Discussion: the Littleton, Colorado Tragedy

Thanks for your thoughtful compilation. Very helpful to see truly thoughtful responses. I have talked some with my aunt, who is now 75 and who taught in the public schools, both in the inner city in Ohio , for 20 years, and then in a small town in CA for 10 years. She saw troubled kids, and troubled situations, as well as love, community and good ideas both places. She said something to me which speaks to one item previously posted, e.g. >But let me suggest,,,. > >If you think about the geography of high school shootings, you become >aware that most have taken place in small towns or in new suburbs -- >rather than in the inner cities, where, had you been guessing in 1980, >you would have predicted this phenomenon to occur. > >SO WE ARE talking about places where people are used to having elbow >room. We are talking about places built on shared assumptions >suddenly engulfed by a world in which all assumptions are questioned. What she said was that 20 years ago, these kinds of problems WERE occurring in the inner cities. Oh, the technology/computer aspect wasn't part of it ... but alienation, pain, despair and guns were part of it. There WERE shootings. (an aside ... I grew up in Denver and my dad taugh high school in Denver. Dad was once threatened at knife point by a student in the 1960s in Denver ... and we had armed policeman on the high school campus I attended. Kids in my graduating class made a suicide pact, once drank cynanide and died. Everyone was totally distressed by this but it never made the news) My aunt feels that these incidents were not well reported in the 60s and 70s if they occurred in the inner city (poorer kids not as newsworthy?) but they still went on. Who knows, maybe less media coverage was good, prevented copycat acts. What she said that was POSITIVE, can be LEARNED FROM was that the *community,* the parents and teachers in the inner cities learned some strategies that worked to lessen violence in those schools. They took various forms -- mentoring, parents patrolling the halls to discourage between-class violence (unarmed, known and respected parents as opposed to armed cops), tutoring -- but basically they came down to one theme: get more caring adults involved in the schools. Teachers CAN'T do it all and sometimes parents are out to lunch, not there for their kids. Or sometimes parents ARE caring but the kids are just more willing to confide in some other adult -- say a mentor -- than their parent. Whatever, more caring adult involvement, from the wider community, seems to make a big difference. As I recall, the team (2 students, one teacher) from Berkeley High who visited Littleton recently came back with the same idea: they recommended that EVERY student needs to have a caring adult who keeps in touch with her/him on a regular basis. Who knows how that might have manifested in Littleton ... recognition that these 2 kids were really troubled and some therapy intervention? ... support for the kids who KNEW their classmates were scary but didn't speak up? ... dialogue about hate, neo-nazi behaviour, self-respect, tolerance, kind and respectful speech? Who knows? But high schoolers are not adults, they still need adult guidance ... and Ralph Nader's right, if we're all working a zillion hours of overtime, how can we be there for the kids in our community? One last thought ... one does not need to be a parent to be involved. One can be a mentor, a tutor, a Big Sister or Brother, a foster parent. Alameda County has a BIG need for foster parents. Berkeley High School matches mentor volunteers with students ... We cannot change the past, but we can contribute to a better future.

For the uncle whose jr high niece is miserable. Small schools (500-600 students in high school) are much much better. (Extremely small schools may have their own problems with exclusivity since there are fewer groups to fit in with). So your sister might look into sending her daughter to a different jr high or look for a small high school. Even if there's not a smaller school to switch to, switching to any other school may give your niece a chance to reestablish herself in a different position in the social hierarchy. I realize your sister asked about how schools and society can change, and certainly that's what we should work towards, but your niece is clearly suffering NOW, so that's why my suggestions place the burden on her. I should also confess that I remember feeling left out at the middle school, asking for advice from a more popular friend, and going to buy the right jeans, etc. Perhaps a slave to conformity, but it also gave me a feeling of power. Deborah . . . For those committed to a systemic approach... Please join educators, families, authors, companies, and leaders in this call to action. A Petition and Pledge for Long-Term Prevention Summary: We are committed to a long-term, education-based violence prevention program for every school in America. These programs will be developed and implemented by educators, researchers, students, parents, business and community leaders, the government, and other volunteer participants working in partnership. Visit http://www.6seconds.org/prevent to sign.

I would like to offer one idea about the Colorado tradgedy. My sons first unsolicitated reaction when we watched with horor the unfolding drama that first night on tv was- I wouldn't want to live in that town. It's the suburbs. I think that's why you see the wierdest things break out in such repressed societal groups. There is all of that forced conformism. As a teacher, I became increasingly aware that the way many teachers keep their classrooms in order was by pointing fingers at the children who aren't able to keep up or do their work. They ridicule them publicly and in some very subtle ways. By doing so, they give other children permission to ridicule those children. It's like the pecking order or in the army, they haze one another until they find a center target. And, then they destroy that person. It's building oneself up by tearing another person down. It's keeping up with the Jones. It's not just in the classroom, it's prevalent in our whole society. But since children spend so much of their time in the classroom or in the school system, it goes on and on and on... ruining many children's lives. It's the silent majority who are afraid to speak up for if they do, they may be the one who will be shot down. I don't think you see this type of mentality in a diverse population as much, because there is more racial, social, class, etc, differences. There are more places to fit in. But in a community that is largely white and upwardly mobile, the pressure is more intense. The hatred and scapgoating and self satisfied bigotry is a given that they pride themselves on. There is a lack of compassion and love. Which says something about the internet. More people in this country are hooked into the internet because it is an invisible room where all are welcome and you can have fantasy relationships. People are turning to the internet for sex! And you know our country's hang-ups on sex. I don't want to go off to far, but the primary thing I want to communicate is the torture of children in the classroom is every day in every way. And it is a given because it is espoused by the greater society as a way to achieve.

Thanks for the Littleton digest. I found it helpful. I recently read a book called Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, which deals with teasing and bullying, both of which in my mind are what drove those boys to the point of insanity. As the mom of a sweet but difficult little boy, I am finding parenthood terrifying.

The Littleton tragedy brought home to me that middle and high schools have an eerie similarity to prisons. Both are mandated by law; both have inmates that are confined in the name of the good of society. Both contain groups that are hostile to each other; the wardens tell them they shouldn't fight, but have no real ability to prevent it. In both institutions, the inmates don't have the full rights of American citizens; and if they try to leave, the police will come and put them back in. The front page newspaper picture of Littleton high school students, all blonds, reminded me of the middle and high school in my small Indiana town. Most of the kids in our school were blond and came from middle class families. With my black hair and immigrant parents, I looked different from many of the kids in my mostly white, suburban school. It didn't help that I was a shy girl and the best in the school at math. I remember being called a dirty spic and other names too vulgar to appear in print, being beaten up and having my schoolwork sabotaged. Because my parents were immigrants and spoke with accents they were a target of ridicule too. I wished desperately for escape, but there was none. When I complained to my parents, they talked to me about the importance of education and warned me that I wouldn't want to turn out like my lazy uncle who'd quit school and spent all his time at the racetrack. The point I'm making with these stories is that adults may have forgotten or never realized how miserable life in schools was for anyone who was the least bit different. I was never a violent person, but there were other outcasts in my school who were treated as cruelly as I was, and I don't know what they would have done if it had been as easy to buy automatic weapons then as it is now. And there have been other tragedies in schools over the years that didn't get the press coverage like Littleton... I remember one girl in my class who was mercilessly teased by the popular kids--she committed suicide. We need to improve conditions in schools so that the torture of some students by others is reduced. Especially since, unlike prison inmates, the students have done nothing wrong that deserves incarceration. In order to improve students' lives, we should first acknowledge that schools, like prisons, are a necessary evil. We need to accept the fact that conditions will never be ideal for the inmates. The first step to improve our schools is to face the unpalatable truth about the misery of the confinement that goes on there. Let's stop this false rose-colored view of high school years as the best years of your life. Here are my proposals to ameliorate the current potentially explosive situation: 1. A national mandate to require uniforms for all public school students. Nobody will like it, but imagine what our prisons would be like if the inmates were allowed to wear gang colors. This will help minimize obvious differences between the fashionably-dressed and the not-so-fashionably-dressed. 2. Minimize the amount of time groups of students are allowed to mingle unsupervised. This will reduce teasing and ridicule of those who are different. For example, instead of having the students walk through the halls and go to the classrooms, have each group of students stay in a home room, and have the teachers come to them. This would also eliminate the recently publicized heavy backpack problem. Students could keep their books in their desks in home room. One might argue that high school students need some time unsupervised by adults so that they can develop social skills with their peers. However, I question the type of social skills that are developed in the artificial society of high school, where a student is thrown together only with others of the same age. In normal society, people interact with people of all ages and backgrounds, and they have the freedom to walk away from someone who is behaving in a hostile manner. In the real world, if an adult beats you up, they'll face criminal prosecution or a lawsuit. Not so in school, where if you even talk about the beating to someone in authority, you get beaten up worse the next time. At the end of the day, when the students are paroled, they enter a society where not everybody likes each other, but at least the groups that are hostile to each other can choose to stay out of each other's way. That's a better time to develop social skills which will be useful in the real world. 3. Perhaps we should also give students more freedom to leave the jail, to spend time observing adult careers, and mingling with groups of all ages. What if schools offered co-op options? Middle and high school kids may be in even a worse situation than felons; the latter know what the outside world is like, and they know their sentence will be over one day. I remember as a teenager believing the oft-repeated platitude that public school prepares kids for the real world, and it was incredibly depressing to contemplate a lifetime in a world as cruel and unhealthy as high school stretching out endlessly before me. What may very well have saved me from suicide during those terrible high school years was the fact that I was allowed to take college classes, where I became best friends with a woman seven years older. We had long talks about everything under the sun, the talks I couldn't have with either my classmates or my parents. And she saved my self- esteem. I had believed that all the maltreatment was my fault, that I was somehow doing something wrong. She told me it was just that I thought about things that other sixteen-year-olds didn't. She made me realize that the world was a bigger and better place than my high school experience had led me to believe, and that one day the ostracism, harassment, and beatings would end. My sentence would be over. So, perhaps if we kept the bullies in line, minimized differences in appearance, and allowed kids some freedom to observe the real world, we might release some of the pressure and relieve some of the misery. Perhaps then schools would become less like prisons, and more like halfway houses. We might be able to better prepare kids for the adult world. High schools might turn out better citizens. Who knows, we might even prevent future tragedies like the one at Littleton.

Sunday, April 25, 1999

SAN FRANCISCO--After the ribbons fade, after the dead are laid to rest, after the reporters drift away, the last casualty of the massacre at Columbine High School may turn out to be the idea of public school.

Public school. We used to know what that concept meant. Earlier generations understood, in a nation as individualized as ours, that we needed an institution, a school, where children would learn to regar themselves as people in common.

After Littleton, Colo., who wonders about Yugoslavia? The most balkanized region of America may well be the high school, inner city or rural, also suburban, middle class. In the cafeteria, the teenagers of America segregate themselves, each group with its own: jocks, skinheads, blacks, surfers, Latinos, nerds, etc. What we saw at Columbine--the Goths against the jocks--was a kind of ethnic cleansing.

More than a century ago, Mark Twain created Huck Finn, a kid who, in the company of a runaway slave, left his small town to risk the great American river. The nonfictional reality today is much less romantic. At that very time--the season we call adolescence--when we expect our children to leave home, to grasp their independence, American teenagers instead are looking for home or a tribe. Inner-city kids, for example, speak of their gang as family, blood. Because school is not the center of existence for the big-city gangsta, ethnic cleansing, East L.A.-style, tends to be accomplished through drive-bys, on street corners. We have known for some time that brown and black inner-city kids kill one another, to establish their sense of belonging in gangs, in the city of strangers. We are sorry for them, but as long as we stayed out of their line of fire, we thought we were safe. But then we started to see white kids emerge from the forests of rural America, their parody of big-city gangs, their murderous rage against parents and school.

Now the nightmare moves closer to the America's heart and hearth, to Littleton, a middle-class suburb where nice people live and the streets are wide and the houses have separate bedrooms for everyone and a three-car garage--the domestic architecture of anonymity. We look at photographs of those split-level suburban homes where Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold lived. Steven Spielberg, our modern Twain, would doubtlessly romanticize the warm, golden light coming from within. The other Stephen--King, the writer whom many teenagers read--imagines teenagers in the basement, plotting to blow up the junior prom, while several televisions blare upstairs.

An Italian friend of mine shakes his head. He says we Americans are always flattering ourselves by announcing our individualism to the world. But, my Italian friend says, you cannot be truly individualistic unless you have a strong sense of family or village. You can't become an I without a strong sense of we. For all our American talk of individualism, my Italian friend says, we are merely the loneliest people on Earth.

Our divorced and womanizing politicians keep yearning for family values. The rest of us settle for chat rooms or support groups or a cafeteria table with people just like ourselves. Have you ever been to Littleton? There are hundreds of Littletons in America now, from the Silicon Valley to North Dallas to Long Island. The main employers are high-tech firms; many homeowners have college degrees; and there is a preference on Saturdays for soccer, not football.

But Littleton is a town built on restless ambition. Most people arrive from elsewhere, and most will probably end up moving away. A psychologist on one of the networks this week estimated that 20% of American teenagers today should seek psychological help. But all week, I kept thinking of the parents of the two monsters. A woman, a mother of teenagers, said to me this week that she began to lose contact with her children when they began to listen to a music she could not decipher. Before that, they had their televisions. Now, of course, they have their own computers. They live in their own world.

This, of course, is where the teacher comes in. We send our children who are innocent of intimacy to Columbine High School. But look at the place! The building has the charm and scale of an office building alongside the interstate. It falls to the teacher, underpaid and overworked, to teach the children of Littleton what public-school teachers have always tried to teach children, that they belong to a culture in common, speak a common tongue, carry a common history that connects them to Thomas Jefferson and Malcolm X.

The ideal of public education is an extraordinary one, especially because America is a country that otherwise prizes its unruly soul. (In Twain's story of Finn, the school marm must play the villain, because it is she who intends to catch Huck and diminish his individualism by making him speak regular.)

In fact, for many decades, in many parts of America, our public schools betrayed their role by being racially segregated. Today, on the other hand, at a time when the American public school is open to all, many teachers settle for the sentimentality of multiculturalism (celebrate diversity!) instead of insisting on a communal vision. There are doubtlessly good teachers at Columbine. (One teacher died last week, trying to protect the lives of his students.) But imagine the task of today's public-school teacher. Everyday facing too many faces to know by name. Bodybuilders, pierced noses, shaved heads, brown skin, Calvin Klein blues, black trench coats. At such a school, can we be surprised to learn that a sad little tribe, the Trench Coat Mafia, dressed like the Blues Brothers, published an ad in the yearbook that announced, Insanity's healthy? No one on the faculty apparently noticed or had time to remark.

It turns out, something not nice was going on at Columbine High School. One father told CBS News that a football player used to look for his son in the hallways, pick on his son--a Jew--for being different. Meanwhile, elsewhere along the school hallway, two boys in black trench coats murmured Nazi tags to each other about football players.

You will say, of course, that high school is high school. It's always been the most conformist society of our lives. What is different now is that increasing numbers of high-school students come from families and neighborhoods that barely exist. They live surrounded by an architecture of impersonality and a technology of solitude--Web pages screaming in silence for attention.

All last week, child psychologists dispensing sound bites spoke about ways to identify the kid who might mean big trouble. Listening to them, I remembered how, after Timothy J. McVeigh's arrest in the Oklahoma bombing, a newspaper reporter, talking to his high-school teachers, found that none of them could remember the boy.

As my Italian friend would say, you cannot become a true individual if you do not come from a we. You merely end up a loner, looking for a tribe. The white-supremist dreams of a cabin on the edge of America, where he might be with his own kind. The street thug kills to prove that he is tough enough to earn his place in the gang. Now we know that there are borderlines in the middle-class high school as murderous as any in Kosovo.

Lost in the news from Colorado this week was an education story not unrelated. Theodore J. Forstmann, a Wall Street financier-billionaire, and John Walton, the Wal-Mart heir, who have promised low-income children scholarships to private or parochial schools, announced that they had received replies from more than a million families.

The rich, of course, long ago abandoned our public schools. Now the poor want out. For many poor families, the best hope for what we might call a public education may be private, religious schools. In spite of their theological tribalism, or maybe because of it, a student is grounded in a larger reality than his separate self, call it a faith.

After Littleton, the middle-class parent may well decide that the public-school library is too dangerous a place for her daughter or son. But the question for America is larger than the safety of any one of our children. The question, now, is whether or not Americans will be able to embrace the idea of a public life--our responsibility to all children--at a time when we feel so foreign to our own, sitting in front of their computer screens or playing in the basement.* - - -

Richard Rodriguez, an Editor at Pacific News Service, Is the Author of Days of Obligation.

Copyright 1999 Los Angeles Times. All Rights Reserved

The Boston Globe article was excellent, focusing on gender differences. Let's th ink internationally as well. I grew up in the seventies in a European country wh ere we don't have jocks, don't have homecoming queens, don't have valedictorians, don't have senior proms, and don't have emphasis on sports. We also didn't have access to weapons and you still can't get a driver's license before the age of 1 8. It wasn't until I moved here that I realized how this combination might have ruled out a lot of potential injuries. What is this urge in the American culture to always glorify one individual as the best? Is that worth pushing 99% in the shadow and giving them the impression that being at the top is the only worthwhil e thing to do and the only way to find recognition? The winner takes it all - ev en in the political system. Why is there a jock culture and why is it so support ed and cocky? Because it is a money making industry?

Once we think globally and understand that things don't have to be this way, beca use they already aren't in other countries, maybe we can make some changes. My f avorite adopted saying is: Most unhappiness is caused by comparison. I live by that. It goes deep in many ways for males and females alike. And we got to get to the core in order to preserve it.

I've finally just got around to reading UCB Parents' The Colorado Tragedy, part 2, and I'd like to recommend a book, though I haven't actually read it (awful, eh?). I'm not sure how soon I'll have time to read it, but I'd really love to hear what members of this newsletter think of it, if you've managed to find the time. The reader reviews on Amazon.com are mostly extremely positive. Here's a bit from Amazon's official reviewer: Reviving Ophelia, Mary Pipher's groundbreaking book, exposed the toxic environment faced by adolescent girls in our society. Now, from the same publisher, comes Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys by Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson, which does the same for adolescent boys. Boys suffer from a too-narrow definition of masculinity, the authors assert as they expose and discuss the relationship between vulnerability and developing sexuality, the culture of cruelty boys live in, the tyranny of toughness, the disadvantages of being a boy in elementary school, how boys' emotional lives are squelched, and what we, as a society, can do about all this without turning boys into girls. Our premise is that boys will be better off if boys are better understood--and if they are encouraged to become more emotionally literate, the authors assert. Sounds good so far!