Flashback - Terrifying Children

[This entry comes from not too long ago, August of this year, and was originally titled How to Shade the Truth. As I pointed out, shading the truth to attract viewers or make a political point is both common and cold-hearted.]

Here is a point of view I might want to push: Although there has not been a lot of news lately about school shootings, they are still a major problem. Parents and students alike should still worry about the safety of schools and demand something be done about gun violence.

If I am CNN, I run a headline on July 26, 2019 saying, “There have been 22 school shootings in the US so far this year.” Wow, that is almost one every 10 days!

They define a school shooting as one where someone was hurt or killed and that happened on school property. It includes incidents of accidental discharge and those where the weapon was a BB gun, because they are “potentially lethal.”

Seeing only the headline would cause many to assume that the shootings involved a K-12 student during regular school time. The examples in detail tell a different story.

They are listed in reverse chronological order. The first three happened in school parking lots or playgrounds during summer break. One of the people shot was 36 years old, riding his bike though a high school parking lot. 

The next two victims were a teen shot in the parking lot after a fight broke out, and a 25-year-old man playing basketball at a Chicago elementary school playground.

Four of the incidents happened at Universities, none of them inside buildings. Likewise, of the remaining thirteen incidents, only six actually happened inside a school. One involved a 16-year-old student “trying to buy marijuana from a 17-year-old student.”

The single incident of note was the well-publicized one death and eight injuries at the STEM School in Highlands Ranch, Colorado. “Two male students were charged with murder and attempted murder; one of them told police he sought to target classmates who had bullied him.”

Of course school shootings are bad: one is too many. But let’s be honest about it. There were not 22 since the beginning of the year as most people would understand them. A 46-year-old man shot multiple times by his neighbor in a high school parking lot “amid an ongoing argument over a parking spot” is not really a school shooting in any sense of the term. 

This is the kind of shading and spinning that the media often do to achieve the shock factor desired to retain readership and viewership. It pays to read the rest of the article; it pays to question headlines; it pays to use critical thinking. It especially pays when you know they have a hidden agenda or an incentive to get you all upset – which is always.

[These are not only common but cruel. The 22 in the headline became 6 inside a K-12 school during school hours and only one that fits a commonly held understanding of a school shooting. With over 100,000 public schools in the US, these incidents are exceedingly rare - an impression the news media tries to cover up. What are not rare are headlines like this one: “There are kids who simply are scared to go to school.” How is this practice not a form of child abuse?]

Some Odd Thoughts

As I write these little essays, I get the impression that I often have thoughts that are out of sync with the rest of the world. Perhaps I think too hard about things, but here are a few more random observations.

I picked up a small card advertising a kind of school system open house and presentation. In part it read, “Come hear about some of the new and exciting things happening at our schools.” This is probably a symptom of current advertising where everything has to be new and exciting or new and improved or innovative and sustainable. Buzzwords fill all advertising from shoes to cars to doctor’s offices.

But if I were a parent of a child attending one of these schools, I wouldn’t care two pins about new and exciting. I would want the school to teach my children how to read, write, add and subtract. These are basic skills that anyone needs in any profession or just to live a reasonably stress-free life. Instead, in another case I see a television news segment featuring kids in the early grades crawling around on the floor to get an appreciation of STEM subjects with “educators” gushing about how wonderful it is and how it “keeps them engaged.”

Shouldn’t it be the child’s responsibility to learn and the parent’s responsibility to ensure they do? It seems in too many cases teachers are entertainers, the students are the audience and the parents are automatic advocates for their children when they step out of line, setting up an unproductive dynamic.

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Some research shows that patients in nursing homes can be comforted by dogs and other pets, but can be equally comforted and cheered up by mechanical dog-like robots. What if airlines developed a policy that so-called support animals were no longer allowed on planes. Instead people could rent a teddy bear of other stuffed comfort animal at the departing airport and turn it in when they landed. (This would not apply to legitimate service animals.) That’s never going to happen. Society is headed in the opposite direction.

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CBS Sunday Morning ran a segment a few weeks ago about the $450 million makeover of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City. In it the museum director mentioned that they “will also increase the number of works by female artists – five times as many [as] before.” Wow, that’s really a good thing – or is it?

Apparently the art world today harbors some resentment that the art world of the past judged art, at least in part, on the basis of whether the artist was a man or a woman, giving preference not to the quality of the art but to the sex of the artist. The quality of the art (as subjective as that can be) should be the criterion for judging what gets displayed and what is rejected, not the appearance, the status, the reputation or the political connections of the artist. That would be the really good thing.

So why is MOMA making it a point to call attention to the number of female artists? Isn’t that the same kind of objectionable thinking that prevailed in the past dressed up in a different costume? They express their objection to past flaws in the system by doing the same thing in the opposite direction and call it progress.

Parental Responsibility and Education

Relative to the behavior model with its five dimensions, the problem is that so many other books and articles touch only on one of the dimensions or even a subset of a single dimension. They all come to the same conclusion in a more limited way. They agree that American society is handicapped by poor individual choices and faulty decisions; but only here, at Real American Solutions, is right behavior in all five key dimensions seen as the only way to get out of the hole that Americans keep digging for themselves and their country.

One example comes from John Rosemond, a columnist, public speaker, and author on parenting. “His weekly parenting column is syndicated in approximately 225 newspapers, and he has authored 15 books on the subject.” A common theme of many of his columns is the problem of parental responsibility.

Here is a recent example about eroding discipline in the schools. A “steady stream of missives from teachers, ex-teachers, and other folks who have insider knowledge of America's schools” tells him that “classroom discipline is falling apart” and no one seems to have the answer.

One factor adding to the problem is lack of support from school administrators. When a disruptive student is sent to the principal's office, they often return to class having “received a cookie or some other treat while they talked about their 'feelings.'” On top of that “almost every teacher says that when they call a parent about a child's behavior, the parent makes excuses or blames the teacher." As the problem gets worse, teachers demand smaller class size, increasing overall cost to taxpayers.

Compound those behaviors with teacher unions that have been given legal power to game the system, federal aid to education with strings attached and administrators too timid to back up teachers, and he predicts “that by 2030 nearly every public-school student will have a diagnosis of one sort or another.” This will be a strategy to increase the number of special needs children to maintain funding as responsible parents, many of them teachers themselves, continue to pull their kids from the public schools to send them to available alternatives. 

Ultimately, it all comes back to the parents. They are the ones who side with the child. They are the ones who put the fear of legal action on the administrators. They are the ones who take too little interest in their children’s education in general, passing it off to the teachers and after-school programs. Parental responsibility is at the heart of the problem; it's the answer everyone is looking for.