BATH — The recent Santa Fe, Texas, school shooting was one of at least 315 incidents of gunfire on school grounds in the U.S. since 2013, according to Everytown for Gun Safety. In the trembling words of a Santa Fe student: “It’s been happening everywhere; I’ve always kind of felt like eventually it was going to happen here, too.”
Our conscience should tell us our No. 1 priority is to eliminate this monstrous threat from our children’s education.
We know that gun and psychological controls can, at best, only lessen this childhood threat. Instead, it’s time to focus on stopping our children from becoming shooters by raising and educating them properly and effectively.
A true focus on properly and effectively educating our children would begin with our forefathers’ commitment that each one has dignity and worth. That is not what our present educational system is teaching children. Its emphasis on achievement values not who children are but, rather, what they can do, and it seeks to achieve this by putting children in competition with each other.
This misguided emphasis brings out some of the worst instincts in children. It encourages bullying, which makes them feel a sense of superiority to others; fosters cliques and groups that divide the student body, and leads to cheating to improve one’s academic status. This achievement-oriented school culture can become so dysfunctional, some students are afraid to go to school.
Given our gun-saturated society, I don’t think it should be surprising that such dysfunctional school cultures can eventually result in a resentful youth’s fulfilling his fantasy of being a school shooter.
Most of our teachers are very dedicated to helping children. But this system makes it very difficult for them to personalize their relationships with children – perhaps why the annual turnover rate among public educators is 15.7 percent, about 4 percentage points higher than any other profession.
We would not have these school shootings – and many other school problems and the underperforming educational system we have today – if we simply reformed it according to America’s founding principles:
• Commit our educational system to respecting the dignity and worth of every American child.
• Make the development of the unique potential and character of each child the new emphasis. Academic proficiency would continue to be important, but with attitude valued over aptitude, effort over ability and character over talent.
• Continue course grades and test scores, but primarily for the benefit of colleges.
Please realize the comprehensive power behind this dynamic education:
• Teachers: This is why teachers entered the profession – to become trusted mentors of children. It has proven to inspire the entire faculty and staff of a school.
• Parents: This reform makes parents into vital new school partners, with mothers and fathers the primary teachers of character and the home the primary classroom for lessons in character. As we have found, this source is more powerful than anything presently at school.
• Students: Because children are born with a unique potential and an inner guidance system to realize it, this personal attention connects with their inner selves, allowing them to be their natural selves in school. And with the primary emphasis on character, each one is capable of excellence.
• Peers: Children are basically idealistic; since the present system brings out some of their worst qualities, they don’t like their school selves much. This radically shows up in their extensive efforts to help their fellow students. When observing a public school initiate this program last fall (helped by two other school systems), a seventh-grader made it a point to come up to us and say, “I used to be afraid to come to school – not anymore.”
It would be difficult to imagine a school shooter emerging from this education. If a troubled child needed psychological help, many people would see it over a time frame that would enable proper help or placement. The child simply would not fall through the cracks.
This is the way our education should be. It involves more than two-thirds of Americans. It establishes the character of our nation.
And it does the right thing for our children.
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