Author: Harlequin Jones (---.rr.com)
Date: 08-10-2001 22:05
A few things to note:
1) Murder, rape, and violence have occurred for many years in the inner-city school systems of America.
2) More children have been killed in high school football accidents in recent years than by school shootings.
(Just trying to keep things in perspective.)
<rant>
Note also that the majority of these violent episodes have taken place in the public school system. I believe that much of the problem, at least in the US, stems from the nature of this system.
Our school system was modelled after the fascist Prussian system. It a system that was designed not to educate, but to indoctrinate - to turn children into skilled and well-behaved servants of authority.
From a very young age, you are forced to wake up hours earlier than you might like and are crammed into crowded classrooms or trailers with surly teachers and the occasional prepubescent savage.
You are taught to march around to the grating sound of a loud bell.
You are urged to say the pledge of allegiance and taught about the Bill of Rights even as your rights to speak your mind and to be free from random invasions of your privacy are denied.
(These things do not apply to you, because you are just a dumb kid.)
When intimidated or assaulted by other prisoners, you are punished for standing up for yourself - for fighting back. The victim is usually punished as harshly as the offender. It's just easier for the authorities to mete out equal punishment than to try and discover who was at fault.
You are told to settle all of your problems with an appeal to authority, only to find that those who make the appeal are labelled as tattle-tales, scorned by their peers, and harassed even more frequently by the savages - savages who cannot be kicked out of school because they have a "right" to an education (never mind that most of them do not try, and could care less).
It was not so many years ago that yours truly was a participant in the system, and by all accounts things are even worse today than they were when I was there. Rampant paranoia about violence has led to creative kids being expelled for playing cops and robbers, for drawing pictures of soldiers, or for writing horror stories for their creative writing class. Meanwhile, the truly thuggish types are given slaps on the wrist because they are "misunderstood" or "crying for help" or "lashing out because of trouble at home."
(You might as well say that the Columbine Kids were lashing out because of trouble at school - trouble caused by the lashing out of kids who "had trouble at home")
Needless to say, I did not enjoy my time in the system. I found it to be very much like a prison. It stifled my creativity and killed my desire to learn.
</rant>
--
My outlets were role-playing games and electronic bulletin board systems (ah, ye olde days before the rise of the Internet). Contrary to the snooty opinions of social researchers and coffeehouse philosophers, I do not believe that either of my outlets caused me to become anti-social. Quite the opposite! I was anti-social to begin with, fer cryin out loud - the product of years of constant mocking at the hands of my parents and my peers.
Role-playing games let me be someone who I wanted to be, rather than who I was. This drama did wonders for my real-life social skills.
Socializing on eBBSes, where no one knew how old I was or what I looked like, made me realize that I could be loved for who I was. Being treated by an equal by people ten years my senior was delightful, as was being told, upon face-to-face meetings, "I thought you were much older!"
If any of you who are reading this are currently imprisoned by the American educational establishment, the following website may help. It gives a number of tips on dealing with difficult individuals. Hell, it might help some of you adults out there if you work in stressful environments.
http://www.teasingvictims.com/
The above site discusses, at length, something that I did not realize until high school - that you are harassed and tormented by others because you allow it to happen. It is not your fault, but you do have the power to stop it.
All of the appeals to authority in the world will do you no good, but a simple change of outlook will.
That, and computers and RPGs. <smirk>
HJ
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