Confront bullying in schools, not just access to guns

As a 47-year veteran teacher, it is immensely disheartening to see that schools are no longer safe havens for children. Particularly disturbing is the relative lack of action to address this problem.

I will leave it to others to debate the merits of gun control and campus policing.

Instead, I want to address what students can do to make a difference. The vast majority of the people who have chosen to be violent have been marginalized in their school communities, and it is that problem that I think we need to address most aggressively.

As children enter middle school, they seek to find their identity and their place in the world. Unfortunately, they are initially not very sophisticated about it, and they look for measures they can take that will confer status. It is this search for status that creates problems. They often find status in very superficial ways, comparing themselves with others on the basis of clothing, wealth, physical appearance, relative social skills and, in some cases, co-curricular achievements.

Unfortunately, they can be mean about the ways they do this. They identify themselves by finding others like them who confirm their values, but they also establish that identity by being critical of those who are different and by ostracizing them. In a word, they are “mean.”

This has been going on for a long time, and usually, by the end of high school, most students have a clearer sense of their own identity and worth so that they do not have to play these games.

We have our best chance of curbing violence by changing the culture of schools. We have to overtly and directly confront bullying. We need to convince students that they can ensure that violence does not occur in their schools if they simply treat everyone with decency and respect. Teachers need to have repeated conversations with students about how we find our identity. We have to teach them that ostracizing others does not make them a better person and their schools better places.

No one will deny the essential responsibility of the shooter in these tragic cases, but the best opportunity to prevent these tragedies is to look at the culture we have allowed to be created in schools. Long before we should be worrying about access to guns, we have to concern ourselves with what creates the motive for picking one up and using it.

KEN DIDSBURY,