Back in 1999, I wrote an essay (and also gave a talk) entitled, “Violence: Coming Soon To A School Near You?” It was in response to the Columbine school shootings, the biggest such event to date.
Here are some excerpts from that essay. See for yourself how little has changed. I stand by every word of it.
If you understand the role of philosophical ideas in human life, it’s not so surprising to see school violence spread from inner city environments to middle America. Why? Because kids in middle America are being taught gangster-like ideas no less than kids in the inner cities.
Kids in middle America are taught, for example, that one’s group identity is more important than the individual mind. Multiculturalist textbooks and federal mandates require kids to look at themselves more as members of a group (Hispanic, Afro-American, Asian-American, etc.) rather than as members of the human species with individual minds capable of reasoning and ascertaining the same, one objective reality.
As the emphasis shifts from mastering one’s individual conceptual abilities to defining one’s group membership in society, is it any wonder that Nazi-like ideas start to flourish, increasingly, among youth? Is it any wonder that what started out as a phenomenon among inner city gang members is now, even as we speak, spreading to the more comfortable mainstream of America?
Here’s how one author defines a gang: “a loosely organized group of individuals who collaborate together for social reasons.” (Steve Nawojczyk)
This is a better definition than the author may have realized, at least in one respect. Notice how he implies that an essential feature of gangs is that they get together for a social purpose.
Not a social purpose in the usual, rational sense – sharing a value in common with other people and wanting to spend time with those people in the pursuit of that value. Rather, “social” in the deepest psychological, even epistemological sense – using each other, in a way, to determine what reality and ethics are; as opposed to using their own individual minds, and their faculties of reason, for assessing what reality is.
As one gang expert points out, “You must remember that (individual gang members) believe everything the gang tells them.”
Some other characteristics of gang psychology: “Joining a group known to have a reputation, good or bad, gives a kid looking for a purpose something to belong to. Participants have said the mere interaction of members, listening to one another’s problems and sharing the other trials and tribulations today’s teens are faced with are the drawing card for them to become a banger (gang member). Gang members also claim to enjoy the respect or fear others exhibit around them. Then they say, the money begins flowing, and with that comes all of the things associated with material wealth that is usually beyond the reach of these adolescents without the criminal activity of being involved in a gang. All of this is quite a heady trip for a young kid.
Once a kid gets into a gang, over and over they are told there is no way out. They fear serious reprisals from fellow gang members if a defection is suspected. Some are told they will be killed if they try to get out.
Others are told that they can kill their mother to earn their way out.”
Notice how gang psychology represents the exact opposite of a psychology grounded in individualism, objective reality, and the absolutism of reason. Gang psychology is based upon the philosophy of collectivism, subjective reality (as defined by the dominant group feelings), and the absolutism of force based upon whims.
Human beings can and should make harsh, objective judgments about other human beings who want to destroy them. Children should be taught how and why to make such judgments.
All of my assertions depend upon the concepts of objective reality, and reason as an absolute. These are the concepts kids can’t be expected to learn too much about anymore, neither from the amoral subjectivists who run the public schools, nor the religious fundamentalists who would just love to get their hands on the public schools and impose a different kind of religion.
As fundamental and all-encompassing as philosophical ideas are, we cannot forget that our political system of socialized education is also a major culprit in school violence. In a truly private marketplace of education, where schools could actually go out of business if they failed to do their jobs properly, rational ideas would stand a much better chance.
Just imagine, for a moment, if a private chain of schools experienced an increase in outbursts of violence.
In a free marketplace, without the coercion of government, parents and students would be much freer than they are at present to choose a different school – or even homeschool. The profit motive would compel competing chains of schools to find ways to make their schools safer – and fast. Not so with the public schools today.
Yet there is more privatization afoot than might be obvious at first glance.
Michael P. Farris, the president of the Home School Legal Defense Association in Purcellville, Va., said, “It’s clear a lot more people have thought about home schooling this spring (post-Columbine) than ever before.”
In Colorado, in the month after the Columbine shootings, the state education department fielded 68 calls about home schooling, about 60 percent more than usual, said Suzie Parker, who oversees home schooling for the agency. Like most states, Colorado doesn’t require parents to report to the state or school district the reasons why they want to home-educate.
Home school leaders in such states as Arkansas and Georgia, which have endured widely publicized school shootings of their own, say they too have gone through similar spikes in interest.
The lack of hard data on home schooling makes tracking the movement difficult, claims Michelle Doyle, the director of the U.S. Department of Education’s office of nonpublic instruction. Much of the available information is anecdotal and self-reported.
None of this is to imply that there’s anything inherently superior about home schooling. That’s a whole separate discussion. The point is that we have some evidence that a private market is gradually building. Objective, parental judgment is gaining momentum, bit by bit, over the collective judgment of the politicized, bureaucratic public school system.
This trend has a long, long way to go. But the more parents who take control over their kids’ education (whether it be home schooling, a hired teacher or a private school), the harder it will become for statist politicians to build and maintain majority voting blocs to retain their coercive power.
Is the subjectivist public school system still the establishment? Overwhelmingly so. But there are signs the establishment is showing more and more cracks.
The more parents who become self-confident and assertive about their moral right and intellectual capacity to take responsibility for their own kids’ education – instead of handing it over to the horribly mediocre (and worse) public school system – the more endangered that establishment becomes.
Think about it. In order to survive and flourish, our socialized public school system must count on 2 things: (1) low self-esteem and low self-confidence in parents about their ability to make judgments regarding how to educate their kids; and, (2) a continuing presumption, despite obvious evidence to the contrary, that schools are both effective and physically safe places to learn.
In other words, the public school system can only survive the extent to which it declares war on reality and truth.
As one advocate of the public school system, Steven J. Pratt, the executive director for the Colorado Association of School Executives, recently said, with a straight face: “I think once you get past the emotional aspect, people will realize that schools are still very, very safe places to be.”
So much for reality.
If this is the sort of individual to whom the future of the socialized public school system is to be entrusted, I don’t believe it’s all that long for this world. Do you?
The best short-term measure for beginning privatization, in my view, would be to pressure Congress to close down the U.S. Department of Education as soon as possible. Completely get the federal government out of education. Most of the irrational ideas in the public school system trickle down from the top, from those wrong-headed intellectuals and hapless policy wonks in Washington, DC.
At the community and local levels, public school teachers and administrators should be left relatively free to be more rational and common sense-oriented in running the schools. They need to be left as free as possible to operate schools the way private schools usually are – teaching kids how to read and think, and expelling those who refuse to learn.
These modest reforms would not change the coercive, immoral and impractical nature of the public school system. But it would probably bring some relief in that teachers would not be under constant federal pressure, at least, to teach amoral subjectivism, environmentalism, and other irrational dogmas to young minds.
A longer-term approach? Fight for complete privatization of the schools. Allow parents to obtain tax-credits for schools of their choice, and to set up tax-free education savings accounts when their children are born (or even sooner). Allow parents to home-school, as record numbers are doing today. Phase public schools out of existence – or at least let them compete with private schools in a fair race. It won’t be hard to predict the winner.
Stop making schools the responsibility of everyone-in-general (meaning: politicians). Instead, make them the responsibility of the people who run them and the parents who pay money to send their kids there –as with any other commodity in the marketplace.
As a psychotherapist, I constantly encounter parents with the “somebody should take care of it attitude” about their kids’ education. Parents who would never in a million years drop their kid off at the doctor’s office and ask little or no questions about what the doctor is doing, take this very approach with their children’s education.
They treat his medical condition seriously, while almost ignoring his intellectual condition altogether.
This defaulting of responsibility by parents is the greatest evil upon which all the other evils today, in the field of education, depend.
Most fundamentally, people need to make their priorities clear and face reality. It’s not possible to have something for nothing. The “free” public school system – the system of socialized education – has failed, as it had to fail. When responsibility and freedom are taken away from people – especially for something so profoundly important as the training of the young mind – negative and even catastrophic results will follow.
If the state of today’s public schools is not sufficient proof for my assertion, then what will it take?
How many more young minds must be quietly crushed – and young bodies overtly killed – before we accept the reality that socialized education has failed and it’s time to change?
Most of all, parents need to think honestly about the wrong ideas which schools – and even parents themselves – are sanctioning. Think about who does and does not benefit from the politically correct ideas that: there is no such thing as right and wrong; there is no objective reality; feelings are just as powerful or even more important than rationality and facts in comprehending the external world.
Certainly the rational, and the good, do not benefit from this moral relativism. Certainly the superior athletes and the superior students do not benefit; they have the most to lose when the idea of moral relativism takes over. They only stand to lose when the intellectual atmosphere is stifled so that the inferior won’t have their feelings hurt. They only stand to lose if the bullies, the druggies, and the lazies who refuse to think and work are kept in school (by law) because “everyone has a right to an education.”
The bullies and the life-haters and the little Nazis, on the other hand, only stand to gain from the spread of moral relativism. If they join irrational groups or act in bizarre ways, who are adults to stand in the way?
If they want to build bombs in the school basement or their parents’ garages, they can count on most parents and teachers to look the other way, saying to themselves: “Who am I to judge? Who am I to assert myself? Maybe he’s just doing what’s right for him.” Goodness knows, the schools can’t expel the druggies and the bullies and the little Nazis; their parents would sue!
How can these irrational trends and tendencies not lead to resentment and psychological conflict in any kids? How can they not lead to outright violence among the worst elements, sooner or later? To stop the violence, we need to end the public school system – and all the ideas which make it possible.
For all its flaws and contradictions, American culture is still essentially reason-oriented. Being reason-oriented means having a high regard – indeed, even a reverence – for the pursuit of knowledge. Most Americans see education as a basic requirement of life, which in an advanced society it certainly is.
Consequently, they view education as a moral and political right which should be accessible to everybody.
It seems inconceivable to them that the government stop providing a guaranteed education to everyone – even if it’s increasingly apparent that the “education” may be doing more harm than good.
If you argue for privatized schooling, what most people hear you saying, in effect, is: “Education is not that important. You don’t have to have it; it’s a luxury.” The better types of Americans need help understanding that it’s precisely because education is so important that the government needs to get out of it.
Government, by its nature, is an agent of force; this is why it is valuable and necessary for keeping the peace, prosecuting violent criminals, upholding legal contracts, and defeating foreign invaders. It does not belong in the classroom, however, because the mind does not think under force or compulsion or political correctness; schools cannot teach young minds effectively under such conditions.
Today’s public school system has, to a very great extent, become a vehicle for flaky, irrational ideas which would perish if forced to survive on their own in the marketplace. Its one-size-fits-all structure is appropriate for the military or the police force, perhaps, but not for the complex and deeply individual, objective process of learning.
Lastly, what about the issue of alienation? For example, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, the Columbine killers, were reported to walk the halls of school “with their heads down, because if they looked up they’d get thrown into lockers and get called a ‘fag.’” While this certainly does not excuse their violence, does it not help explain it? Can’t anyone who has been unfairly or viciously treated understand at least wanting to open fire on your classmates, if not actually doing so?
Not if you understand that evil and irrationality are impotent, so long as you grant it no sanction or power. Not if you understand that reality is objective, not subjective – and if large numbers of your classmates are making fun of you without really knowing you, then the bigger error is theirs, not yours.
Of course, these are not easy ideas to internalize and feel under circumstances of humiliation and degradation. But these rational kinds of ideas would be much less difficult to internalize in the right kind of intellectual philosophical climate – which, I have pointed out, the great majority of kids (especially in public schools) do not inhabit.
Also, if public school attendance was not compulsory by the government – and if the government did not make it so hard to expel kids unable or unwilling to learn – and if the government did not require its teachers to spread the notion that being non-judgmental is important, thereby undermining everyone’s self-esteem– then things would be very different.
I certainly would like to believe there would never be school violence under a non-coercive, rational educational system. I am certain that there would not be school violence repeatedly throughout the year, as we see happening now. Parents would not have to live in constant fear that violence is coming, soon, to a school near them.
People who feel sympathy for the killers, simply because they were perhaps unfairly taunted and teased, reveal the extent to which they have accepted the whole psychology of nonjudgmentalism. They evade the wider context – which is quite a huge context.
They evade, for example, the fact that the boys planned their attacks. They stockpiled weapons for months. The speed and cunning with which they moved through their school on the day of the shooting shows how they had developed a plan of action.
On a deeper and more fundamental level, school shooters had heard from their school teachers (over and over, explicitly or implicitly) that hate is always wrong, and that judgment is always unkind and unfair.
Many kids, thankfully, reject this baloney, though few if any go so far as to reject it explicitly, proudly and on principle. Still other kids more or less buy into the nonsense of nonjudgmentalism and bow their heads, to some degree at least, in humble compliance.
Then there are the shooters, the killers. They are the type who hear the commandments against objectivity and judgment and see it as an opportunity to exploit. They see it as an opportunity to gain a false sense of power, achieve revenge against their real or alleged tormenters, and whatever else suits their fancy.
They understand that in a climate where people were not afraid to make judgments, to call a bad person a bad person, that they would not stand as great a chance at taking over their school or even flying a 747 into Manhattan. But, in their own way, they must have sensed the moral disarmament of enough students and teachers that – once their emotions moved them to do so – they could go for the kill.
The student killers, past, present, and future, are not victims. They are perpetrators, made possible by the fact that we victimize ourselves. We victimize ourselves by pretending that objective reality is other than what it is – that (quoting Aristotle) A is other than A – and as a consequence, contribute to creating a social climate where criminals and victimizers feel more comfortable than would otherwise be the case.
Ideas have consequences. So long as schools continue to propagate the idea that everything is relative, we can continue to expect to have students who will cash in on the premise. Remember, after all, that school shooters were only doing what was “right” for them. Who are you or I to judge their actions as wrong?
How insensitive of us! How dare we be so judgmental?
All the gun control laws and movie censorship laws in the world cannot alter the power of ideas. Trying to control people’s actions while pretending there is no such thing as the human mind is worse than futile. So long as some of us understand this fact, and are both able and willing to communicate it to anybody who will listen, then there is hope.
Why? Because reality, and the facts, are on our side. Because we are right and people who continue to promote public schools and the irrational philosophy underlying them are wrong.
Because the guiding premises underlying today’s educational system – coercion, subjectivism, nonjudgmental selflessness – are dead wrong, that school system is corroding right before our very eyes. It had to. There’s no mystery about it.
Those of us who take the time to understand the role of philosophic ideas in human action have an excellent grasp of just why those schools are collapsing. We can see beneath the superficial claims that guns, video games, movies, and single parenthood “make” young people kill.
But even the philosophically uneducated or illiterate who watch the evening news or read the daily newspaper are finding it a little harder to deny that, for whatever reason, something is desperately wrong with today’s coercive, subjectivist and amoral school monopoly.
Quite properly, more and more taxpaying citizens are losing respect for that monopolistic system.
These tragic incidents offer utterly undeniable concretes as to the power of ideas – even, regrettably, the power of wrong ideas, if you allow yourself to concede anything to them.
More and more parents are turning to private and homeschooling. The petty dictators who run the public school teacher collectives (also known as teachers’ unions) are starting to panic.
At the moment, they ever more diligently cling to control over their essential monopoly on private and secondary school education in this society. But such a neurotic, irrational need for control stems from a sense that one is losing it.
Dictatorships, in the end, survive not because the irrational ideas which prop them up are strong – but only because people give them power. In the long run, more people want their kids to be educated in a bullet-free zone than want to protect the “right” of public school monopolies to teach moral and epistemological relativism. Something has to give, sooner or later.
Our present dictatorship of subjectivism, anti-individualism, and anti-reason will fall. It’s already falling. Like similar political and intellectual dictatorships throughout history, it too shall pass. By naming the most fundamental issues aloud, we can and will speed up the process.
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