To say students are mean to each other is an understatement. A student will tell their peer to "go kill yourself," and feel zero remorse. Who are these children raised by where they think it is okay to say/do these things? We need more accountability, and we need students to actually care about their peers. In today's school system you feel as if nobody really cares about you. Our government really needs to step in and do something. Because as it stands the school system keeps churning out kids who are bitter and hated their school experience. Many people have psychological issues that aren't diagnosed in school time. For instance, bullying a young kid with depression could cause them to commit suicide. A big step would be to have more counseling for individual students. They could have maybe 1 counselor for every 100-150 students that they could talk to, who could get in-depth and actually get to know the student. Another step could be to not leave anyone left out; typically school shooters often are loners that say that nobody cared about them, especially their peers. Schools could have time devoted to students getting to know one another, talk about problems they are having, etc. This ties into gun control, just because you get rid of guns doesn't mean students won't try to murder their peers with other types of weapons. What will it come to, will we have to get rid of anything dangerous?
While gun control is a very large issue that won't be resolved anytime soon, getting personal with students can be done. Few would oppose reform to help the children of America get through the rigors of school. We reap what we sow, we have to raise children up better, and not just at school, but at home too.
Dear Hobart,
ReplyDeleteI really appreciate you tackling the issue of needing to improve mental and emotional support in our schools in your article “Guns don’t kill students, students kill students.” It’s been a while since I was in secondary school, but I still remember quite vividly how it felt to be bullied and ostracized. I’ve always wondered how we as a society have allowed this to continue with our children decade after decade when we wouldn’t tolerate behavior like this from adult colleagues in a workplace or adult strangers on the street. I couldn’t agree with you more that we need to see reform, and I applaud your ideas about increasing the availability of counseling for students along with your ideas about needing inclusion and emotional support activities. I think all of these could have a tremendously positive impact on the issues we are facing.
I also wholeheartedly agree with you that these issues and mental health concerns in general are at the core of our nation’s problem with mass shootings, but where I diverge from your ideas is in the belief that tackling these issues will be easier or produce more immediate results than reforming gun laws. I was in high school over 30 years ago and experienced first-hand the type of bullying and alienation you speak of. The sting is still there as it is for countless others I went to school with. What differs so much between my generation and the current one is not that we had so much better mental and emotional support (I guarantee you we didn’t!), it’s that we didn’t have the same kind of gun culture, gun access, or gun types that we do now. It wasn’t even a consideration. But since Columbine, it has increasingly become not only a consideration but a go-to.
I wish we would have solved all the emotional and mental support issues in the 30+ years since I was a high school student, but we haven’t. I absolutely agree with you that we need to make it a top priority and continue to chip away at it, but I don’t think it will produce the results we are looking for as quickly as we need it to, especially if the last 30 years is any kind of indication. While legislating reform to gun control laws is no easy task, I actually think it will be an easier and quicker deterrent to mass shootings and will allow us to continue the essential work of trying to reform our society’s school bullying and emotional support issues.
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ReplyDeleteI absolutely agree with your blog post, Guns don't kill students, students kill students. I think it's going to take a lot of work to get rid of and/or redefine the second amendment and if it IS ever amended, it's going to take a long time and an army to regulate the mass amounts of firearms in the U.S. In the meantime, friendliness can go a long way. I don't know if assigning counselors to students at school will exactly improve the attitudes of millions of kids but it couldn't do any harm. I also think this issue starts more with activities at home and how kids spend their free time. Children/teens look up to family members and if someone is a complete a**hole, they are more likely to develop that same attitude or eventually become depressed. Let's start by influencing good character at home and setting positive examples for youths.
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