← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · neoclassical
Thread ID: 18081 | Posts: 4 | Started: 2005-05-03
2005-05-03 04:34 | User Profile
The Tragedy of Our High Schools
We're getting used to the school shootings. They happen in small bursts, every couple of years, and usually don't involve a body count high enough to make us do anything except the usual cosmetic remedies: add metal detectors, more guards, more rigorous police presence in the high schools. The main effect of all of this is to make high schools more like jails, and to force kids to be slightly more creative in their massacre planning. Yet while it has undoubtedly deterred some, and stopped others, it hasn't stopped the process.
Kids still shoot up their schools. When it happens, the expected response of us - by our government, our peers and our industries - is to throw up our hands and say, "What a tragedy!" but in our numbness to make the fatal error that lets such things continue: we blame the shooter, but ignore the overall phenomenon. This "reasoning" of ours assumes that something went wrong with the youth, and not the situation into which that youth was placed, and this allows us to find a convenient scapegoat in a psychological version of shooting the messenger. "The problem isn't what we're doing; the problem is the few bad apples," we think, and go on with our lives.
Columbine Shooting And then the problem comes up again.
The real tragedy in our high schools isn't the occasional partial massacre. These massacres are symptoms of deeper underlying problems in both our high school and society at large, and the only way to stop the massacres is to fix the problems. We cannot treat the symptoms without literally making our schools into maximum security prisons, which will then equal the body count in shootings with an increase in suicides. The kids who strike out often have their own share of problems, but there is no way to pin the entire blame on them. More likely, it's those with the most visible problems who are most sensitized to the situation, and thus most likely to act on it.
Take a kid with problems and put him in a good environment, and unless those problems are insoluble (psychosis, sociopathy, perversity) the kid will find an even ground. Take the same kid and put him into a grossly flawed situation, in which no authority figure will admit to the pervasive nature of the problem, and the kid will introvert. No one else will publically say what he feels, or even listen to his ideas; the kid has become isolated by what he can see that no one else can. Therefore, eventually, he concludes the situation is helpless, but does his best to send out a massive cry for help in hopes that the situation will change, even with his death. This is why most school shooters are intelligent underachievers who become introverted as they enter high school.
It's these situations that produce massacres. The groundwork of this phenomenon is the jail-like nature of high schools, and the sheer amount of propaganda we feed our children in order to shoehorn them into a society that sees them as function and not individual. No adult will admit to these problems, as no adult even wants to face them. Think about it from the perspective of someone who isn't accustomed to ignoring our society's failures like adults are: crime is rampant, most people are miserable, adults spend almost all their time at jobs and are abysmal parents, the environment is being consumed, there's a sublimated race war on our streets, and in social terms, we are defined by what we own and the wealthy people who know us. To an adolescent - stuck in that unique time where the child must assess what form of adult he or she will become - the idea of completing adulthood, of going into that insane world, is unbearable, if the kid is both smart and headstrong.
Of these smart and headstrong kids, the ones who have the least to tie them to survival are the ones most likely to start blasting their oppressively numb peers. Most kids endure by adopting a cynical attitude, and surviving the best they can with the aid of drugs and sex and social power, but some seem to thrive on this kind of environment, and these are the vapid popular cliques who find themselves in the crosshairs at d-minus-zero. These school shooters aren't rebelling against specific individuals, but against the condition of numbness that makes tolerance of an insane situation possible. This is why they choose to set the world on fire with violence, to send up a flag so profound that people will have to notice.
And still we - the adult world, those who could do something about the situation - don't get it. We shut our eyes, blame the shooter, and move on. And this is the real tragedy, as then we miss a great chance. Most of us view high school as a container for children until they're old enough to work, as if work is the highest goal any of us can imagine. We forget that high school is an amazing opportunity. Four years is a long time, and during that time, we can educate our children in many ways and make them more productive, not just as line workers in some bureaucracy. When Bill Gates recently announced that American high schools were fifty years out of date, he grasped part of the picture. Our high schools aren't out of date - in fact, the way we did things fifty years ago is closer to what we need. But our high schools are failing.
They fail because we do not view them as an educational opportunity, but as a chance to force conformity to social and political norms, and thus to make our kids perfect raw material for incorporation in the machine. We understand quantity, but not quality; our schools barely acknowledge that some are smarter than others, and refuse to acknowledge that some have superior character. This is a giant difference from how our schools were run in the 1950s, where character, intelligence and physical strength were viewed as indivisible parts of the value of a student. Even then, however, the original American impetus toward public education as a chance for the best to rise - meritocracy - had been shattered.
Why has this happened? Take a look at how our society has changed. There is no longer any wilderness to which to run, and there are few chances for an individual to make an entirely solitary living, as even owning one's own business means being dependent on government agencies. We can no longer pick our associates, and not hire or rent to or promote someone because we don't like their character; it is assumed that they can do the job, even if they don't belong in the local community, or are of suspect moral discernment. We are forced into a one-size-fits-all product called "the worker," even if we work in different strata. Who benefits? A wealthy few.
Since 1950, America's postwar industry has expanded to almost entirely take over our sense of social and moral values. Once, you did things because they were right; now, you do them because they are profitable, and it's not acceptable to say something that might offend others - even if it's admitting that our high schools are jails. You can't pick your coworkers, your associates, those who live around you. It's an invasion of the mediocre, and to accomodate it, our government has created laws against discrimination even against people of your own race, and has dumbed down our high school that so that the most clueless can attend and become workers, too.
The racial crisis is one symptom of the larger crisis, and when I speak of dumbing down, I'm not addressing a racial issue, but a more pervasive one. Our industry likes generic people. Our government and society are conspiring to create them. Generic people don't need more in-depth education, that might emphasize that some (yes, within the same race) are of superior intelligence and character to others. Industry likes people who follow orders; it doesn't need genius, or moral intelligence. Therefore, our society has decided to eliminate them, in part through a mentality of sniping: if the rights of some idiot are violated, he can sue. Because lawsuits are common, high schools and other entities act to avoid them, and thus even more radically standardize the experience of people within those entities.
Imagine a high school where half of the kids have 140 IQs, and half have 100 IQs. The 140 kids will always be bored, even if shuttled off to honors classes, because some of the 100 IQ kids will work really hard and thus "deserve" to be in the honors classes. If one kid of 100 IQ points (again, within the same race) is in a class of 140 IQ point kids, the teacher will have to calibrate that class to adapt to the 100 IQ point kid, as to design it for the 140s cuts him or her out entirely. It's a negative form of logic. Positive logic would be to design classes so that the smarter kids could go farther, and everyone else could hang in as best they could. But that would provoke a lawsuit.
This situation is endemic to our society at whole. Even if someone of your own race shows up trying to rent from you, and you think they're a scumbag, if you turn them down, you're liable to get sued. That will mean out-of-pocket expenditures you cannot afford. So you rent to anyone, and pretend you didn't see it coming when the apartment gets trashed. At jobs, we're accustomed to blockhead coworkers who make every instruction have to be repeated in simpler words, and we've all had to route around people who were purely incompetent. And in high schools, kids sit through mindnumbingly dumbed down classes and wonder why all adults are numb to the obvious truth.
In our negativity, we lash out against the few who wish to rise higher, and standardize our society toward the lowest common denominator, in the name of "fairness" and "equality," but really, we're poisoning the experience for everyone, even those who will come in last on every test. Our negativity and numbness are most visible in the tragedy of our high schools, where a time of great potential growth and learning and success is turned into a time of endurance, boredom and silent suffering, all so that no one is offended. In contrast to the vastness of this failure, the occasional school shootings are not tragedies, but mere reminders of the larger travesty daily transpiring.
[url]http://www.nazi.org/community/columns/smith/[/url]
2005-05-03 13:18 | User Profile
Good commentary, good post.
2005-05-04 02:41 | User Profile
[QUOTE=neoclassical]The racial crisis is one symptom of the larger crisis, and when I speak of dumbing down, I'm not addressing a racial issue, but a more pervasive one. Our industry likes generic people. Our government and society are conspiring to create them. Generic people don't need more in-depth education, that might emphasize that some (yes, within the same race) are of superior intelligence and character to others. Industry likes people who follow orders; it doesn't need genius, or moral intelligence. Therefore, our society has decided to eliminate them, in part through a mentality of sniping: if the rights of some idiot are violated, he can sue. Because lawsuits are common, high schools and other entities act to avoid them, and thus even more radically standardize the experience of people within those entities......
In our negativity, we lash out against the few who wish to rise higher, and standardize our society toward the lowest common denominator, in the name of "fairness" and "equality," but really, we're poisoning the experience for everyone, even those who will come in last on every test. Our negativity and numbness are most visible in the tragedy of our high schools, where a time of great potential growth and learning and success is turned into a time of endurance, boredom and silent suffering, all so that no one is offended. In contrast to the vastness of this failure, the occasional school shootings are not tragedies, but mere reminders of the larger travesty daily transpiring.
[url]http://www.nazi.org/community/columns/smith/[/url][/QUOTE]I read an intersting article on this a while back re: the Red Lake shooting. The kid was complaining (on Nazi.org) how his indian friends all liked to listen to rap and dress like wiggers, etc. I ought to dig it up sometime.
2005-05-04 05:50 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Okiereddust]I read an intersting article on this a while back re: the Red Lake shooting. The kid was complaining (on Nazi.org) how his indian friends all liked to listen to rap and dress like wiggers, etc. I ought to dig it up sometime.[/QUOTE]
Besides the obvious tragedy of a school shooting, the first thing I thought when I read about that was "damn, he sounds like a really good kid. What a waste"