop it, stop it now!
Ban the schools. They are too expensive and not at all self-sustaining, a real drag on the tax base and a nuisance for people having to drive anywhere around them. Principals hate them, teachers hate them, and students really hate them. Even parents hate them, except when they are required to babysit their own children and feed them. Ban the schools.
Not the teachers. Not the students. Not the parents. Not the guns. Ban the schools.
For far too long we have allowed these institutions to propagandize our children, regiment them into little cogs with no idea of how to think or work on their own, traumatized by the hint of disapproval, failure or rejection. Ban the school. It isn’t working anyway.
Our school system evolved from a model of collective teaching for a preindustrial age. It was obsolete with the invention of electricity. Ban the schools! We need to rethink what it means to educate a young mind and prepare our children to prosper in an uncertain world with intelligent tools to succeed.
We have light bulbs now. Computers and something called the internet.
We need to re-institutionalize families, not expand the schools.
We need a duel, complimentary set of parents who are committed to raising and EDUCATING their children. Yes, we still need teachers, and measurable standards of education. Goals to ensure our children are reading, writing and able to function with mathematics. We need engineers, scientist, doctors and plumbers, the whole list of occupations.
But we need people who can work with heart. People who can meet the needs of others, but also people who can stand on their feet when needed and say “Enough of this!” and do something about a wrong. It might start with an article. An article bold enough to say, ban the schools!
Ban the schools. Let us rethink the model. Do we need to collect our children to educate them? Can a program teach fundamental principles with a reporting feature that will help a designated teacher to teach areas that the child seems unable to grasp? Perhaps go back to the one roomed schools, located very near the children, and limit the size of the class and the number of hours a kid has to sit there? Gasp! Can they be taught at home?
Or can perhaps the school become reduced in physical size such that a student can spend a day a week learning what must be taught from another human being? Can we recognize the profession of the teacher and pay them accordingly? Can we be much more selective as to who teaches our children? Yes, we can, and we should. Teachers should be respected and respectable.
Can we do away with most of these expensive buses? Relegate sports back to the community and parents, and take that dynamic out of our school budgets? Think of the saving just in insurance alone!
Can we re-institute art, music and dance into our education so that we can remember that we are creatures of higher forms, capable of beautiful creation and expression? Can we teach those things and other skills using wood, metal and plastics in with the biology, geology and physics? As well as principles of manufacturing, tooling and crafting? Can we as parents select these things for our children who express interest, aptitude or desire? Or must we really have so many units of maligned history and social justice that we cannot learn how to cook, cut a board or sew? We must teach our children how to budget and invest, to avoid harmful debt, change a flat tire safely, how to manage an accident, respond to other real life emergencies. We must educate our story tellers, and re-enthrone truthfulness and integrity, manners and polite discussion, even when we ardently disagree. We should teach responsibility and taking consequences and the best way to teach those sorts of things is to live them. Ban the schools.
Ban the schools, re-institute the making of families.
But we have so many one parent families! Why? We institutionalized them by rewarding them instead of penalizing them to live their lives uncomfortably, to not have to rely on their parents for their mistakes. It is not a racial thing, but a spiritual thing and it affects us all or will. We gave unwed mothers all sorts of benefits, and the more children they have, the more comfortably they get. It was a political gimmick to take a bow and tax the population more, with no thought as to where it was going. As a consequence, we have multi-generation of needfulness because we refused to confront it, softened the consequence and thrust generation after generation of illiterate, ‘entitled’ thinking that is eating us alive. Many of these children are troubled, maladjusted, not properly feed, taught or socialized. Single parent families rely on the schools to baby sit and feed their children then become unglued when these kids fall into trouble. Nobody wants to admit that. Why are we rewarding this destructive behavior? I retired from the prison system, having worked there for longer than most murderers have to serve time for. I have seen the underside of our social systems and dealt with the fallout. My mother was a school teacher as was her mother, as were some of my sisters and brother in-laws. I have seen both sides of this argument. My wife works for a school district. I spent a sizable part of my life as a student in a variety of schools and colleges as well as my eight children and now their children. One of my best friends is a principle, as well as was a brother in law. I understand this problem as well as anyone else. It’s a broken model.
We need to re-invent this education system from the ground up laying aside our social engineering, collectivist thinking and reinstall the family as the principle place of learning, and build up on that, else we are done for.
Ban the schools. It is time to start over.
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