Education, verse 34
by Matt Worley

Bang, bang, bang go the guns. Toot, toot, toot go the horns. Blather, blather, blather go the pundits. It's another one of those endless refrains, and it'll probably happen again before the winter snow flies. But who to blame and what to do about these tragedies? And is it going to get worse before it gets any better?

Questions without real answers. There is no cure-all, and there is no future seeing entity that can pinpoint the next round of murdering kids with guns. The problem schools are facing is not new. This kind of thing has been happening for over a decade, but never this intensely in small towns filled with people who thought they were immune from the big city threat of child violence.

I went to high school in a small town. The biggest threat that ever happened was fake bomb threats on test days. Never taken seriously, and, coincidentally, the schools never blew up. Today in the same small town according to reports from friends still with ties, high school life has changed drastically. While the most important initiative my class dealt with was getting the administration to let us wear shorts, today's teenagers have taken a huge step back. Gone are open campus lunch hours (this was not only a tradition, it was necessity when I was going there--the lunch room wasn't half as big as it needed to be to accommodate all students). Gone are permissive dress codes. Gone are the days when the worst thing that might happen was getting caught skipping the pep rally for a quickie in the parking lot.

Sure, lots of bad stuff happened when I went to school. Cars got dinged up, shoe-polished, and graffiti-ed. A couple of times drug dogs walked through the halls and sniffed at lockers. Drunk kids tried to see how long they could stay in school before the teachers found out they were drunk. But no one thought of bringing a gun to school (even though it was one of those country small towns with "sporting" dads and granddads), and fights were left to those who wanted to fight. The rest of us either watched in the time-honored "fight circle" or heard about it the next day during homeroom.

This was ten years ago.

The kids haven't changed, but their method has. The power struggle still goes on. The popular kids are the ones everyone looks up to. But the way into the popular sect has gotten a little bit warped. If Heathers happened today, the head Heather would have been offed by one of the geeks spitting milk, rather than by her best friend. And officials have responded in kind. No longer are problem kids easy to identify. They aren't just the ones smoking pot in the alley, they're everyone. Everyone is a suspect because tragedy is horribly random.

In the wake of the Oregon shootings (which also left the parents dead), many schools around the country have received threats of more shooting--from their students. The schools, afraid of seeing death on their campus, cowered in fear and canceled school. Which was probably what the threatening student wanted to happen in the first place.

We've gotta do a couple of things. One, school has to be as personal to the kids as homelife. We need to spend our billions of tax dollars on education. We need to double the number of teachers. We need to pay teachers more. I'm not saying spend everything on education, but even a percentage of what we pay to protect ourselves from invisible threats from other countries is in order. What is there to protect if the entire country has rotted away from within?

Education is like infrastructure. It's like the roads. And it's definitely like nuclear missiles and fighter planes. Money should be appropriated to teach and nurture kids. College students should feel that teaching is a legitimate job, one that will provide them with a future. And most importantly, a kid going to public school should feel he is being cared for and taught. Not baby-sat.

To save a little money and to make kids retain the information better, schools should be converted to year round everywhere except in the smallest communities. Quit bitching about vacations. There are no summer vacations when they go to work, so why coddle them now?

And just to bring another small point home, giving schools computers does no good if the kids can't read. Besides, computers will be very different in 10 years. Just like they were very different 10 years ago. Learning specific computer applications is not the issue. Being comfortable around a computer console is. Of course, that's not a problem with the new generation. Getting them to do anything other than chat or play video games is.

This is a long term investment. Something many people in today's make and spend marketplace don't seem to understand much. Everyone wants results now, even if it is illogical to think we will miraculously teach every child overnight. We're used to fast food, fast information and fast sex. But learning takes years. Sometimes it's really boring, and other times it's more exciting than sex. Well, in a matter of speaking.

Oh yeah, the other thing. We gotta scare kids a little bit. Make them afraid of screwing up. They're gonna rebel anyway when they go to college, so worrying about that won't do any good. We might as well make sure they kill as few people on the way to enlightenment as possible.

Matt Worley was educated entirely in public schools and only got called to the office a couple of times.

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