A Sense of Crisis
Around the world, governments see violence in schools as a growing problem.
The subject is on the agenda at a meeting of G8 education ministers in Japan in April, according to the European Commission, which is coordinating efforts by member governments of the European Union to deal with the issue. UNESCO, the United Nations’ educational body in Paris, is preparing an action plan. And the US administration is turning schools into high-tech fortresses in its determination to defeat the problem.
Many educators, however, say governments are missing the point, which Kisa Savo-lainen of UNESCO says is that violence “is a problem of society reflected in the schools.” and that schools are ill-equipped to deal with the problem on their own.
Mrs. Savolainen, director of UNESCO's department for culture and peace, wondered how the situation would improve so long as some governments spend more money on prisons than schools, while domestic violence remains a daily reality for many children, or while teachers in Africa, Latin America and elsewhere continue to subject children to corporal punishment.
Nor does the American technological response do anything more than treat the symptoms, she said. It reinforces the idea in children's mind that “the whole structure of society is based on violence".
Karen Colvard, senior programme officer with the Harry F. Guggenheim Foundation, which studies violence in societies, said that the stringent security introduced in inner-city high schools in New York and elsewhere played more to public misinformation that the world is meaner than it actually is. She said the real issue was the poor quality of education in those schools.
“The board of education should have other priorities,” she said. “It should be paying more attention to educational issues, which will have a bigger impact in the long run.”
While violence clearly is an impediment to education, a response wholly based on security considerations creates an environment that is not conductive to learning, according to an educator in New York, Peter Lewis. In a study for the American Anthropological Association, he described the oppressive atmosphere of a typical inner-city school: the crackle of guards’ walkie-talkies, the constant sirens and alarms, flashing strobe lights, beeps from metal detectors and the constant yelling of violent invective derived from rap songs.
Nevertheless, following the killings at the Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, and other shootings last year, authorities in the United States are spending millions of dollars on alarm and video systems, metal detectors, physical barriers and uniformed guards — money that many educators say would have been better spent on teachers, books and better buildings.
Some educators also advocate counselling and tutoring programmes, or childcare programmes to prevent young students from being left on their own for hours.
Francois Marchand, president of a French institute for research into non-violent resolution of conflict, recommends that children should be encouraged to understand aggressive instincts through role-playing, which American educators call “peer mediation". The children “have to be caught young,” Mr. Marchand said. “By the time they get to high school, it becomes not impossible, but a lot more difficult.”
But there is considerable debate about the value of such conflict resolution programmes. Some teachers believe they help institutionalize violence and are yet another distraction from the main business of teaching.
Governments do not seem to know how to deal with the crisis, which affects both rich countries and poor. If there is conflict or violence in society, it will inevitably be reflected in the schools.
Mrs. Savolainen said there is some promise in a multipronged approach in the Netherlands, for example, where the education, social affairs and culture ministries are seeking a coherent solution.
Before the Columbine High School shooting last year, 87 per cent of American schools were considered safe and had little or no security, according to a report by the National Center for Education statistics in 1997, the latest available.
Schools in the roughest neighbourhoods or with the highest proportion of minority enrollment reported the most crime, but overall the incidence of violence affecting 12th graders had remained constant for some 20 years.
US data show that tragedies such as the Colorado killing and other serious crimes are still extremely rare and are generally not on the rise, despite public perception to the contrary. But children are far more likely than 20 years ago to be killed in the streets or in their homes. The reason for this is the crack cocaine epidemic that began in the mid-1980s.
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse in the United States, about 3.6 million Americans are chronic users of cocaine. More worrisome, the institute found, more than 3 per cent of eighth graders had tried the drug at least once.
Most crack users buy the drug a single hit at a time, necessitating a network of street dealers, runners and messengers. These tasks are often performed by children, who can more easily escape police surveillance. Many routinely carry guns.
In the United States, the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control found a couple of years ago that nearly 6 per cent of high school students carried concealed handguns. Weapons are considered cool in a gang culture that is glamorized by the media and by popular idols who rap about violence.
However, most killings occur in inner-city areas where crack cocaine is prevalent and firearms easy to come by. The centre found that less than 1 per cent of all homicides involving children aged 5 to 9 occurred in or around school. The real problem then seems to be not violence in schools but the easy availability of guns.
In France, too, where education has for long been seen as an essential tool for civilization and assimilation, educators agonize about violence in the classroom, but firearms are not a problem. Last autumn, teachers published several books decrying conditions in the classroom. But the Ministry of Education says that fewer than 40 schools have problems with serious violence.
Because they are given extra government resources, schools in problem zones afflicted by crime and high unemployment — such as Chanteloup-les-Vignes, west of Paris — are often havens of relative civilization. Usually they admit children with no questions asked about their parents’ legal status — a contrast with the United States, where some illegal immigrants are afraid to send their children to school for fear of detection.
Even if they come from safe home backgrounds, most children are exposed to vicarious violence through television, computer games and even rap music. By the time they leave school, most children have spent more time in front of the television than in class. According to a report by the American Medical Association, as long ago as 1992 — the problem is doubtless worse today — they will on average have witnessed 40,000 murders and 200,000 other acts of violence by the age of 18.
George Gerbner, who founded the Cultural Indicators project in 1968 to study violence in the media, coined the phrase "happy violence" to describe unreal screen violence that appears painless and leads to a happy ending. For Mr. Gerbner, exposure to such violence "breeds aggressiveness in some and desensitization, insecurity, mistrust and anger in most”.
Schools, it seems, are no more capable than anyone else of dealing with the problems created by such commercialized and globalized “culture” that now reaches people anywhere from American inner cities to the developing world.
| A | B | C | D | E | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Francois Marchand` | |||||
| 2 | George Gerbner | |||||
| 3 | Karen Colvard | |||||
| 4 | Kisa Savolainen | |||||
| 5 | Peter Lewis |