Homeschooling: A Family’s Journey

Monday, April 20, will mark the 10th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre, in which two students killed twelve students and a teacher and wounded twenty-three others before killing themselves

Why? 

Early news reports said that they were maladjusted loners.  But then the U.S. Secret Service and the U.S. Department of Education collaborated in a study of thirty-seven school shootings.  They found that school killers are often model students.  They get good grades, participate in sports and other activities, and are in the social mainstream at their schools.  They’re pretty much like the kids who don’t kill –  except that they kill.  

According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES):

In 2005, 8 percent of students in grades 9–12 reported being threatened or injured with a weapon in the previous 12 months … In the same year, 28 percent of students ages 12–18 reported having been bullied at school during the previous 6 months

The NCES reports that homeschoolers cite “school environment”, including safety, more often than any other reason for homeschooling.  They’re right to be concerned about the school environment. But there is even worse violence in schools than most imagine.

The novelist and philosopher Walker Percy wrote The Loss of the Creature in 1954, long before the first student picked up a gun to kill classmates and teachers.    This essay is worth reading as we reflect on Columbine, for its discussion of how the educational system depersonalizes students:    

He is deprived of his title over being. He knows very well that he is in a very special sort of zone in which his only rights are the rights of a consumer. He moves like a ghost through schoolroom, city streets, trains, parks, movies. He carves his initials as a last desperate measure to escape his ghostly role of consumer, saying in effect: I am not a ghost after all; I am a sovereign person. 

It may seem a stretch to talk about petty vandalism in a context of school massacres.  But the Broken Window theory of policing connected small crimes with murder.  So it is worth at least considering the possibility that Percy may have put his finger on the answer to the “Why?” of Columbine when he wrote of

A predicament in which everyone finds himself in a modern technical society – a society, that is, in which there is a division between expert and layman, planner and consumer, in which experts and planners take special measures to teach and edify the consumers.  The measures taken are measures appropriate to the consumer. The expert and the planner know and plan, but the consumer needs and experiences. There is a double deprivation.

Such depersonalization is a form of violence that never makes the papers.  It is so common it’s not news. It happens to almost every student.

Its pervasiveness is evident in the very fact that when people ask “Why?” about Columbine and other massacres, the answer is often that the students were consuming the wrong entertainment media.  A popular and reflexive answer to the “Why?” of school shootings is:  video games and dark music.  Back in the 1950s, Americans asked “Why?” about a social problem called juvenile delinquency, and came up with similar answers: comic books and rock & roll.  Are we really to believe that the problem with youth violence is a consumption problem?

Or might it be more reasonable to look closely at the many ways the educational system robs students of their sovereign personhood?  The zero tolerance frenzy that followed Columbine made this depersonalization even worse.  The Supreme Court is about to hear the case of a school that strip-searched a 13-year old honor student, because of a rumor that she might be carrying ibuprofen.  She wasn’t carrying anything before the search and after it she wasn’t even carrying her dignity anymore.

Maybe such depersonalization is a nasty process that human beings inevitably resist in various ways.  Increasing the air pressure in a balloon will lead inevitably to a tear somewhere.  We can be sure the balloon will pop, but we may not be may not be able to predict where the tear will happen. The tear that explodes the balloon may happen in a very normal spot indistinguishable from any other spot.  So too the pressure of depersonalization in schools may lead inevitably to explosions of violence somewhere, often in perfectly normal students and schools — indistinguishable from any other students and schools until they explode.

It’s not the rare student shooter we need to fear. It’s the system that depersonalizes and deprives almost every student who enters it.

(Greg)

Share/Save