Violence in public school?

Question

what do you think the solutions for the violence at public school?

as a parent, school, administration, and government?

Answer 1

We home school because of the school violence our kids went through. Our kids had their lunches stolen and they were attacked because they were not part of the popular kids' groups.

Public schools claim "Zero Tolerance" but all that is is the ability to sweep he problem under the rug and not report it.

If it is not reported as a statistic, then it didn't happen.

Children in public schools that commit acts of violence should be removed and placed into an environment that is more suited to their mentality. I don't mean prison, but an independent environment that helps to keep their minds focused on their futures instead of harassing or assaulting others out of fun or jealousy. Public school violence acts are not prejudice. They are committed by rich and poor kids. Popular and unpopular kids. So people really need to focus on the child doing it, not the name or income. Favoritism plays a large role in who gets busted for this or not.

The staff that allowed this to happen and had a chance to stop it but didn't should be fired and never be allowed again to work with children anywhere until they have gone through a series of psyche evaluations and refreshers on how to respond to the problem and students equally.

The school violence problem doesn't always come from home. But you cannot tell a staff member that. They want to place the blame on the parents right away.

Students committing violence do it because of home problems, school problems, or personal issues within themselves.

I honestly believe that school staff "can be" some of the problems. After all, it's not students that walk out on strike and deprive the teachers of a pay check, it's the teachers that walk out on strike and deprive the students of an education.

School violence can be stopped. But first we have to find people that actually care. Real teachers, not glorified babysitters. Public school kids that commit violent acts must be dealt with now. Not 3 grades later or too late in life when they turn out to be rapists or murderers.

We teach our children the hard cold facts of life. What happens if they act out violently, rape, or do drugs. Not just being sent to prison, but what can happen to you in prison. Our boys are completely terrified of breaking the law and I'm proud to say they are very well behaved kids. We don't sugar coat anything or baby them. They know the facts.

The problem cannot be solved by abandoning a student at all. Fix the problem, not the blame.

Answer 2

Put simply:

1. Schools need to stop sweeping these things under the rug. I had bad experiences in middle school, and the school all but pretended it wasn't happening.

2. The school has to teach better. I was removed from middle school (where I stagnated) in order to be homeschooled. Now I am attending college early.

Students should be taught according to their potential and not grouped together with everyone else. This creates alot of unnecessary stress, and therefore violence.

3. Last but not least, PARENTS need to pay attention, and teach their children right from wrong. It has nothing to do with religion, ipods, new clothes, or violent video games. The bullying problem can almost always be traced back to the parents.

4. school creates a bad atmosphere. It forces some children to feel that they are part of a hunter vs. hunted scenario. Since children of middle school age are also trying to identify themselves, they are unstable.

So, when we put poorly parented children who are trying to find their place in the world into a stressful environment that tries to ignore problems, we get violence.

Answer 3

I am honestly offended that some Christians think it is completely OK to make two false claims:

1. Prayer is not allowed in schools.

Wrong. Students cannot be forced or "led" in prayer by a school official (government employee) or during a mandatory school event. Many schools have morning prayer everyday. It is student led and done prior to class time. There are still Christian clubs in the schools. Prayer is not banned by any stretch of the imagination. To suggest my child should be forced to participate in or stand out by abstaining from Christian prayer in a public school is ludicrous. It is a public school, not a Christian school. Imagine being a Jewish kid and at the start of each day, at every ball game and pep rally, you must sit through Christian prayer. How would you feel if the shoe was on the other foot? It would most certainly be the government favoring a religion. That is not the American way. If you'd like to live in a theocracy, may I suggest Iran?

2. That the absence of that Christian prayer has led to the decline of morals. Following that logic, there are no morals in my home. I am incapable of teaching my child to be a decent person. Frankly, you are claiming ethical superiority to all non-Christians. As a Pagan mother of a non-violent and well mannered child, I can't really take that sitting down. Considering the high percentage of Christian students, shouldn’t there be no violence in the first place? Or is it that you suppose only atheists, Jews, Pagans, and Muslims have violent children?

Considering the warmongering buffoon who currently sits in the Oval Office, was and still is touted as the right wing Christian's great white hope, I don’t really think Christian prayer in government leads to nonviolence. Didn't his spiritual advisor, an evangelical minister beloved by many turn out to be a meth addict who slept with g*y male prostitutes? Please consider this before you suggest that your religion should be thrust upon the rest of us to cure all social ills.

Correlation is not causation.

To answer the original Q: Students are often stymied and frustrated in schools. Sometimes the kids have a lack of structure and support at home. This could still be overcome with a smaller student to teacher ratio, capable counselors and greater freedom in teaching styles. Kids need to work at the level they are capable, not the level at which “most” kids their age are capable. Class sizes are currently far too large and the teaching style is one size fits all. The children, kept away from the influence of mature adults and shoved together tend to look to one another for cues on how to behave. I think shorter school days and smaller classes may help the kids to be exposed to more appropriate adult behavior.

Answer 4

I believe more parents need to become better parents for violence to be reduced at school. Most violent kids are that way due to issues in the home (ranging from just poor parenting to abusive situations), being allowed to play too many violent video games, watch too much violent tv and more. An unhappy child or one who has had poor models is more likely to be violent compared to a reasonably happy child (of course, even the generally happy child can have his moments of losing control).

At the school level, they need to actually follow through more. We actually have a bullying by-law in our city, but do you think the schools report anything? Of course not. They want to minimize problems with the parents, in large part so the kids don't get moved to another school. Why don't they want the kids to go to another school? Because it means loss of funding. My husband deals with this constantly--kids who are given measly 1-day suspensions after their 5th offense.

As well, they need to start taking care of kids' emotions, reaching out more to those troubled ones instead of ignoring the behaviour or treating them like they're bad, or just ignoring the root of the behaviour. Giving detentions and suspensions doesn't usually work because those types of "negative reinforcement" treat the behaviour as separate from the kids' internal lives and don't ever address that part. Yes, the parents should be taking care of that, but as I said above, not all do; for the sake of all the kids there, the schools ought to do more in this regard.

Answer 5

The entire system of public schooling would need to be overhauled for any significant changes to take place.  Advocates of such changes included John Holt, who wrote several classics, including "How Children Learn," and "Why Children Fail."  In the end, Holt advocated homeschooling.

Answer 6

"What, prayer in public schools? Someone here hasn't read the book of Matthew where Jesus tells his followers that they should not pray in public!"

TR, perhaps you'd better re-read Matthew - he tells them not "to pray as the hypocrites do".  This means don't walk down the street, decked out in religious regalia, praying loudly for everyone to hear so that they'll think you're oh, so holy.  It doesn't mean that we should never pray in public; Jesus did on several occasions.

Ok...now to the question.  A lot of things have to happen to solve this.  First, the government needs to stay out of what morals can be taught in school, whether those are taught through Christianity or as just plain morals.  Sorry, but if you look at the stats on a graph, you'll see a sharp upturn in violence rates shortly after prayer was taken out of school.  I'm not saying we have to return to praying in school, but stopping the teaching that there are no absolutes, you go your way and I'll go mine, would do a lot.  Maybe students would figure out that human life has value, once again.

Also, teachers need to be given the freedom to teach.  They need to be able to impart morals and examples to students, and they need to be allowed to discipline unruly students without the administration and negligent parents jumping down their throats.

Parents...well, they need to parent.  Part of the reason my son doesn't attend a public school is that so many of the kids there *aren't* parented.  They're given every new electronic device, clothes from the latest stores, and someone to everything but wipe their backsides for them...but they aren't parented.  They aren't taught right from wrong, they aren't taught responsibility or respect, and they aren't held accountable for their choices and actions.  This makes it nearly impossible for teachers to keep order in the classroom or enforce rules, and seriously impinges on their ability to teach.  The fact is, I can teach my son more information in a fraction of the time, and I can teach him character qualities.  It's not that teachers themselves aren't capable of doing this, it's that the system surrounding the classroom doesn't allow them to.

This affects not only the instruction in the classroom, but the actions of the kids outside the classroom.  If a kid will swear at a teacher, throw things at them, and openly disrupt class, what will they do when no authority is present?  They'll beat up on the weakest person there, or they'll take it out on anyone they think presents a problem to them.

Administrations need to stop catering to non-parents and babying these kids; if they're not there to learn, then why are they there?  Sorry, but not every child is required to *get* an education, they are required to be *offered* an education.  If they're not willing to take what's offered, then why on earth should they be there?  They're not only wasting their own time, but the time of everyone around them.  Maybe if an education was seen as something to be earned rather than a place to bide their time, more kids would step up and learn rather than just fighting.

Basically, society as a whole needs to change.  Parents  need to step up and teach their kids to begin with; teachers need to be allowed to teach, and need to be able to hold kids accountable; schools need to determine why they're there - is it to educate, or just to corral as many kids as possible until they're of dropout age? - and the government needs to back off and allow all of this to happen.

But first, we as a society need to allow morals - notice I didn't say religion, but morals, as in absolute morals - back into our daily lives.  If nothing is right, and nothing is wrong, then anarchy (violence) will be the result.

JMHO...

Edit - glee, I haven't seen any response on here saying that Christian prayer should be mandated in schools, or that non-Christians are incapable of teaching their children morals.  There were statements of the fact that school violence spiked sharply after the Margaret Murray O'Hare trial in the 60's, since it's true; however, it's not the removal of prayer that did it, it's the removal of expectations of living according to morals.  There was a pretty severe societal shift around that time, and students were taught (by society and by schools) that absolutes don't exist - absolutes like respect for human life.  This shift coincided with - and was partly caused by - the immediate removal of prayer from schools.  Suddenly, schools were afraid to teach anything that might even loosely look similar to religion, which pretty efficiently created a moral vacuum.

I don't have any doubts that you teach your daughter morals or that you have high standards for her behavior.  And yes, there are times when student-led prayer is allowed on school property (though not during school hours), but the "society" that schools have formed for themselves make it very difficult for a student who believes in absolutes - Christian, pagan, whatever - to hold to their beliefs.  Kids are taught that they must "tolerate" - i.e., advocate for - every single belief.  They're taught that everything is right, if it's right for them, and there are no wrongs.  What exactly is a child supposed to do with that information?  It removes boundaries that previously helped them determine the difference between right and wrong attitudes and actions.

And no, those actions weren't always right (Jim Crow, etc.); however, there is extremely strong evidence that the removal of absolutes from society (which started in the schools in the 60s) resulted in violence (both in schools and in the "real world").  It existed before that, but not anywhere near as intensely as it does today, just 40-some years later.

Please don't take the stating of stats as a religious attack...and please don't turn it into one.  I wasn't attacking you with the statement, and neither was anyone else.

Answer 7

I think that stricter punishment, like geting comunity service hours for fighting, or for gang activity, would end at least some of the problums. I know that schools don't really have a lot of options because their "just kids", but in highschool, I've seen some pretty crazy ****, and I don't see those uperclassmen who instegate fights as kids, they should have to take more responsibility for their actions...as cliche as that sounds.

Answer 8

You have to remember that usually the students behavior pattern comes from home not school. It is sad to say but there are lots of parents out there that don't care what their children are doing as long as they are out of their hair. I home-school my daughter and do so just because of all the violence in public school, not to mention the fact that I got tired of them trying to make a salesperson out of my child (candles, wrapping paper, etc.) I know my old hometown school system put all the children in uniform thinking that would help stop bickering, etc. since all the students would be dressed alike and not be competing over status symbol clothing. Duh, it doesn't take an Einstein to figure out that just because people dress alike doesn't mean they are going to act alike; however, that school district still adheres to the uniform code. The administration can only do so much with all the bleeding heart liberals out there. Bring prayer back in school and that would help some. I know it wouldn't help everyone but at least those that don't attend church on a regular basis or have never attended, would be subjected to prayer and it might even help change them. As they say, the Lord does work in mysterious ways.

Answer 9

Stricter punishment, and getting the police involved. One of the high schools I went to didn't hardly do anything to violent students. I got sent to the hospital three times. I think only one kid was suspended, becaue he drew blood.

Answer 10

Actually, I was thinking about the "prayer in schools" thing.

Since the government has been trying to get prayer out of schools, violence has been on the incline. Is it related? I think it is.

Also, it is everyones responsibility to quell the violence situation in schools. "it takes a village to raise a child"

Answer 11

What, prayer in public schools?  Someone here hasn't read the book of Matthew where Jesus tells his followers that they should not pray in public!  When I was a kid, prayer in school was common, and I can attest that it did nothing to discourage fighting, disrespect, profanity, or even weapons (tho' when I was a kid, the boys carried knives and such but never used them on one another--some attitudes have changed).

Violence will never be completely eliminated from public schools, and most public schools do not have any more violence than a hundred years ago.  The violence that we perceive is either random Columbine or Virginia-Tech meltdowns (which are horrific but so rare that you have a better chance of getting killed by a farm animal than a gun-toting student), or chronic social conditions in the inner city which exist outside of the schools and which involve more than just students.

If we want to reduce the incidences of crazed mass shootings, then we need to get serious about enforcing current laws that restrict possession of firearms by minors or the mentally ill.

If we want to reduce violence in the inner city, it will require a much broader effort.  There needs to be better leadership in the community, more people need to stand up against violence as a way of life.  Young children need anger management training in schools, since they're not getting it at home.  The government needs to come up with a sane policy toward narcotics, with emphasis on eradicating the more anti-social drugs and treatment/management of the less harmful ones.  And schools need firmer discipline, a solid KIPP-type approach implemented from day 1.

Answer 12

Homeschooling is a lot better!!

I'm an ex student

I got pulled out last year by my mum, because my skool was so violence n I was a victim of annonomus cyber bullying, it turned out to be my so called BEST FRIEND

I learn a lot better at home, I still have a lot of mates (Not a lot from my old skool, don't really like dem so much now) and I'm a lot more my own person

Personally I think that actual community service isn't good enuf for sum of em