Empathy and Respect, Not Metal Detectors and Guns

With the rise in school shootings over the last five years, comes a corresponding rise in fear. Parents, students, and community members are wondering what can be done to increase the safety of our children.

Some suggestions include arming school employees with guns, installing metal detectors, and increasing police presence in schools. These things represent the opposite of "security," however. Rather, they invoke a sense of fear and foreboding for those who would face them every day: our children, teachers, and school staff.

Do we really want to send our children to prisons and require their teachers to serve as body guards?

Yet, parents and community members want to know from their schools: What are you doing to ensure the safety of our children? and How are you handling bullying at your school?

These are logical questions, considering the majority of injurious school shootings are perpetrated by students involved in some kind of conflict with other members of the school population.

What we really need is to shift the culture of our society from one of fear, hatred, and violence, to one of understanding.

Unfortunately, our children regularly observe violent responses to conflict in their entertainment media and in the news. Many of them are also attending schools that perpetuate an authoritarian structure that addresses student-to-student conflict with separation and punishments, rather than restorative justice and peaceful-conflict-resolution training.

As a result, too many of our kids lack the conditions necessary to cultivate empathy, resilience, and respect for diversity. Those things cannot blossom in a society that does not model and validate them. No metal detector or teacher's handgun is going to reverse that reality.

Schools, then, do not need another anti-bullying campaign, stricter disciplinary codes, or militarized buildings and staff. They need to reorder their existing structures and rehabilitate their culture.

Teaching empathy does not happen in a twice-each-year whole school assembly. It happens in myriad daily interactions, both at home and at school.

Our kids need to learn how to resolve conflicts peacefully and respectfully. This requires time, care, and repetition. Teachers, parents, and other adults in contact with children have to seize every opportunity to mediate and facilitate conversations for peaceful resolutions, beginning with sandbox disputes at the playground and extending through heated arguments in the high school gymnasium.

Until we build a culture of mutual respect, we will not see an end to children killing children with guns they can too easily acquire from their parents' case, a local dealer, or an illegal sale at the school playground.