8/19/2001
School boards have enthusiastically embraced "Zero Tolerance" policies in connection with a wide range of proscribed student behaviors, including drugs and weapons. Such policies are an abdication of responsibility on the part of boards to treat their students as human beings. The likely outcome of such misguided policies are likely to be exactly the opposite of what is intended. Read the article.
11/02/99
In polls conducted in July and August for Fight Crime: Invest in
Kids, a national anticrime organization of over 500 police chiefs,
sheriffs, prosecutors, victims of violence, and leaders of
rank-and-file police officer organizations, violence tops
back-to-school concerns for 47 percent of Americans, followed by 19
percent who are concerned about inadequate education.
The Opinion Research Corporation, commissioned to conduct the survey for Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, found that Americans overwhelmingly (90%) believe violence can be greatly reduced by providing more kids with early childhood development programs like Head Start and with quality afterschool programs. By a three-to-one margin, Americans are ready to pay more taxes or to forego a tax cut to provide kids with access to such programs, and priority ranked these concerns equal with Social Security and Medicare.
Poll results also support the School and Youth Violence Prevention Plan of Fight Crime: Invest in Kids. This plan calls for access to educational preschool for all babies and toddlers, quality afterschool programs for older children and teens, parenting coaching to reduce child abuse and neglect, and intervention to help get troubled kids back on track.
Sanford A. Newman, President of Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, stated that "between five and seven million youngsters under twelve, and millions more teens, lack afterschool programs." Newman cited the Quantum Opportunities afterschool program's statistics showing that boys who did not participate were six times more likely to be convicted of a crime in their high-school years. Cited also was the High/Scope Foundation study where children who did not participate in a Head Start-style preschool program supplemented by weekly in-home coaching for parents were, 22 years later, five times more likely to have grown up to be chronic law breakers with five or more arrests.
8/22/99
From the New York Times Magazine. Stories of outcast adolescents living in the vicinity of Petersborough, New Hamshire, the setting that inspired Thornton Wilder's "Our Town." Like many other schools, the high school, ConVal, formed a committee on school safety, and the Petersborough Police Department stationed an officer at the school door. But left intact is a system of abuses by students to students of the type that led to the Littleton killings. Not a happy story. And the school year is just beginning. The article is no longer available except at a charge. Search the Times for the phrase "ConVal" The article was published on Sunday, August 22, 1999.
8/17/99
Murray Stein interviews Dr. Allan Guggenbuehl, Director of the Institute for Conflict and author of The Incredible Fascination of Violence: Dealing With Aggression and Brutality Among Children Julia Hillman, Tr. (1996) and Men, Power and Myths: The Quest for Male Identity Gary V. Hartman, Tr. (1997).
Dr. Guggenbuehl's impression is that "in the U.S., this antagonistic quality [values and behaviors that are attractive that enable a differentiation from the culture of the grown-ups] is not respected. One still believes in 'teaching the good values and right behavior and the power of the good example by the grown ups.' From the psychological point of view this is naive. In order to prevent violent incidents like Littleton, one needs to introduce violence into schools on the level of the imaginal and by encouraging aggressive rituals." Read the article.
5/21/99
Now it's Conyers, Georgia. Thank God, nobody was killed this time. Again, it happened in the context of a nice, white, middle class, wholesome community -- a safe haven for those who would flee the "crime-infested, dope-dealing, rap-addicted," all-black, inner-city schools.
Will we learn the lesson or hear the message these children are literally screaming in our faces and in our hearts?
Doubtful. We decided long ago that we have it all figured out. We know who are the good guys (us) and the bad guys. Nasty happenings are the fault of the bad guys, who are always somebody else.
We can't isolate our children or hide ourselves from the evils of the world -- we carry the evils within us. We take them with us to the suburbs and our gated communities. We even take them into our smug, middle-class churches. The psychic and spiritual poverty of the suburbs is the blood-brother of the physical suffering in the urban slums.
Congress just appropriated $15 billion to drop more bombs on Yugoslavia's residences, hospitals, bridges, castles, monasteries, and water supplies along with a few remaining targets of questionable military value. Who is protesting? Who is saying "No"?
Everything is quiet.
As long as it is only Yugoslavians who are suffering and dying we seem indifferent to the consequences of our nation's actions, done in our name. As long as poverty and crime are kept away from us and out of our consciousness, we seem equally indifferent to them, even though they may exist only a few miles away. Only when they finally arrive, as they must, on our own doorsteps, are we surprised and concerned.
Will we ever learn the lesson?
Kyrie Eleison
5/15/99
It's happened too many times. We can't ignore them all. Nice, middle class, wholesome communities, caring teachers, beautiful physical plants.
Something is wrong and we know it, but the soul-searching seems so terribly shallow. It's as though the entire nation is in denial. And we sit, wringing our hands, waiting for the next heartbreaking news of indiscriminate slaughter and mayhem in another nice, wholesome school in another nice wholesome community.
Here are two articles that attempt to re-imagine the shootings. Send your thoughtful comments and contributions by clicking on editor@jacksonprogressive.com.
Tom Lowe: What is Devouring our Children? Kronos and Littleton
Dennis Rader: Ressentiment in Littleton
Littleton has been in the news before. Read Requiem for a Reform from the June 1, 1994, issue of Education Week.
[Ed. Note: A thoughtful piece by William Raspberry appeared here until recently, but as the Washington Post made it unavailable on 5/24/99, the link had to be removed. Copyright restrictions make it impossible to cache the column on this site. Sorry. You can purchase the article from the Washington Post by going to their website and clicking on the "archive" tab. The article appeared on Friday, May 7, 1999, page A39, on the op-ed page.]
Town Hall
Searches on "Littleton" and "Columbine" resulted in no hits concerning the shootings.
William Buckley: "Asking Why"
The godfather of the mainstream conservative movement is stumped. Strange. He sure has an answer for everything else.
Phyllis Schlafly: "What Caused Columbine?"
Teaching kids about death is the villain. (Better not teach kids The Bible or Shakespeare. Let's not talk of "graves and worms and epitaphs".)
John Leo: "Kill-for-kicks Video Games Are Desensitizing Our Children"
Shooting aliens on a screen makes it easier to shoot classmates in a library. Maybe this is an important piece of the puzzle.
Mona Charen: "Three cheers for uniforms"
The killers wouldn't have been able to wear trenchcoats if everybody had to wear uniforms.
World Socialist Web Site: "The Columbine High School massacre: American Pastoral ... American Berserk"
The deed of Harris and Kelbold represented only an extreme application of the selfish and inhumane attitudes that are commonplace in American society today.
"Colorado and Kosovo: A Letter from Michael Moore"
There is a relationship between the killings in Littleton and our leadership's prosecution of the war with Serbia.
Danny Schechter: "Covering Wars At Home and Abroad"
The Kosovo-Columbine Connection. In both cases, violence has been the method of choice.
Michael Bronski: "High School Hell: Littleton, Movies, and Gay Kids"
Schools are ruthless when it comes to students that are seen as "different."
Dave Stratman: "You'll Never Be Good Enough: Schooling and Social Control"
The corporate and political elite who dominate education policy have goals for education which contradict the goals of the people who populate the schools: teachers and students and their families. A chilling interpretation of the current emphasis on "higher standards."
| The Jackson Progressive http://www.jacksonprogressive.com |
P. O. Box 2050 | Jackson, Mississippi 39225-2050 |