-Caveat Lector-
from:
http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.17/pageone.html
<A HREF="http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.17/pageone.html">Laissez Faire City
Times - Volume 3 Issue 17
</A>
-----
The Laissez Faire Times
April 26, 1999 - Volume 3, Issue 17
Editor & Chief: Emile Zola
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Littleton Shootings
Who Is Really to Blame?
by Don Lobo Tiggre
While watching the blame-game go into high gear in the wake of the
Littleton shootings this week, an interesting pattern emerged. As in any
mud-flinging contest, if you want to find the real culprit in a confused
environment of flying accusations, look for the one clean spot with no
mud on it, and that will be the place from which most of the mud is
coming�i.e. the people most interested in drawing the attention
elsewhere. In this case, it�s the education establishment, including
researchers, administrators, and policymakers.
Consider the people and things that are being blamed. Guns, of course,
and video games top the list. The internet itself is being blamed, as
well as entertainment and communications companies we could call "the
media," and parents. Parents are responsible for their children, of
course, though no one can be 100 percent responsible for the free-will
actions of other human beings. The media too should rightly be blamed,
but not for their responsiveness to customers that like violent content;
they should be blamed for their willful cooperation with and
participation in victim disarmament. As for guns and games, well, other
authors have already addressed the myopic foolishness of blaming
inanimate objects for the horrors produced by twisted minds.
A CNN Interactive Poll (4/22/99) asking, "Who or what is most
responsible for school violence?" produced the following results:
Survey: Who is to blame for school violence?
Group
Percentage
Number of Votes
Kids
13
1,592
Parents
30
3,775
Schools
2
288
The Media
18
2,292
Access to Guns
15
1,867
All of the Above
17
2,122
None of the Above
4
509
Total
100 (rounding)
12,445
Now who does that leave out?
Where�s the category for "politicians"? How about "education
researchers"? Or "educrats"?
As mentioned above, parents are rightly blamed, and it�s interesting
that they received the largest number of votes by a wide margin. But
let�s face it: most parents ship their kids off to school and then go to
work, perhaps interacting some with their children in the evenings and
weekends. This isn�t necessarily a problem, if the parents are proactive
enough to retain primacy as moral authorities and exemplars for their
children, but increasingly, this is not the case. Kids are spending more
and more time at school, and parents are abdicating more and more of
their roles as parents to the alleged experts at the schools�including,
most significantly, the teaching of values. This may indeed make parents
as responsible as the CNN poll suggests, but it�s not necessarily
because of their parenting as such; their great fault is in abdicating
their most important responsibility to others.
So, what about America�s new oracles? Do we hold teachers accountable
for their teachings? Apparently not, according to CNN�s poll, which
showed that only 2 percent of the respondents really focused on the
schools as being most to blame. Now that�s quite remarkable. The
institutions where school children spend most of their days, and those
who run them, are given the least blame. To an extent, this may not be
entirely unjustified, as teachers and even principals are caught like
ping-pong balls in bureaucratic table-tennis education policy games.
Most of them just want to teach. However, the research coming from
education departments at universities around the country, the directives
from the U.S. Department of Education and Congress, and the multiplicity
of regulations and mandates from state offices of education drive them
hither and yon in pursuit of the latest education fix. The average
result of all the directives, mandates, and regulations has been an
increasingly socialist socialization (not to say "brainwashing") that
minimizes the importance of the individual, and hence individual
responsibility.
Moral absolutes, of course, can�t be taught at all, because no one
has�or can�invent "average American morals" that everyone agrees upon.
It would be bad enough if parents were abdicating their responsibilities
to teach right and wrong to others who actually did so, but the real
tragedy is that they are abdicating to a vacuum. No one is teaching the
vast majority of today�s kids any serious sense of right and wrong.
Well, the greens are; they have the National Education Association (NEA)
helping them to push their "people are evil and the planet would be
better off without them" agenda. That�s a morality of sorts, but if
anything it�s one that might justify shooting sprees�after all, the rain
of lead is helping to wash the tortured face of our poor planet free of
the vile human infestation.
The One-Room Schoolhouse
This is the current trend in American education, but it hasn�t always
been so. Consider the one-room schoolhouse of last century. Is it even
imaginable that something like the Littleton shootings could have
occurred in such an environment?
No.
And there are reasons for this. The first and foremost would be that
parents back then did not expect the school teacher to teach their
children to become responsible, healthy, moral adults. That was their
job, and the teacher was there to teach letters and numbers (which he or
she did with a success rate that would put many modern schools to
shame).
Another important reason is that the school was too small for any
misunderstood outcasts to be neglected. The teacher would know much of
the life history of each child, would know their parents, would
understand their unique situations and challenges. Even if the teacher
wasn�t particularly sympathetic, he or she would at least be
knowledgeable about every single child under his or her care. There were
probably mal-adjusted outcasts in most one-room schoolhouses, just as
there have always been outcasts�how long ago did Hans Christian Andersen
write "The Ugly Duckling"? But those unhappy souls would have a much
better chance of getting the attention they needed back then than the
misfits in today�s massive indoctrination centers.
To say that the increasing size of today�s huge urban high schools is a
contributing factor to school violence may seem to be making the same
mistake that people who blame inanimate objects (like guns) make. But
who designs these giant, politically-correct reprogramming factories?
There are people, individual policymakers, who have been pushing things
in this direction. Who are they, and where can we write them letters of
protest? It would be useful to find out and let them know that we will
hold them accountable.
Also, these observations about the size and impersonality of most modern
high schools are made in the context of the understanding that the decay
in the moral fabric of society is worst in our public schools. In this
context, the size of the schools can be viewed as an exacerbating
factor, more than as a direct cause in itself. It is precisely because
of the amoral context of modern education that the amassed anonymity of
huge high schools is so dangerous. Who has time to notice or care if
some neglected misfit is nearing the boiling point?
And it�s because of that amoral context that the boiling over of angry
students is becoming increasingly dangerous.
Remember, it�s not that the one-room schoolhouse didn�t have its ugly
ducklings. There have always been outcasts�it�s an inherent part of the
human condition. And back then, it wouldn�t have been all that
surprising to find a number of possum guns among the coats, books, frogs
in boxes, and assorted other items stacked against the walls of the
schoolhouse. So, the key variable is certainly not that kids have
greater access to guns these days.
The Education of a Misfit
Heck, I was a misfit in just about every one of the more than 20 schools
I went to, and I didn�t shoot anyone.
My parents moved around a lot when I was a kid, so I was always the new
guy. Worse yet, speaking frankly, I was smarter than most of my
classmates and they hated me for it (it didn�t help when the teacher
would pretend I was a computer and ask me to answer the questions other
kids missed). Even in the best private schools I went to, I was always
the outsider, and loneliness was my predominant emotion. Anger would
have been a close second. After some particularly egregious contact with
members of "in" groups, or the bureaucrats who ran the show, my anger
would often boil up.
If school administrators had developed "profiles" to target potential
troublemakers as they are doing today, I would certainly have been
singled out: I played Dungeons and Dragons, I got involved in misfit
activities like medieval re-creation, I had few friends, and I was known
to look down on "Jocks". I�ve never had any respect for authority
(though I have always had a tactical sense of what I could get away
with) and hated stupid and rights-violating school policies. I even
experimented with different explosives and pyro techniques. I
even�horrors!�knew how to shoot.
I also went to some huge public high schools with more than a thousand
students in each grade, where I experienced anonymity and neglect first
hand, but I never even considered violent�lethal�revenge. NEVER. What
fantasies I had concerned leaving it all behind, and maybe coming back
to show then how wrong they all were when I became rich and famous.
Some of the other misfits I knew would occasionally joke about burning
the school down (there was that "Teacher Hit Me With A Ruler" song), but
I never knew anyone, in any school, who I thought would actually carry
out such fantasies of aggression. I may not be able to speak for all the
misfits of my generation, but I encountered a good sampling of them and
can tell you that we were not as murderous as today�s troublemakers seem
to be.
So, what�s the difference? What has changed?
Answer: the stage had been set for tragedy by the impersonal,
bureaucratic anonymization of public education, but the decay in morals
had not yet released the brakes on children�s angry impulses. We misfits
might even have had a better sense of right and wrong than the jocks and
studs we despised and envied�we were sensitive souls.
And now that last protection is being torn down. In an environment where
the highest moral percept is that it is wrong to be insensitive to the
feelings of trees and kangaroo rats, is it really any surprise that kids
are acting out the values (or lack thereof) they are being taught?
In this environment, does it make sense to:
1] Ban guns?
2] Ban trench coats?
3] Ban gang colors?
4] Mandate dress codes?
5] Strip kids of what few rights they have left?
6] Turn schools into mini-police states?
7] Ban violent video games?
8] Censor movies and books?
9] Censor the internet?
10] Sue gun makers and game companies?
11] Putting youthful-looking under cover cops in our schools?
12] Mandating metal detectors in all schools?
13] Do anything else besides address the real root causes of violence
among schoolchildren?
Notice that I say "violence among school children." It�s not gun
violence, or school violence, or violence by any other inanimate
objects. It�s violence by people, young people Americans have entrusted
to the care of self-appointed experts.
End the Education Monopoly
It�s time to tell the real culprits that we�re on to them!
It�s time for parents to take back their responsibility for the moral
character of their children, and it�s time for their agents, the people
in the education establishment, to be confronted with the fruits of
their policies.
The pundits are right about one thing, this shooting should be a wakeup
call. But it shouldn�t be a call for more of the same laws and policies
that set the stage for such tragedies in the first place. It should be a
call for all caring people to tell the public education establishment,
bureaucrats, union honchos, and legislators alike that we�ve had enough
of their incompetence. And we want out of their destructive monopoly!
If you�re a parent, the most powerful and direct action you can take is
to simply unsubscribe your children from public schools. Get them out of
those "disarmed victims waiting to be shot" concentration camps. There
are many things that can be done, but this one act cannot be ignored or
misinterpreted; it says "no confidence" louder than any number of
letters and phone calls. If you are not a parent, you can forward this
article to people who are. It doesn�t matter who you are, it only
matters that you take action�not next week, not when you have time, not
after the next mass murder: do it now!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Don Lobo Tiggre is the author of Y2K: The Millennium Bug, a suspenseful
thriller. Tiggre can be found at the Liberty Round Table and The Liberty
Channel.
-30-
from The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 3, No 17, April 26, 1999
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Published by
Laissez Faire City Netcasting Group, Inc.
Copyright 1998 - Trademark Registered with LFC Public Registrar
All Rights Reserved
-----
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Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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