Teaching to Learn, Learning to Teach

(Nancy Kaufman) #1

We did not want to hurt anybody, but we did want to do away with a hated place that we ex-
perienced as a prison.
My friends and I were pretty serious about some of our fantasies. After graduation,
two of us spent the summer searching for Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest and the follow-
ing year three of us traipsed through the Andes and along the Amazon River in South
America. Our parents were deeply worried about our behavior, our sullen demeanor,
and our use of drugs, but there was little they could do to change things. Mostly they just
hung on to tenuous relationships, hoping we would grow up before we hurt ourselves or
ruined our lives. I have lost track of most of the guys from Zo’olium, but from what I have
heard, they have generally done all right with their lives. A couple of them are engineers,
one is a restaurateur, one is an astronomer, one is a postal worker and part-time author,
and I am a teacher.
I think about my friends and our high school experiences whenever I hear about another
new case of school or teenage violence. I suspect that many other adults have also been re-
thinking their pasts as a result of the shooting deaths at places like Columbine High School
in Littleton, Colorado. What I have tried to figure out is what was different then, and why we
did not take the same destructive path.
Many commentators have called for increased vigilance by school authorities to tar-
get suspect youth before they have a chance to injure themselves or others. Sometimes
this profiling would be coupled with psychological support services, but usually it just
means keeping an eye on teenagers that people find “too different” because of their ap-
pearance, music, or ideas. Some have suggested that the solution to this type of violence is
increased school security. They want teachers and principals to have the power to search
and suspend students, metal detectors installed at entrances, and police officers assigned
to buildings.
These proposals share three things in common: They are premised on the idea that alien-
ated young people are somehow different from the rest of us and do not deserve our con-
cern; they violate fundamental democratic rights that are cherished in our society such as
freedom of speech, the right to due process, and the right to privacy; and they generally ig-
nore why those two young men at Columbine High School were able to kill and injure so
many other people and then to kill themselves.
As I think back on the past and my friends, what emerges most clearly is that our culture
has changed. Today, we live in a culture that glorifies violence in sports and the movies and
where the evening news celebrates the death of others through hygienic strategic bombings.
It is a society that promotes the need for instant gratification and uses youthful alienation to
sell products, where those who do not fit in are ignored, where schools still rank and sort
out young people and brand them as failures. And we live in a country where unhappy peo-
ple have easy access to plans to make bombs on the Internet and can purchase weapons of
immense destructive capacity.
Although I do not absolve them of responsibility for their actions, there is more to blame
for what happened in Columbine than those two young men. I can only think of two solutions
that would help prevent future violent explosions like this one. As a former high school
teacher, I am convinced that if these young men had had a place where they felt they be-
longed, where people cared about them, they might not have committed those violent acts
against others.
But even more crucially, if our country had strict gun control laws, no one would have
died in the incident at Columbine. When I was in high school, we were weird and we were
alienated, but we did not have guns.


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