On violence in schools
This week here in Cleveland, people are talking about a child’s violence in a school of shining stars. A child self-described as isolated and marginalized, a state that always gives way to violence.
Schools need to redefine themselves. Away from places designed to remind children that they are problems to be fixed to places designed to remind children that they are gifts to be engaged.
The mistake is to think that violence has anything to do with security or the lack of security. It is a lack of engagement. When we understand engagement, safety will be remembered as a conversation of generations passed.
October 12th, 2007 10:24
Good point Jack. When you have 20 minutes check out this speaker, Sir Ken Robinson on the topic
Do schools kill creativity?: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/66
October 13th, 2007 01:42
thanks for that link Susan. i really enjoyed the video.
October 13th, 2007 02:43
You’ve pointed the dialogue in the right direction. All this talk about security hardware and guards is so silly, so hollow. The prevention of such things involves one-on-one attention to kids at risk, way before things escalate, way, way before they blow up. In the service, we often tried to take the at-risk kids and make them our drivers or clerks–keep them close, keep them busy, or, as you call it, “engaged.”
October 13th, 2007 11:33
Hi Jack-
Quite frankly your post applies universally. Not just schools and kids, but cities and people: neighborhoods, councilmen, police, CDC’s, etc.
While communities seem to have an easier time discussing socially based marginalization of individuals in the school, what we learn at school we carry into the “real world.”
Our society will not be any greater than the citizens we create.
October 13th, 2007 13:59
Susan, the video is fabulously humorous and wise. It speaks in part to the misdiagnosis of creativity as maladjusted behavior. When we aren’t clientizing people, we’re discovering their gifts and engaging them, resulting in wholeness on all levels of individual, relationship, and community. The good news is that it is a radical yet very accessible transition, this shift from noticing problems to imagining possibilities.