Junior high schools are not being overrun by gangs by and large. Most high schools don't have more than one incident with a weapon per year. The ones that do are usually misunderstandings (i.e. a teacher sees a student use a Swiss army knife to fix their calculator and becomes alarmed because NBC did a report on stabbings last night). Youth violence is on the decline. Drugs are in high schools, but not in the sense that they are in the prison system.
Few people complain when metal detectors are placed in schools that have had shootings. Few people complain when students are asked to wear ID badges in a school where they have had serious problems with people not from the school within the halls.
The problem stems from the paranoia generated by the wild claims by various media that the youth of the United States are out of control. The fact is, they aren't. Youth violence has dropped very significantly since 1970, and has decreased rapidly even within the last four years.
Gangs rarely operate within school grounds. In my high school experience, I knew one person in a gang, and he dropped out his sophomore year so he could spend more time with his gang. He never was a troublemaker in school, and never recruited in school.
Drugs are in the high schools of America. They always will be, just as beer will always be at parties on the weekends. The distinction needs to be drawn between the common drugs (marijuana, steroids, snorted ridalin, etc) and the drugs that are thought of but actually very uncommon (cocaine, heroine, etc).
So the problem most people (labeled "libertarian" because they still believe in the Bill of Rights, regardless of their political persuasion) have with the current situation is what a knee-jerk reaction it all is from cheap early nineties movies about rebel teachers beating up drug dealers and gang members in school and saving all the beautiful pregnant genius dropout artist students.
All the metal-detectors, clear bookbags, orange jumpsuits, keycard locks, and security guards in the world wouldn't have prevented Colombine. According to the web site of one of them, one of the reasons they hated their school so much was because it felt like a prison.
You'd need an in-school SWAT team to deal with an organized attack like that.
Wouldn't the better solution be to hire teachers who gave a damn about their students and created relationships with them? I hated my junior year of high school - my teacher stated to the class at one point, "I don't care what grade you get in here. I get paid the same either way. It's too late for me to go back to college and take a different career." This didn't make me shoot anyone, but it hit some of the students who believed in themselves less than I did very, very hard. Wouldn't it be better to create an active learning environment rather than a holding area until adulthood?
Turning schools into fascist institutions makes students more violent - especially at the high school level.
Slashdot Mirror
A rational argument based on inaccurate facts.
Junior high schools are not being overrun by gangs by and large. Most high schools don't have more than one incident with a weapon per year. The ones that do are usually misunderstandings (i.e. a teacher sees a student use a Swiss army knife to fix their calculator and becomes alarmed because NBC did a report on stabbings last night). Youth violence is on the decline. Drugs are in high schools, but not in the sense that they are in the prison system.
Few people complain when metal detectors are placed in schools that have had shootings. Few people complain when students are asked to wear ID badges in a school where they have had serious problems with people not from the school within the halls.
The problem stems from the paranoia generated by the wild claims by various media that the youth of the United States are out of control. The fact is, they aren't. Youth violence has dropped very significantly since 1970, and has decreased rapidly even within the last four years.
Gangs rarely operate within school grounds. In my high school experience, I knew one person in a gang, and he dropped out his sophomore year so he could spend more time with his gang. He never was a troublemaker in school, and never recruited in school.
Drugs are in the high schools of America. They always will be, just as beer will always be at parties on the weekends. The distinction needs to be drawn between the common drugs (marijuana, steroids, snorted ridalin, etc) and the drugs that are thought of but actually very uncommon (cocaine, heroine, etc).
So the problem most people (labeled "libertarian" because they still believe in the Bill of Rights, regardless of their political persuasion) have with the current situation is what a knee-jerk reaction it all is from cheap early nineties movies about rebel teachers beating up drug dealers and gang members in school and saving all the beautiful pregnant genius dropout artist students.
All the metal-detectors, clear bookbags, orange jumpsuits, keycard locks, and security guards in the world wouldn't have prevented Colombine. According to the web site of one of them, one of the reasons they hated their school so much was because it felt like a prison.
You'd need an in-school SWAT team to deal with an organized attack like that.
Wouldn't the better solution be to hire teachers who gave a damn about their students and created relationships with them? I hated my junior year of high school - my teacher stated to the class at one point, "I don't care what grade you get in here. I get paid the same either way. It's too late for me to go back to college and take a different career." This didn't make me shoot anyone, but it hit some of the students who believed in themselves less than I did very, very hard. Wouldn't it be better to create an active learning environment rather than a holding area until adulthood?
Turning schools into fascist institutions makes students more violent - especially at the high school level.