One of our students on the Cho incident.

[donco6]

I was out and about on school visits last week, and came on a class of high schoolers doing a Socratic seminar on Cho and Virginia Tech. There were quite a few boys speaking up saying things like, "We have to have more security . . . need to wear name badges . . . metal detectors . . . background checks . . . " etc etc. Others were talking about how those have problems and how they used to go to this school or that school and they had metal detectors there, but people would just pass weapons through the bathroom window, etc. It was really interesting.

But then one girl who had been quiet the whole time stood up and just laid into everyone, "I can't beLIEVE you're buying into all of this!! We don't need more security and less privacy - we've already lost so much of that as it is. What we need to do is take CARE of each other! If someone is lonely we need to help them, not hurt them. If someone is strange it's probably because we've helped make them that way - or someone else did. We all know each other - there's only 88 kids in the entire Junior class! We can stop this stuff by making sure we're all OK."

There was more, and there was some pushback from the others, but overall I think she carried the debate that day. It was downright inspiring. And I think she's right. I work in schools. Kids are smart. If they are so alienated that they feel they need to do some act of violence, no metal detector or name badge is going to get in the way. But if we all learned to really KNOW each other (and it's a lot easier when your school is only 400 kids), I think we could avoid a lot of death and destruction.