My first course in teacher-training college was a weekly one-hour orientation seminar. We were required to observe classes in our intended field (mine was secondary English). We learned that Alaska paid better than the lower 48, as everything had to be flown in. We were advised that good teachers don’t make friends with their students, but establish strong relationships with the custodian, librarian, and especially the secretaries! In the future (like, now), practically every student would have an IEP (Individualized Education Program) for special education, giftedness, or limited English.
No one warned us about disgruntled, disaffected, deranged former students walking in with weapons of war to shoot up the schools where we planned to work. In 1985, that wasn’t on the radar. The Columbine kids introduced that spectacle in 1999, and copycats soon entered the fray.
I never worried seriously; in every school where had I taught, gun culture was strong and sensible. In my first position, staff told me that the first day of turkey season would be marked by high absenteeism, excused. Buck, an amiable senior, demonstrated the sharpness of his hunting knife by scraping hair off his arm, and I thought nothing of it: rodeo, hunting, fishing, camping out, tubing or floating rivers – these are outdoor activities that my students in rural Louisiana, on the Navajo Nation, and here in Carroll County engage in. They go hunting with relatives and take mandatory hunter safety courses – guns are for sport, recreation, to put food on the table or kill varmints.
My dad grew up in this culture, in Florida, the first third of the 20th Century, and when he left, he became a career Army man. Somehow he never taught my brothers and me about guns, but I understood that they were as American as the baseball he did introduce us to.
At Berryville High School, some students might trudge in after a predawn vigil at their deer stands. After iPhones became mandatory accessories, they showed me photos of the critters they shot. In 2008, I made copies of a New York Times article about a Texas school district that planned to arm its teachers after another school shooting. None of my students thought this advisable – they knew that some teachers were hot-tempered, that some distraught kid may wrestle the gun from the teacher and BLAM – sorrow and devastation would follow.
So how has our nation come from this sensible understanding that guns do not belong in schools to a Wild West mentality that promotes sending people into schools (and churches, and grocery stores and barrooms) bearing arms?
We are so far off base in terms of schooling already; under No Child Left Behind, relentless testing became the means and the end to education. Schools should be where people learn to get along and work together to stimulate, satisfy, and exploit their urges for curiosity, creativity, and community. Making mistakes, messing up, moving on anyway – these are how people not in school go forward in their work. Having time to reflect upon and analyze with others what works and what doesn’t are essential to true learning. In the test-centered programs pushed under No Child law, these were tossed out. Now this president, under the sway of the National Rifle Association, would turn our schools into armed camps.
When Wyatt Earp deputized his brothers to pacify Dodge City, cowpokes at the end of the cattle drives had to turn in their guns if they wanted to visit the saloons and whorehouses, retrieving them when they left town. Who would dream of bringing guns into places meant to be safe for children?
Many a student will compare schools to prisons, and here is the obvious extension: locked doors, barbed wire fences, armed guards, watchtowers, teachers in bullet-proof vests leading their students in lockdown drills. The education-industrial complex is big business – textbooks, computer hardware and software, junk food, construction, consultants and experts, test manufacturers – of course security outfits want some of that money.
On the other hand, maybe the Republicans recognize that many people will withdraw their kids for home schooling, further weakening the public school network. But for those who choose, Trump Fortress High School will be recruiting soon.
Kirk Ashworth, Berryville