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Schools teach despair, pupils learn violence
Josey1
Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
Schools teach despair, pupils learn violence
April 24, 2002
Regarding "Memorial to Columbine held to highlight dangers of guns" (The Star, April 21), I am perplexed by the popular usage of the term "gun violence." Violence is violence regardless of the tool or method employed by the perpetrator. Why do we never hear "knife violence" or "baseball bat violence?"
The violence epidemic will only worsen if society seeks to blame objects instead of people. To say that guns made the tragedy possible is to incorrectly accept that everyone is a potential killer. To teach this false lesson in school or in print is to deny the fact that individual choices lead to peace or violence, success or failure, in all areas of life. The lack of fundamental life-guiding ideas kills, not the weapons used by desperate teenagers hateful of a world in which they have been taught that morality is a delusion of the na?ve.
Instead of presenting the world as a place for achievement, public schools keep their emphasis on the mitigation of tragedy, implying that the world is a miserable place where mere survival is the most ambitious goal possible. Schools and the media focus much time addressing such issues as violence, drug abuse, suicide and teenage pregnancy as if they were spontaneous natural phenomena. Poverty is discussed as if it were a random cancer that strikes its victims without warning.
True education and a value for independent thought are an antidote for those ills. Instead of nurturing a love of life, public schools instill a fear of the world and a sense of moral and intellectual incompetence. Though the blame for Columbine belongs primarily with the shooters, the school and the parents follow closely behind.
Jose Batista
Indianapolis
http://www.indystar.com/article.php?eletbatista24.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
April 24, 2002
Regarding "Memorial to Columbine held to highlight dangers of guns" (The Star, April 21), I am perplexed by the popular usage of the term "gun violence." Violence is violence regardless of the tool or method employed by the perpetrator. Why do we never hear "knife violence" or "baseball bat violence?"
The violence epidemic will only worsen if society seeks to blame objects instead of people. To say that guns made the tragedy possible is to incorrectly accept that everyone is a potential killer. To teach this false lesson in school or in print is to deny the fact that individual choices lead to peace or violence, success or failure, in all areas of life. The lack of fundamental life-guiding ideas kills, not the weapons used by desperate teenagers hateful of a world in which they have been taught that morality is a delusion of the na?ve.
Instead of presenting the world as a place for achievement, public schools keep their emphasis on the mitigation of tragedy, implying that the world is a miserable place where mere survival is the most ambitious goal possible. Schools and the media focus much time addressing such issues as violence, drug abuse, suicide and teenage pregnancy as if they were spontaneous natural phenomena. Poverty is discussed as if it were a random cancer that strikes its victims without warning.
True education and a value for independent thought are an antidote for those ills. Instead of nurturing a love of life, public schools instill a fear of the world and a sense of moral and intellectual incompetence. Though the blame for Columbine belongs primarily with the shooters, the school and the parents follow closely behind.
Jose Batista
Indianapolis
http://www.indystar.com/article.php?eletbatista24.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878