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TRAGEDY AND THE MEANING OF SCHOOL SHOOTINGS
Bryan R. Warnick, Benjamin A. Johnson, and Samuel Rocha
School of Educational Policy and Leadership
The Ohio State University
Abstract. School shootings are traumatic events that cause a community to question itself, its values,
and its educational systems. In this article Bryan Warnick, Benjamin Johnson, and Samuel Rocha explore
the meanings of school shootings by examining three recent books on school violence. Topics that grow
out of these books include (1) how school shootings might be seen as ceremonial rituals, (2) how schools
come to be seen as appropriate places for shootings, and (3) how advice to educators relating to school
shootings might change the practice of teaching. The authors present various ways of understanding
school shootings that may eventually prove helpful, but they also highlight the problems, tensions,
and contradictions associated with each position. In the end, the authors argue, the circumstances
surrounding school shootings demonstrate the need for the ‘‘tragic sense’’ in education. This need for
the tragic sense, while manifest in many different areas of schooling, is exemplified most clearly in
targeted school shootings.
A report from the National Center of Education Statistics (NCES) and Bureau
of Justice Statistics concludes, ‘‘Between 1992 and 2004, the victimization rates
for students ages 12–18 generally declined both at school and away from school;
this pattern held for the total crime rate as well as for thefts, violent crimes,
and serious violent crimes.’’1 At the same time, one specific genre of violence,
labeled ‘‘targeted school shootings’’ by law enforcement agencies, appears to have
increased every decade since the 1960s. According to a joint report from the U.S.
Secret Service and the Department of Education, there were four incidents of
targeted school shootings in the 1970s, five in the 1980s, twenty-eight in the
1990s,2 and, according to our own count, there have been twenty-five so far in the
2000s. This general trend in school shootings is worrisome, not because schools
are becoming more dangerous overall (schools remain some of safest places for
students to be3 ), but because there is a symbolic meaning to school shootings that
transcends the small number of incidents. As the joint report says, targeted school
shootings have ‘‘a tremendous and lasting effect on the school in which [they]
occurred, the surrounding community, and the nation as a whole.’’4 When school
shootings occur, accusations are brought against a community’s moral beliefs,
1. Rachel Dinkes, Emily Forrest Cataldi, Wendy Lin-Kelly, and Thomas D. Synder, Indicators of School
Crime and Safety: 2007 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2007), 10.
2. Bryan Vossekuil, Robert A. Fein, Marisa Reddy, Randy Borum, and William Modzeleski, The Final
Report and Findings of the Safe School Initiative: Implications for the Prevention of School Attacks in
the United States (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2002), 47.
3. The NCES report, Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2008, points out, ‘‘In each year during
the period 1992–93 to 2005–06, there were generally at least 50 times as many murders of youth
away from school than at school.’’ For the full report, see http://nces.ed.gov/programs/crimeindicators/
crimeindicators2008/ind 01.asp.
4. Vossekuil et al., Final Report and Findings of the Safe Schools Initiative, i.
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entertainment choices, pedagogical practices, gun laws, religious observance (or
nonobservance), and much more. Perhaps more than any traumatic event, the
phenomenon of school shootings calls our lives, communities, and values into
question.
In this essay, we wish to explore some questions related to the meaning of
targeted school shootings. We will present various ways of understanding school
shootings that may prove helpful, but also highlight the problems, tensions,
and contradictions associated with each position. While we offer no ultimate
suggestions about how to prevent school shootings that go beyond what others
have said, we do wish to suggest that studying the topic has potential to
transform the work of schools and our work as educators. In the end, we will
argue that the circumstances surrounding school shootings, and the complexities
and contradictions of such circumstances, demonstrate the need for what has
been called the ‘‘tragic sense’’ in education. This need for the tragic sense, while
manifest in many different areas of schooling, is exemplified most clearly in
targeted school shootings.
In this essay, we will look at three recent books on school violence to help
us begin to understand the meaning of these tragic events. First, we examine
Ceremonial Violence: A Psychological Explanation of School Shootings, by
Jonathan Fast.5 Fast is a professor of social work at Yeshiva University whose
academic work includes studies of aggression, crisis response, and school safety.
Second, we look at Education Under the Security State, a collection of essays
edited by David Gabbard and E. Wayne Ross.6 Gabbard is a professor of education
at East Carolina University and Ross is a professor of education at the University
of British Columbia. While not about school shootings specifically, this book deals
with notions of security and violence as they relate to schools. Third, we examine
Books, Blackboards, and Bullets: School Shootings and Violence in America by
5. Jonathan Fast, Ceremonial Violence: A Psychological Explanation of School Shootings (Woodstock
and New York: Overlook, 2008). This work will be cited in the text as CV for all subsequent references.
6. David Gabbard, ed., Education Under the Security State, vol. 1 of Defending Public Schools, ed. E.
Wayne Ross (New York: Teachers College Press, 2008). This work will be cited in the text as ESS for all
subsequent references.
BRYAN R. WARNICK is Assistant Professor in the School of Educational Policy and Leadership
at The Ohio State University, 121 Ramseyer Hall, 29 W. Woodruff Ave., Columbus, OH 43210;
e-mail: <warnick.11@osu.edu>. His primary areas of scholarship include philosophy of education,
ethics of educational policy and practice, educational technology, human exemplarity and modeling,
and American educational thought.
BENJAMIN A. JOHNSON is a Doctoral Candidate in the School of Educational Policy and
Leadership at The Ohio State University, 29 W. Woodruff Ave., Columbus, OH 43210; e-mail:
<johnson.3357@osu.edu>. His primary areas of scholarship include the history and philosophy of
education and comparative education.
SAMUEL ROCHA is Owen Duston Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Teacher Education at Wabash
College, Forest Hall, P.O. Box 352, Crawfordsville, IN 47933; e-mail <rochas@wabash.edu>. His primary
areas of scholarship include phenomenology, philosophy of education, and curriculum theory.
Warnick, Johnson, and Rocha
Tragedy and the Meaning of School Shootings
Marcel Lebrun.7 Lebrun is an associate professor of education at Plymouth State
University and specializes in school violence, functional assessment, and mental
health concerns.
School Shootings and Ritual Violence
In Ceremonial Violence, Fast examines twelve school shootings, beginning
with the Anthony Barbaro shooting in 1974 and ending with the Columbine
disaster in 1999. Five of these shootings (the cases of Brenda Spencer, Wayne Lo,
Evan Ramsey, Luke Woodham, and Columbine’s Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold)
are examined in great depth. The book appears to have various goals. In some
moments, the aim is to find the appropriate psychiatric diagnosis for each school
shooter from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th
edition (DSM-IV). At other times, the project is to build a broader theory of school
shootings, a theory of ‘‘ceremonial violence’’ hinted at in the book’s title. The
book takes up a range of topics related to school shootings, such as gun control
(a social policy issue) and post-crisis intervention (a counseling issue), but does
not develop these topics in much depth. The end of the book reads like a how-to
book — what to do to prevent school shootings, or how to respond once they
occur.
At its most impressive, the book documents these sad events as a storyteller
might, seeking meaning by pulling together the details of the disparate tragedies.
This storytelling is the first achievement of the book. As Fast states in the first
chapter, ‘‘While I was trained late in life as a social scientist, I was raised in a family
of storytellers, and I know that to fully understand what has occurred — to get to
the heart of it — one must hear the whole story’’ (CV, 19). These stories make for
grim but fascinating reading, and the reader may easily compare the stories that
are presented. Fast, in telling these stories, clearly wants to find similarities among
his twelve cases as a way of anticipating and preventing future incidents. In the
end, he does find some similarities, and they are important: the school shooters
were often bullied at school, they were often abused at home, they often fell under
the spell of a ‘‘violence coach,’’ they often possessed narcissistic personalities that
turned what otherwise would be a suicide into a dramatic school shooting, they
often publicized the event and turned it into a public ceremony, they often came
from small towns with religious zeal and strict norms of right and wrong, and so
forth.
In the end, however, we found the differences among the cases to be at
least as impressive as the similarities. Brenda Spencer who shot at elementary
school children in 1979 is diagnosed as having ‘‘malignant narcissism,’’ while
Wayne Lo, the son of Chinese immigrants, suffered from ‘‘identity confusion,’’
and Columbine’s Eric Harris, whose military family moved half a dozen times
while he was in school, is said to have ‘‘relocation stress.’’ After reading these
7. Marcel Lebrun, Books, Blackboards, and Bullets: School Shootings and Violence in America (Lanham,
Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Education, 2009). This work will be cited in the text as BBB for all
subsequent references.
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stories, the family situation of Dylan Klebold seems very different from that of
Evan Ramsey, or of Luke Woodham, or of Andrew Golden. The circumstances
in the shootings in Jonesboro, Arkansas, were poles apart from those of Pearl,
Mississippi, or Littleton, Colorado, or Blacksburg, Virginia. Some child shooters
claim to hear voices or demons, while others vigorously assert their sanity. Some
seem to struggle with sexual identity, others do not. Some have successful older
siblings that make them feel like failures in comparison. Some seem to thrive on
the writings of Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche, others on Rush Limbaugh, and
others on violent media or music.
The particular circumstances of each shooter, each distinct from the last,
contribute to a sense of disequilibrium. Such differences, and the details of the
events themselves, make it difficult to fit these shootings into simple moral
and conceptual boxes. They blur the distinction between victim and victimizer,
between good guys and bad guys. The victims of school shootings are many,
including, most obviously, the students that are killed. The tragedy of the slain
children is so obvious and so unjustified that it would be easy to construct meaning
of school shootings based on their deaths. Even when child shooters are partly
motivated by the vicious bullying of their peers, it is rarely the bullies themselves
who are killed or maimed. Few of the dead at Columbine were actually ‘‘jocks,’’
and none were actually those jocks who had reportedly terrorized the halls of
Columbine High School. They were, if anything, quite the opposite. One victim,
Kyle Velasquez, was a gentle, special needs student who had suffered a stroke in
infancy. Hence, the whispers that were heard after Columbine when few were
listening: ‘‘They killed the wrong ones.’’8 It was, in other words, only the innocent
who died. The meaning of school shootings at this point is simple: we have
guiltless victims killed by undiscriminating moral evil. This, to some people, is
the only thing we need to understand about school shootings.
Often, though, the children who pull the triggers, the murderers, live dark
and painful tragedies long before the shootings occur. Scott Pennington, Fast tells
us, who shot a teacher and the custodian in 1992, knew his father only through
random episodes of violent physical abuse and knew his mother as a mentally ill
woman ‘‘hiding behind the barn when people came to visit and ruminating about
ghosts’’ (CV, 28). After the shootings, 17-year-old Pennington was sentenced to life
imprisonment. Eric Houston, who killed his teacher and three students in 1992,
was violently abused by his father, suffered from organic brain damage, and testified to sexual abuse from a teacher. After his killings, he was sentenced to death by
poisonous gas. Evan Ramsey, who shot a fellow student and the school principal
in 1997, had a father in prison and a neglectful, alcoholic mother. Ramsey, who
bounced around among many foster homes, was constantly harassed by his classmates who enjoyed seeing him fly into an angry rage. After his rampage, Ramsey
was sentenced to a 210-year prison term. It seems clear that these young people
8. See Ralph W. Larkin, Comprehending Columbine (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007),
chap. 5.
Warnick, Johnson, and Rocha
Tragedy and the Meaning of School Shootings
are swept up in forces of violent cultural expression beyond their control — in
a culture that delights in simulated killings and that glorifies a big gun, which
becomes the ultimate problem-solving mechanism. In feeding such attitudes, the
larger culture becomes the monster rather than the individual shooters themselves.
To make matters worse, after the school shootings are over, if they survive,
the shooters, who are little more than children, become the focus of community
vengeance. The community demands that they be ‘‘tried as adults.’’ They are
often given multiple prison sentences and live the rest of their lives in brutal,
maximum-security prisons (Luke Woodman, who killed his mother and, later,
two students, was sentenced to the notoriously cruel Parchman Farm, the state
penitentiary in Mississippi). Sometimes they are executed; sometimes they try to
hang themselves. Such campaigns of vengeance against children, then, point to
other meanings we could draw from school shootings: the shooters themselves are
innocent victims, driven to their crimes by a cruel and unjust social order, and
then harshly punished as scapegoats.
But even this story of shooters-as-victims fails to capture the particulars of
every situation. Some of the child shooters were not abused, but came from, by
all appearances, loving and attentive families. Some of them were not bullied,
but were themselves the bullies (while others were both bullied and bullies). The
sympathy one begins to feel for some of the shooters exists in tension with the
descriptions of the cruelty such children are capable of and an apparent lack of
remorse and comprehension at what they have done. Before his rampage shooting,
Luke Woodham had brutally beaten and tortured his own dog (‘‘We took a night
stick and hit her in the shoulder, spine, and neck,’’ Woodham wrote. ‘‘I’ll never
forget the howl she made, it sounded almost human, we laughed and hit her more’’
[CV, 149]). As Evan Ramsey shot his schoolmates, he was described as ‘‘laughing,’’
‘‘going crazy,’’ and ‘‘gleefully evil’’ (CV, 125). After shooting at the elementary
school children across the street from her house, Fast tells us that Brenda Spencer
‘‘giggled’’ to a reporter as she admitted that she was the one who did it. She seemed
disappointed when told she had only killed three or four people — ‘‘Is that all?’’
she asked. ‘‘I saw a lot of feathers fly’’ (CV, 71–72). On the Columbine tapes, we
are told that Klebold and Harris mock their parents as they imagine their parent’s
shock: ‘‘If only we had reached them sooner,’’ Harris laughs as he imagines their
reaction, ‘‘found the tape, searched their rooms, asked the right questions. . .’’
(CV, 202, emphasis in original). After the shootings, many of the shooters become
celebrities of a sort, spending their time reading fan mail from alienated teens that
find their actions heroic (CV, 171).
In the face of such complexity, how then should we understand school shootings? What meaning should we draw from them? Which concepts and theories
are adequate to explain them or evaluate them? Particularly, how should we
understand the causes of targeted school shootings? On this last question, of
course, everyone seems to have a theory. The easy availability of guns is often
cited, or violent video games, or domestic abuse, or moral relativism, or mental
illness, or bullying. Or maybe the cause is naı̈ve parents, or the sensationalist
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media, or student peer groups. Perhaps the answer is any of them, which is to
say, all of them. Which is really not to say much at all. In fact, it is likely that
any realistic explanation of school shootings will be a hodgepodge of different
factors or probabilities, all forming a kaleidoscope of possible warning signs. As
the complexity of our theory increases, our ability to predict or prevent school
shootings decreases. A complex theory of school violence, for example, would
no doubt increase the odds of false positives (that is, accusing harmless students of dangerous intentions) and false negatives (that is, overlooking students
who are planning violence). If the causes of shootings are varied and multiple,
as they would have to be, we may understand school shootings on some level,
but be left with little preventative power in the face of such understandings.
While Fast certainly has his own ideas about the causes of school shootings, his
detailed storytelling made us question the utility of any larger theory of school
violence. The stories returned us, again and again, to the particulars of each
situation.
And yet, the devastation of these events also seems to call us to ‘‘do something,’’ even in the face of complexities and contradictions. A complete surrender
to pessimism and hopelessness, in other words, also feels inappropriate. Such distressing events push us look for resources, any resources, to help us understand and
prevent school shootings. Ultimately, these stories both urge us to action while
also suggesting the limitations and dangers that lurk when we ‘‘do something.’’
As we try to understand and prevent school shootings, Fast may again be
of some interest, particularly as he points to a theory of ceremonial violence.
Although Fast does not develop his theory in any detail, it may, in time, prove
to be a productive way to think about school shootings. While many of the
suggestions about dealing with violence in this book are already familiar to those
who follow the literature on school shootings, Fast contributes something new by
pointing to the ceremonial or ritual aspects of school violence.
Fast describes the elements of ritual surrounding school shootings in the
following way. A ‘‘candidate’’ school shooter finds him- or herself at the lowest
level of the school social hierarchy and contemplates suicide. The student,
however, has narcissistic tendencies, that is to say, the student is ‘‘a person
who craves attention and lacks empathy.’’ This combination of traits results ‘‘in
turning a suicide, a private event, into a mass murder, a public event.’’ The
candidate becomes friends with a ‘‘violence coach,’’ a person who ‘‘convinces the
candidate to channel his rage into an SR [School Rampage] shooting, promising
that as a result he will become loved by his similarly oppressed peers, feared by
the bullies, or simply renowned throughout the world for being ‘bad-ass’ or cool.’’
The candidate, in adopting this view, buys in to a ‘‘sham ideology’’ that glorifies
violence and killing, perpetuated through the mass media (CV, 17–18).
Once these factors are in place, the shootings then proceed, often with several
common elements:
Once the candidate gets the idea of turning his suicide into a public ceremony, he becomes
absorbed in the planning of it, often documenting his thoughts in journals and other media. He
Warnick, Johnson, and Rocha
Tragedy and the Meaning of School Shootings
may ‘‘publicize’’ the event by telling certain friends about it, warning them to stay home that
day, or suggesting a safe place from which to view the mayhem.. . . The candidate may choose
special clothing for the event. He may even choose background music. This kind of ceremony
seems to be a throwback to something very ancient and primitive, where the supplicant plays
the part of a god, and indulges in a forbidden or privileged activity prior to his own execution
or banishment from the tribe. (CV, 19)
The ritual of school shootings, then, commonly includes ‘‘special clothing,’’
music, and the participation of others — in broad outlines, a ceremony similar
to some religious rituals. There is also something about the school shooter’s
ritual preparation for violence that, we might add, echoes type-scenes in heroic
tales. For example, in the collecting and displaying of weapons, the student is
like an epic warrior donning his armor. The preparatory recordkeeping and the
shooter’s triumphant exclamations during the rampages also mirror the taunting
and boasting that accompanies epic combat. According to Fast’s description of
school violence, the goals of the shooters seem to us to align with the Homeric
ideal of obtaining immortal fame and notoriety (kleos) through acts of seemingly
superhuman violence.
As we read Fast’s too brief account of violence and ritual, we wondered what
more could be made of this idea and where such an understanding of school
shooting might lead us. Philosophical work on ritual is not well developed, since
rituals are often thought of as irrational and thoughtless, and thus beyond the pale
of serious philosophical inquiry. There is a growing body of literature, though, that
seeks to develop philosophical resources for understanding ritual. Among the most
promising may be the ‘‘pragmatic’’ approach to understanding rituals, which takes
the notion of human action as a source of knowledge seriously. Kevin Schilbrack
summarizes the pragmatic approach in the following way:
[This] approach has the potential to provide the conceptual tools to see rituals as activities in
which ritualists are not simply repeating traditional gestures but are rather raising and seeking
to settle a problem. From this Deweyan perspective, rituals seek to move the participants from
disquiet to resolution, they involve the testing of the hypotheses, and hence they are a form
of inquiry. Thus a pragmatist philosophy of rituals might ask the questions: what problems
are ritualists trying to solve, what afflictions or difficulties are they trying to overcome, and
what do they learn in their rituals?9
It is useful, we believe, to apply this approach to the study of ritualized school
shootings. If school shootings are to be seen as forms of inquiry, we should ask
(1) what is the problem being addressed? and (2) what solution is being proposed? In
seeking to answer these questions, it would make sense to look at both ritualized
violence more broadly and school rituals specifically. In what follows, we will
briefly touch on both of these literatures.
First, in his study of human sacrifice and ritual killing, historian and
anthropologist Nigel Davies writes that human sacrifice was most often intended
to connect human beings to the gods. ‘‘Through the medium of the victim’s
death,’’ he writes, ‘‘man momentarily became God, and God became man.’’ This
action of sacrificial reconciliation, though, must be painful: ‘‘only the blood of
9. Kevin Schilbrack, Thinking Through Rituals: Philosophical Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2004), 3.
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the sufferer can forge the link that binds him to God — the God he has created
in his own image.’’ This ‘‘transformation of man into God’’ serves to ‘‘reunite
the community and restores equilibrium.’’10 The victim, the one who is killed or
commits ritual suicide, is the bridge between things that are separate; accordingly,
the status of the person killed must be ambiguous, both ‘‘pure and impure’’ and
‘‘loved, but also feared.’’11
The expectations of many school shooters are that the rampage will end in
their suicide; they are set to sacrifice their own lives, as well as the lives of
others. Understood in this light, school shootings connect to Davies’s analysis
of human sacrifice in several ways. First, the ideology of transcending ordinary
human life, and obtaining a godlike existence through killing, is clearly present
in many school incidents. Luke Woodham wrote this quasi-Nietzschean advice
on the day before his shootings: ‘‘Make your own rules. . . For you, dear friend,
are a Superman’’ (CV, 146). Columbine’s Eric Harris wrote, ‘‘I feel like God and
I wish I was, having everyone being OFFICIALLY lower than me.’’12 Through
their killings and suicides, the school shooters believe they become the higher
being that they have always wanted to be. They see themselves as godlike, for
instance, in their manipulation of life and death. Second, the moral ambiguity
that is often attached to the student shooter, part victim (as a victim of abuse,
bullying, and so forth) and part victimizer (as a murderer), mirrors the ambiguity
around the redemptive figures in human sacrifice more broadly. Third, just as the
human sacrifices were offered to ‘‘reunite community,’’ the problem of disunity
and community fragmentation often drives the child shooters, who often complain
of being excluded, hated, and marginalized. The key connecting point, then, is that
both school shootings and sacrificial violence are driven by issues of perceived
community disunity.
Davies’s theory, which links ritual killing to worries about fractured
communities, may be further connected to specific discussions of ritual in
education. In an analysis of school ritual, philosopher of education R.S. Peters,
together with noted sociologist and linguist Basil Bernstein and educationist Lionel
Elvin, attempts to place school rituals within a larger cultural and economic
context. Contemporary schools, the authors argue, have become increasingly
focused on economic specialization and less on developing a common expressive
culture. The increasing differentiation among students breaks down the consensus
that often supported school communities. They write, ‘‘educating for diversity of
economic and social function in pluralistic societies often involves a strengthening
of the instrumental and a weakening of the expressive culture of schools.’’13 With
10. Nigel Davies, Human Sacrifice — In History and Today (New York: Morrow, 1981), 275.
11. Ibid., 276.
12. Quoted in Greg Toppo, ‘‘10 Years Later, the Real Story Behind Columbine,’’ USA Today, April 13,
2009, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-04-13-columbine-myths N.htm.
13. Basil Bernstein, H. Lionel Elvin, and R.S. Peters, ‘‘Ritual in Education,’’ Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Biological Sciences, 251, no. 772 (1966): 435.
Warnick, Johnson, and Rocha
Tragedy and the Meaning of School Shootings
the community fractured, schools cannot employ the schoolwide expressive rituals
that require a certain degree of agreement and commonality among students. There
are no longer shared understandings about the nature and purposes of schools.
There is no common identity to be formed among students. In response to this
increasing specialization and instrumentalization (and, perhaps, greater emphasis
on cultural and religious diversity), students construct their own rituals: ‘‘Pupils
are then likely to generate their own consensual and differentiating rituals in
order to assist in the development of a transitional identity.’’14 Students look to
schools to help them construct their identities, then, which is the central purpose
of school ritual. When they find that the school offers no guidance, they form their
own rituals — their own ceremonies, rites of passage, and expressive traditions.
If we think of school shootings as one manifestation of student-initiated
school ritual, and if we combine it with Davies’s analysis of human sacrifice, some
interesting conjectures follow. The pragmatic approach to ritual asks us to see
ritual as inquiry, as a problem and a proposed solution. Davies would say ritual
killings stem from problems in communal life. Similarly, Bernstein, Elvin, and
Peters would say that school rituals are undertaken partly because differentiated
schools, as vehicles of economic instrumentalism, are unable to aid in the process
of student identity formation through common, expressive rituals. Left without
substantive guidance, the students create their social customs and hierarchies,
which are ruled at the top by the popular students, and are filled at bottom by the
‘‘community of the excluded.’’ When members of this community of the excluded
are also struggling with family and psychological problems (and have easy access to
powerful firearms and violent media), they may formulate a ceremony of violence
in an attempt to redefine themselves, invert values, and regain a measure of social
respect. In short, the lack of a normative ‘‘expressive culture’’ coming from schools
means that students are forced to construct meaning on their own, and sometimes
this meaning may, when combined with other factors, take the form of targeted
school shootings. The problem or the aim of the ritual inquiry, in other words, is
fractured school community, and school shootings are one attempt to reformulate
that community.
Is this a productive way to understand school shootings? The strength of
this approach obviously depends on how much credence one gives to high-profile
sociologists and anthropologists like Bernstein and Davies, since this particular
theory is heavily dependent on their work. Independently from them, though,
it does seem to be the case that American public schools do not stand for a
comprehensive worldview, or set of values, as they did in the past. Beginning
with Horace Mann, schools were charged with inculcating ideals of nonsectarian
Protestant Christianity, and offering certain ritual practices (prayers and Bible
readings) that served to support these values. Such practices were weakened as
the U.S. Supreme Court began to take a more active interest in school practices
(forbidding such rituals as forced flag salutes, school-sanctioned prayers and Bible
14. Ibid.
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readings, and so forth). It is also the case that the Progressive Era saw a rise in
economic differentiation, and with this came a decline in the idea that schools
should offer students a substantive common experience. So, it does seem that
contemporary schools might themselves offer less of a common ‘‘expressive
culture’’ than in the past. Whether this trend is one cause of the rise of a ‘‘youth
culture,’’ with its own set of values and rituals, and whether one such ritual may
be manifest in school shootings, is conjectural at this point.
While interesting and potentially fruitful with more research, this conjecture
does present certain limitations. Even in Fast’s book, some school shootings fail
at first glance to possess the features of ceremony or rituals that Fast describes.
The approach also does not seem to imply any firm conclusions about what to do
about school shootings. Addressing school shootings along these lines would seem
to involve learning to talk about unity in a serious way — a way that goes beyond
football teams, a common back-to-basics curriculum, and school colors. We might
come to question curricular differentiation, or perhaps school neutrality with
respect to moral and religious issues and practices, or perhaps even celebrations
of diversity. The problem is, of course, that attempts to regain a common, schoolenforced ‘‘expressive culture’’ smack of cultural and ideological indoctrination,
and remind us of ill-conceived past and present attempts at assimilation through
coercive schooling. Even if we conclusively demonstrate, somehow, that school
shootings were caused by a lack of school expressive culture, some of these
liberal and multicultural values might be too important to relinquish. Under these
conditions, the educator would be torn by conflicting aims. We are not sure which
option would, or should, be chosen.
The pragmatic understanding of ritual we discussed earlier may suggest one
way out of this conundrum. According to this view, rituals are not thoughtless,
irrational activities, but forms of inquiry. If rituals are forms of inquiry rather than
instruments of indoctrination, they would seem to be permissible under liberal
ideals and schools can then, perhaps, return to the use of expressive ritual. Such
rituals might suggest forms of community and thus help form the transitional
identity, but if they are also experienced as inquiry, they might preserve, in some
sense, important values related to individual difference. Community-based ritual,
in this way, can legitimately play a part in liberal schools. This is at least one
glimmer of hope in an otherwise unrelenting paradox between commonality and
individualism.
Another possible solution might be to use rituals outside of schools that
work to defuse the ritual meaning of the ceremonial school shooting. We have
seen over time that one prominent community response to school shootings is
to react with anger and calls for vengeance against the offending students (if
they survive), while another response is to reach out to them in sorrow and
forgiveness. One response paints the shooters more as murderers, the other more
as victims. These two reactions are best exemplified by the much-publicized and
contentious dispute about whether the Columbine shooters themselves should be
memorialized as victims as part of the cross display on Rebel Hill. The inclination
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to anger and vengeance is certainly understandable: In response to the shooter’s
ceremonial violence, the community responds with ceremonial violence of its
own, sometimes culminating in the execution of the guilty party (itself something
of a ritual killing). The problem is that this form of retributive violence supports
the very meanings the shooters were trying to enforce in their rituals. They often
desire to be the ‘‘badasses,’’ to be looked on with fear and trembling, shock and
awe. Their shootings are an attempt to be noticed, to have power, and to be taken
seriously within the community. When the community response is anger and fear,
the shooters seem to have succeeded in their aim.
A counterritual, though, may work to defuse these ritual meanings. What if,
for example, forgiveness mingled with sorrow for the shooters themselves was
suggested, or was somehow made more visible, through ritual? Instead of being
remembered with fear and awe, future shooters would know that they would be
remembered differently: not as ‘‘badasses,’’ but simply as badly treated children;
not as wielding fearful power, but simply as being driven by powers beyond
their control; not as gods of violence, but simply as young people to be pitied
and forgiven. Could such forgiveness be publicly embodied in ritual? Could the
community offer another ritual solution to the problem of the ritual inquiry?
Would such ceremonial meanings preempt the script that troubled youths are
trying to write?
Beyond our hope for forgiveness, we do not have answers to any these practical
questions. They seem, however, questions worth asking. Fast, in his book, has at
least pointed us to a space where we might ask certain types of questions, even
though the answer to these questions is, right now, elusive. Moreover, we want to
point out that seeing school shootings as rituals brings up fundamental issues of
what we value most in education, of the paradoxes and contradictions sometimes
involved in actualizing these values, and of the limitations of our understanding.
The contradictions that arise when we look at school shootings involve competing
values of community and individuals, unity and diversity. In addition, looking at
violence as ritual ceremony forces us to consider schools not only in their current
context, but also within the broad sweep of human history and of the construction
of meanings across time. It forces us to ask how and why violence has erupted in
human societies and to consider the meanings associated with such violence.
Such an analysis of meaning not only raises questions of time, but also of place.
Place, after all, is a central part of ritual — from temples and cathedrals, to homes
and auditoriums, the place of ritual matters in constructing ritual meaning. The
issue of place leads to another significant question in our thinking about school
shootings: Why schools? If a child simply wants to kill his or her peers, after all,
there are plenty of places to choose from. Shopping malls, concerts, parties, and
local hangouts are all places where a child can find other children to kill. Thus,
the answer to the question of ‘‘why schools?’’ cannot simply be ‘‘because that is
where the kids are.’’ Why are schools, of all places, thought to be the appropriate
places of ritualized violence? We turn now to this question.
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Violence and the Meaning of the American School System
Education Under the Security State is comprised of three parts (‘‘The Security
State and the Traditional Role of Schools,’’ ‘‘Security Threats,’’ and ‘‘Security
Measures: Defending Public Schools from the Public’’) and fifteen separate essays.
The aim of the book is straightforward: It is an assault on neoliberalism, capitalism,
and their subsidiaries (for example, the market and the security state) that threaten
the integrity of public education. The book appears, ironically, in a general series
entitled, ‘‘Defending Public Schools,’’ edited by E. Wayne Ross and published by
Teachers College Press. David Gabbard, who is the editor of this particular volume,
describes the sentiment behind this paradoxical defense of public schools when he
writes, ‘‘honesty forces me to question whether public schools have ever served
either the public or the value of education. . . . The public has been the target, not
the beneficiary, of state-sponsored, compulsory schooling’’ (ESS, xxxiii–xxxiv).
The worry is that, particularly under current conditions, public schools are not
truly public, but rather have been dominated by the interests of the wealthy and
powerful. While this book does not address school shootings, per se, we found
much that was relevant to the topic.
The book poses interesting questions and presents unexpected parallels. In
this book, Noam Chomsky’s notion of ‘‘manufacturing consent’’ — that is, faux
democracy produced by the media to ensure a servile and thoroughly indoctrinated
public — is relentlessly applied to compulsory schooling. While the criticisms of
compulsion rely heavily on Chomsky’s political thought, there is also a strong
influence of Ivan Illich (which is understandable since Gabbard studied under
Illich). At the end of the book, contributor Julie Webber acknowledges this
influence by citing the work of the contemporary de-schooler, John Taylor Gatto.
It is fascinating that although there are fundamental and important differences
between the politics of Gatto and Chomsky (and this book clearly favors the
latter), the question of authority is, largely, the same. While the politics of each
side are quite different — they vary across degrees of libertarianism, democratic
socialism, and anarchy — the concern over what public schools are for, who
controls them, and how they affect the public, is held in common. Growing out
of the basic history of the common school and its roots in the modern industrial
state, both sides conclude that, in undeniably serious ways, the schools we have
today function as replication machines of the state and the differentiated market
that drives it.
For now, we do not want to offer any assessment of whether all of the
criticisms of current schooling under the security state are fair or unfair. Rather
than continue to map out the historico-political analysis of public schools in
Education Under the Security State, we simply wish to take up the problem
of corporatized compulsion as it relates to school shootings. Suspicions about
education under the security state may help to address questions about the place
of the school as the preferred location of violence. Again, we want to ask, why the
school? What is it about the security-state school that cultivates this particular
kind of violence, ‘‘targeted school shootings’’? These questions prompt us to
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consider whether schools are neutral sites of violence, mere accidental places
where people shoot each other from time to time, or something else. There is
also the corresponding hermeneutic question of what it means to have a genre of
violence that is intimately attached to schools.
This hermeneutic question of violence in schools is not entirely absent from
other sites of violence. We rarely feel the need, however, to wonder why killing
occurs in a war zone during wartime. We may wonder what caused the war and the
killing, but the site of violence, the place, is not itself as perplexing or troubling.
We understand that war happens wherever two armies meet, and this has more
to do with strategic concerns than symbolic ones. To be sure, battlegrounds may
sometimes be chosen for symbolic value (the battle of Stalingrad comes to mind),
and we will be more troubled if the site of war is peopled with civilians, but the
particular site of war, by itself, is not such an interesting question. However, when
we consider ‘‘the school’’ — a place that has many connotations for both children
and adults — as the site of warlike things, we become increasingly disturbed. The
school is a place where many of us seem to think that violence is fundamentally
inappropriate; it is supposed to be a site of happy and peaceful events. At the
same time, though, the school seems to be chosen precisely because it must seem
appropriate, to the shooter, for an act of killing to occur.
What is it about schooling that leads to these wildly differing views on the
appropriateness of violence in schools? Perhaps, on this point, we could draw a
distinction between the ‘‘aspirational meaning’’ of American schooling (as Gabbard
says, what we think education should be) and meanings that are formed through
the actual experience with American schooling (what education actually is) (ESS,
4). Judging by our rhetoric, our aspirations for schools are noble: They should bring
about the full development and healthy flourishing of children. Schools are places
where we hope that ‘‘every child can learn’’ and where ‘‘no child is left behind.’’
At the same time, though, schools are experienced by many students as places of
boredom, distrust, violation, or fear. In Books, Blackboards, and Bullets (the next
book we will address), Marcel Lebrun writes, ‘‘Due to their nature, schools are
locations where kids of many colors and personalities come together to share a
place of learning. But what they learn early on is that school can be a nasty, unsafe
place where you defend and protect yourself or you become a victim’’ (BBB, 15).
This is certainly not the only way schools are experienced, but it is probably more
common than some educators would care to admit.
When we consider the argument of books like Education Under the Security
State, violence in schools does not appear so outrageous or shocking; indeed, we
can begin to see why it might seem appropriate to some students. The question
of physical violence, the contributors to this book might say, is preceded by
other forms of political, institutional, and mental violence, including all that
is involved in the neoliberal security state. A growth in this type of coercive
force can be seen in many recent policy developments, such as accountability.
‘‘Accountability,’’ Sandra Mathison and E. Wayne Ross write in their contribution
to the book, ‘‘is a means of interaction in hierarchical, often bureaucratic systems,
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between those who have power and those that do not’’ (ESS, 92). Accountability is
compelling someone to answer in a certain sort of way; in this way, accountability
adds a new layer of compulsion to compulsory public schools. Such use of force
also appears as the security apparatus of the state appears in schools, manifesting
itself, as contributor Kenneth Saltman points out, in ‘‘zero tolerance policies,
surveillance, uniforms, and police presence’’ (ESS, 162). Because schools in the
security state are increasingly coercive in this regard, they are perceived by
certain students as fitting stages for violent performances, or places where violent
statements should be made. Because they are places where people are forced to be
and to do things, they become places apt for the show of force. Because students
experience fear and humiliation in schools, they are seen as suitable places to
cause fear and humiliation. Schools, these authors might suggest, are places of
violence before the first shots are even fired.
The book implies that there is something new about the particular type
of violence attached to schools in the security state. Interestingly, the spike in
targeted school shootings over the past two decades seems to roughly correlate with
changes in educational policies: as new educational policies were implemented
in the 1990s and 2000s, targeted school shootings more than quintupled. Of
course, the nature of the relation between these recent policy reforms and school
shootings, if there is any, is unclear. On one level, it seems absurd to say that these
new forms of testing, accountability, and security measures caused an increase
in targeted school shootings; clearly, there were many other factors in play at
the same time. And yet, if recent policy initiatives make schools feel a little less
hospitable, a little less welcoming, a little less open and trusting than they were
in the past, then this may be one factor (among many) that leads students to see
schools as an appropriate place for violence. More and more, perhaps, students feel
that something is done to them when it comes to schooling.15
Even if recent trends in educational policy contribute to school shootings,
this is not to say that such policies are unjustified legally or ethically speaking.
Schools were certainly not idyllic bastions of love and respect before recent policy
developments, and many recent changes at least reflect well-intentioned efforts
to solve real problems. A school with a serious bullying problem may be morally
required to increase security measures by installing surveillance cameras, for
example, if such measures can be proven to be effective at reducing the problem.
It is precisely this concern for the opportunities of children that makes us want
to control them, socialize them, watch over them with guards and cameras, and
institutionalize them. But it may be this same concern, when caring results in
command-and-control policies, that leads to targeted school shootings.
15. If it is true that recent policy developments lead students to see schools more as appropriate places
for violence, then why has overall violence decreased? This is an important question, and may cast some
doubt on the connection between recent educational policy and school shootings. At the same time, it
is possible that the security procedures in place in the schools of the security state do function well
in preventing day-to-day acts of violence while also creating a tinderbox in which high-profile school
shootings may eventually burn.
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We seem to be caught in a competition between important values and, again,
clear-cut advice about ‘‘what to do’’ about school shootings is illusive. On the
one hand, we care about students and want to keep them secure, to track their
progress, and to make their schools accountable; on the other hand, these actions
may lead to a generally inhospitable environment in which schools may come
to be seen as more appropriate places for violence. The appearance of these
contradictions, though, reveals why it is important to ask these types of questions.
Questions about the particular site of school shootings, and further questions
about the apparent correlation between school-located shootings and recent policy
initiatives over the past two decades, can still be useful in promoting a certain type
of self-reflection among educators and policymakers. Such reflection may call into
question whether, in fact, all our values can be actualized at the same time, and it
may present difficult quandaries about what to do when such visions conflict. This
lesson may not only be important to learn with respect to school shootings, but to
educational problems more broadly. This productive encounter with limitations
and paradox not only occurs as we try to understand school violence, but also as
we think through the implications of preventing school shootings for the practice
of teaching.
Educators as Interpreters of Violence
Marcel Lebrun’s Books, Blackboards, and Bullets: School Shootings and
Violence in America is a seemingly straightforward guide to reducing school
violence. Throughout the book are checklists and words of advice for parents and
school officials about preventing and responding to school violence. The book
deals not only with school shootings, but also with bullying, gangs, and suicide.
When it comes to describing the causes of school violence, Lebrun points to many
factors. He sees the media playing a role in sensationalizing school shootings and
perpetuating violence, and he maintains that journalists focus on the dramatic
and are thus unable to get the story straight. Parents are also partly to blame
since ‘‘youths are not being given good problem-solving strategies, are not taught
how to communicate effectively, and are unable to deal with interpersonal issues
with any level of success’’ (BBB, 55). He claims that schools are insecure and
rigid, that children have easy access to unsecured firearms, that drug trafficking
allows for an underground economy that lures students away from schools, and
so forth. Lebrun concludes, ‘‘It has become increasingly evident that youth are
now choosing guns and bombs as their premeditated method to resolve conflicts
and are senselessly attacking multiple victims at random to express their anger,
frustration, and revenge’’ (BBB, 55).
To be sure, Lebrun’s book offers some useful practical advice. In constructing
his advice, he takes a largely clinical perspective, discussing the causes of violence
and offering his lists of advice to educators. At the same time, there are also some
things that humanize his account. One entire chapter includes brief descriptions of
prominent school shootings over the past few decades, while another is a collection
of student-written poems and essays on the topic of violence and bullying. The
book sums up well, it seems to us, much current thinking on things schools
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might do to prevent and react to violence. At the same time, the book has some
shortcomings. It offers few in-depth case studies of violence, and school violence is
not interpreted in any detail, only in generalities. Most importantly, while decrying
those who would sensationalize violence, and while admitting that ‘‘overall crime
rates have decreased’’ (BBB, viii) and that ‘‘statistics have shown that a student is
safer at school than away from it’’ (BBB, 1), the book has an apocalyptic quality to
it. The tone seems to imply that things are getting worse with respect to school
violence and that schools are increasingly fearsome places — a tone that does not
seem supported by the evidence pointing to an overall decline in school violence.
One of the most interesting and troubling features of the book, for reasons
we will explain, are the checklists that Lebrun creates. With respect to targeted
school shootings specifically, Lebrun constructs these checklists from credible
sources, namely, the FBI Threat Assessment Report. There are checklists for
school officials to evaluate the individual personality of potentially dangerous
students, to evaluate family dynamics, and to assess school climate. Lebrun is
careful to state that such lists do not predict that a shooting will occur, or which
children will be shooters, but they do point to potential problem areas. Lebrun
admits that ‘‘throwing a large net of generalizations may not be an effective
and efficient way to profile and understand the behavior of the acting-out child’’
(BBB, 20).
What interests us, as we read these checklists, and the advice in the book in
general, is what this all means for the self-conception of the school officials who
are being asked to see themselves as interpreters of violence. How does it change
the role of teachers or administrators if they come to see their job as the being
responsible for anticipating and responding to school shootings? Members of some
professions go to work each day with a consciousness of danger and a realization of
the need for caution — the fire fighter and the soldier come to mind. What would
it mean for the role of teachers to join their ranks? What knowledge would they
have to have to do what is being asked of them? What things would a teacher need
to be able to control? How does it change the role of educators, in other words, if
they are to be interpreters of violence?
The first checklist in chapter 3 asks school officials to judge the frequency,
duration, and intensity of a range of student personality characteristics. Educators
are asked to judge, for example, whether a student has ‘‘difficulty with insults,’’
whether they have an ‘‘inflated sense of self,’’ whether they show ‘‘signs of
narcissism’’ or have ‘‘an accurate sense of how others perceive them.’’ Educators
are asked if a student has ‘‘negative role models’’ or belongs to a ‘‘closed social
group’’ (BBB, 22–24). Lebrun claims, ‘‘If a child demonstrates more than 50 percent
of these characteristics, you may have an at-risk individual on your hands’’ (BBB,
24). With respect to the family checklist, educators need to determine whether
there is a ‘‘difficult parent relationship,’’ whether parents ‘‘model careless use of
weapons,’’ whether there are ‘‘limits in television watching,’’ whether ‘‘parents
give in to the child’s demands,’’ or whether ‘‘traditional family roles are reversed,’’
among many other things (BBB, 26–27). With respect to the larger social dynamic
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checklist, for example, educators are to know the students’ outside interests, the
groups they affiliate with, their stated references to other school shootings, and
whether they ‘‘lack a reality check’’ (BBB, 31).
The checklists bring with them a certain vision of how educators should see
students and how educators see themselves. First, notice how very difficult it
would be for educators to make many of these judgments. For one thing, many
of the student personality traits are too ambiguous, too context-dependent, or too
difficult to measure. How does an educator decide what constitutes an ‘‘extremist’’
group or a ‘‘reality check’’? How is an educator supposed to estimate the frequency,
duration, and intensity of students’ display of ‘‘depression,’’ ‘‘narcissism,’’ or
‘‘vulnerability’’? Even if one could settle on a shared understanding of such things,
it would be difficult to make the appropriate observations. Further, this would all
seem to imply that the educator needs deep and pervasive access to a student’s
inner life, or to the records that contain clues to that inner life. They would
need such information not only about the students themselves, but also about
their families. Educators would be required to know if families carelessly handle
firearms, for example, but it seems unlikely that any such information would be
easily forthcoming.
To gather all this information about students, and to conceptualize the bits
of data as possible warning signs that precede an act of violence, demands that
educators come to see students in a new light. Educators would be required to
adopt the gaze of a prison guard. They become the prophets of future violence,
those who are supposed to watch for the warning signs. Teachers, who usually lack
a background in criminology, would now be required to view their students from
a psychologically suspicious perspective. Educators would need to continually
see students and their idiosyncrasies — their depressions, their humiliations,
their resiliences, and their admirations — as potential threats rather than, say, as
potential areas of talent to cultivate or as expressions of individuality. Such advice,
then, seems to change how educators must see and conceptualize their students.
Like in the famous ambiguous drawing, it demands that they see students more as
ducks, say, rather than rabbits, or more to the point, more as potential monsters
rather than potential flourishing scholars or citizens. If this new way of seeing
students saves the lives of children, it may be worth it. But we should not be blind
to the costs to the children themselves and to the personal fulfillment of educators
who make this transition.
Lebrun’s lists also seem to demand that school officials develop a rigorous
capacity for self-criticism. After all, the school environment that educators
construct is itself subject to inspection and criticism. School officials would need
to honestly assess, for example, whether they are ‘‘oblivious to bullying,’’ whether
certain groups are ‘‘not given respect by school officials,’’ whether ‘‘little trust
exists between students and staff,’’ and whether ‘‘discipline is inequitably applied
by staff’’ (BBB, 51). These are things that would require immense capacities for
self-knowledge and questioning, since this is directly the domain of the educators
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themselves. Presumably, most educators who practice inequitable treatment of
students would deny that they are acting unfairly.
In the end, the advice that is offered to school officials has implications for
how school officials should see themselves and their work. The school official
who can avert violence has an intimate knowledge of all the students, not only
their overt behaviors, but also their inner hopes, fears, and desires. To gain
this insight, educators must be attentive to the slightest clues regarding their
students’ lives, and conceptualize these clues so as to recognize certain children
as potential school shooters. They must be familiar with the family dynamics
of their students — with their relations with their parents, and with how guns,
alcohol, and media are used (or abused) at home. They must see themselves as
monitors of appropriate information and make wise judgments about when and
where students can access material about troubling topics. They must have an
immense, perhaps uncommon, capacity for self-criticism.
It is doubtful that many such people exist, and even if they did, we would
wonder whether they should be called ‘‘teachers’’ or ‘‘educators.’’ If it is true,
as we argued previously, that there are certain practices that mark schools as
places apt for violence, then perhaps educators who become agents of criminal
surveillance might be contributing to the problem. After all, if schools are places of
violence because of perceived coercion and distrust, school officials who become
agents of surveillance may be fueling the symbolic fire that allows school violence
to burn. While it may be necessary to some extent, we should recognize that
turning teachers into criminologists comes with real costs. Teachers would need
to become much more intrusive and distrustful, and change how they see students.
Even if our goal is simply to prevent school shootings, these changes might end
up making matters worse. Here again, it seems we are confronted with important
paradoxes and contradictions. We surely want teachers to watch for troubled kids
who might commit violence, but at the same time, we should be troubled by what
this expectation actually means for the practice of teaching.
Conclusion: School Shootings and the Tragic Sense
We have presented ideas that we think might be valuable when it comes
to understanding and responding to school shootings. It is useful, first, to think
about school shootings in terms of their apparent ritual meaning, particularly
their meaning as a form of inquiry, a problem and proposed solution, about
broken communities. Such an approach might with time not only lead to a better
understanding of the cause of school shootings, it may also suggest ways of dealing
with school shootings that involve the construction of counterrituals that offer
alternative solutions to the ritual problem. We have also suggested that the lack
of hospitality within the schools of the ‘‘neoliberal security state’’ may be one of
many factors influencing the rise of targeted school shootings in the past twenty
years, implying that school shootings might be addressed (in part) by revising some
of those policy initiatives. Finally, we have tried to rethink the role of the teacher
if we take seriously the advice given to teachers about ‘‘what to look for’’ in
potential shooters, and have warned about where this might lead. These proposals
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Tragedy and the Meaning of School Shootings
are mostly exploratory and conjectural in nature, but they at least seem worthy of
more extended consideration.
At the same time, we have stressed the limitations that become apparent when
we think about school shootings. We have done this because the books coming
out about school safety often give little indication of this complexity and the
difficult trade-offs involved with working to prevent school shootings. Something
is lost in the advice, the threat assessment reports, and the checklists that are
currently in vogue in books about school violence. Instead, we must encounter
the particular stories of school shootings and, at the same time, attempt to see
such shootings in their larger historical and institutional context. Thinking about
these stories is important in reconsidering how schools are to be perceived or
experienced, how we are to reconceptualize the role of the educator, and how we
might reform school relations. Such stories have important things to say about,
not only violence, but about the human condition and about the educational
endeavor — taking education in its widest sense.
In the end, listening to accounts of school shootings might work to change
us in important ways, even if we cannot easily explain, predict, or prevent
school shootings. We have shown that even our own attempts to understand
school shootings have quickly presented certain problems and complexities. In
this way, these stories function as something of a Socratic elenchus, reducing
us to a state of aporia — a sense of being lost, of not knowing which way to
turn. Like the character Meno, our tongues and souls are ‘‘numb’’ and we are
‘‘full of perplexity.’’16 As we read these stories, at least, it became clear that our
own theories are inadequate, our concepts deficient, and our wisdom ‘‘little or
nothing.’’17 By reading about such stories, we come to face the limits of knowledge
and achieve a certain sort of Socratic wisdom.
Further, targeted school shootings, perhaps more than any other school events,
remind us of the tragic conditions that often accompany education. Listening to
stories of school shootings brings us face to face with what Nicholas Burbules
has called the ‘‘tragic sense of education’’ — a realization that our answers are
either illusory or incomplete, that our values will inexorably conflict, that success
is always provisional, and that success and failure are inextricably intertwined.
The tragic sense is the realization of the dangers of utopianism and the reality of
uncertainty, mixed with the realization that we still must try to act to improve
the world even in the face of such doubts. The power of tragedy, writes Burbules,
lies in achieving ‘‘a kind of self-knowledge’’ that ‘‘this is how life is.’’ He observes
that
In this order, all of our actions take place in the context of incomplete and often inaccurate
information; under circumstances that, outside our knowledge, may be working against us; or
16. Plato, Meno, trans. Benjamin Jowett, 80a; http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/meno.html.
17. Plato, Apology, trans. Benjamin Jowett; http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/apology.html.
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toward ends that may be fundamentally self-defeating. We observe this in the tragic character,
then we recognize it in ourselves.18
Throughout this essay, we have engaged with three books to show how
certain contradictions arise when we consider the problem of school shootings. We
have seen conflicts between security and freedom, community and individuality,
surveillance and trust, safety and openness. There are conflicts between the goods
of unity and of diversity, the goods of control versus freedom, the goods of seeing
children as potential threats and of seeing them as potential citizens. The fact of
school shootings, though, also unmistakably calls us to act rather than be paralyzed
by pessimism. Whatever difficulties such tragedies present, we cannot help but
try to do something, something that strikes at the causes of these tragedies and
that helps to prevent them in the future. If developing this ‘‘tragic sense,’’ this
point between utter pessimism and blind utopianism, is an achievement (and we
agree that it is), then we can think of no other example in education that better
exemplifies this point.
18. Nicholas C. Burbules, ‘‘The Tragic Sense of Education,’’ Teachers College Record 91, no. 4 (1990):
469–479.
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