A fight after school in Florida leaves one middle schooler dead, and and his classmate facing a stark choice: a 10 year sentence for manslaughter or a trial for second-degree murder. The Ledger, a newspaper in Lakeland, Florida, looks at the background of the two boys. This troubling story of uprooted lives, absentee parents, racial tensions, illness and crime is like watching a slow-motion train wreck.
The role of the school in this story is limited to a single paragraph in which school officials say “it wasn’t a race thing. It was a kid thing, a pride thing, a turf thing. Fights are common in middle school.” The lives of these two boys are by no means remarkable by the standards of inner city youth. Thus the unasked question in this story: Do schools have a role in preventing events like this from occuring? What is the lesson to be learned here?
I admire schools that provide some sort of moral and ethical education along with a strong curriculum. It doesn’t end the fighting, but it does give students a chance to choose which values they will adopt.
Moral education alone isn’t enough; it has to be reflected in practice. In many schools, not only is there no moral education, but meanness runs rampant. An individual teacher can only teach so much “respect” if a principal comes into the room and yells at him or her in front of the students–or if teachers complain loudly about the principal or colleagues in the hallway.
So, as usual, it is a problem of systems and of humans. Schools need to teach students how to treat each other; but the individuals within the schools also need to treat each other well. Yes, there will still be fights, in school and after school. But at the very least there will be a place where students can experience something different.
And as for preventing the “slow motion train wreck”–we see many signs of trouble before the worst actually happens. Schools should use assemblies and other means to address problems as they come up. One day I was covering another teacher’s class, and a fight broke out between two girls who had been badmouthing each other over MySpace. In such circumstances the school should hold an assembly about dangers of social networking sites. These problems should not be brushed aside. We know they’re happening; we need to tackle them.
If schools wish to act “in loco parentis,” if they want to take the “bigger, bolder” approach and provide all that the parent should be legally responsible to provide or, as in the case of birth control, legally able to deny, then they must accept liability for the actions of their charges. The lesson to be learned here is that the two legal entities need to decide together where the parent’s responsibility ends and the school’s begins and then each needs to take that responsibility. The sad reality is that the more the schools are willing to take, the more the parents are willing to give. The parent in this case couldn’t keep watch over one of seven, but the school is supposed to keep watch over two of hundreds? The answer in both cases lies somewhere in the math.