Rev. Fr. Dr. Isaac Padinjarekuttu
After the recent shooting incident in Virginia Tech University in the United States, in which a student shot and killed more than thirty people including staff and students after which he shot and killed himself, a list of such shooting incidents in that country was circulated.
Moses Lake, Washington 2/2/96
Bethel, Alaska 2/19/97
Pearl, Mississippi 10/1/97
West Paducah, Kentucky 12/1/97
Stamp, Arkansas 12/15/97
Jonesboro, Arkansas 3/24/98
Edinboro, Pennsylvania 4/24/98
Fayetteville, Tennessee 5/19/98
Springfield, Oregon 5/21/98
Richmond, Virginia 6/15/98
Littleton, Colorado 4/20/99
Taber, Alberta, Canada 5/28/99
Conyers, Georgia 5/20/99
Deming, New Mexico 11/19/99
Fort Gibson, Oklahoma 12/6/99
Santee, California 3/ 5/01
El Cajon, California 3/22/01 and
Blacksburg, Virginia 4/16/07
One American parent has reflected on it and has asked the question, how this got started, and has given us the following answer. It is worth considering. “Once a parent, Madeline Murray O’Hare complained, she didn’t want any prayer in the schools, and all said yes. Then, someone said, you better not read the Bible in school: the Bible that says, “thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not steal and love your neighbour as yourself.” And all said, OK. Then a psychologist by name, Benjamin Spock said: we shouldn’t spank our children when they misbehaved because their little personalities would be warped and we might damage their self-esteem. And all said, an expert should know what he’s talking about. So we won’t spank them anymore. Then someone said: teachers and principals better not discipline our children when they misbehave. And the school administrators said: no faculty member in this school should touch a student when he/she misbehaves because we don’t want any bad publicity, and we surely don’t want to be sued. And we accepted their reasoning. Then an elected representative said: it doesn’t matter what we do in private as long as we do our jobs. And we said: it doesn’t matter what anybody does in private as long as we have jobs and our money. Then someone said: let our sons and daughters have all the fun they desire when they are young, and we said, that’s a grand idea. And the entertainment industry said: Let’s make TV shows and movies that promote profanity, violence, illicit sex, and let’s record music that encourages drugs, murder, and satanic themes. And we said: it’s just entertainment and it has no adverse effect and nobody takes it seriously anyway. So go right ahead. And now we are asking ourselves why our children have no conscience, why they don’t know right from wrong, and why it doesn’t bother them to kill strangers, classmates, or even themselves. Undoubtedly if we thought about it long and hard enough we could figure out the answer: we reap what we sow.”
In the United States, the center of the so-called western culture, where the population has increased by 41% since 1960 violent crimes have increased by 560%, single mothers by 419%, divorces by 300%, and children growing up in one-parent families by 300%. Shootings are the second most frequent cause of death there after accidents (thousands of teenagers are shot dead every year). Are other western countries better? By no means. Some years ago, the murder of a two-year old child by two ten year-olds in Liverpool, England, made a news paper cry in anguish about the “orientation jungle” and a lack of taboos unprecedented in cultural history. It said: “The youngest generation must cope with a confusion of values the extent of which is impossible to estimate. For them clear standards of right and wrong, good and evil, of the kind that were still being communicated by parents and schools, churches and sometimes even by politicians are hardly recognizable any more.”
If we do not take adequate measures young people everywhere will find themselves in the same orientation jungle, including our own. All education has as its primary task to offer a meaningful structure, which allows for a creative use of the student’s energies. Structure is the key word of formation and the criterion of any educational guideline. Structure allowing one to judge which feelings to trust and which feelings to distrust, which ideas to follow and which to reject. Structure providing unity to the many seemingly disconnected emotions and ideas of the student. Structure which helps to decide which plan is just a fancy and which contains the seed for a workable project. Structure, which offers the possibility to organize the day, plan the year and steer the course of life. Our fundamental problems in education are not related to the fact that we are too modern, too liberal or too progressive but that we do not have meaningful structures through which we can help our students give form to their many as yet undirected and unfocussed potentialities. Students are looking for a structure, clear, explicit, and articulated in which they can test themselves and be tested by others in order to allow the necessary decisions for their future life.
Who are responsible for these structures? Parents and teachers with whom the student daily relates and who are able to claim in a clear and defined way their role of authority. The source of this authority is one’s competence, maturity and faith. He knows his field, is able to cope with the tensions of life and believes that he is called to do a meaningful work. Students want to be criticized, reprimanded, and even punished. They ask for it if you can hear their language. But the authority by which this happens should be based not on subjective feelings and ideas, not on abstract rules and regulations, but on a critical, competent and objective understanding of the student’s behaviour. Let us take all measures possible to provide clear and meaningful structures for our students, for we reap what we sow.
(The writer is Principal, St. Joseph’s College, Jakhama)
