The Jewish Observer

Last week my wife, Audrey, and I attended a panel discussion co-sponsored by the Village Square and the Tallahassee Democrat concerning gun issues as they relate to school safety. The conversation among the panelists ranged from what the local schools do to insure school safety, to statistics on gun ownership, to what does the second amendment really mean, to what exactly IS an assault weapon anyway. These are all useful topics, I am sure. But it was the clergy on the panel, Reverend Brant Copeland, who was the only person who tried to steer the conversation away from the minutia of gun types, or trying to parse the second amendment, towards a larger conversation about what are the values we want our community to reflect? What is the kind of society we really want? From Pastor Copeland’s perspective, if we can have that conversation, then our policies on guns, the 2nd amendment and school safety measures will become self evident. I agreed with him and thought he had nailed the problem – at least I thought he did until my wife and I discussed the event over dinner afterwards.

Audrey felt that the whole conversation was the wrong one, or more accurately, the less important one. She has the perspective of someone who worked as a school counselor serving difficult schools and students in Philadelphia (before we moved to Tallahassee) and working for almost 12 years for a department of FSU that does experimental reading programs in schools and pre-schools serving diverse populations. She has observed many pre-schools and elementary schools in our area of the panhandle. In a nutshell, Audrey believes that schools are the incubators for the next Adam Lanza. Why? Because children are not being socialized properly. Our education system is producing an ever larger population of automatons.

It begins in kindergarten. When I attended kindergarten, it was all about playing with others, listening to classic children’s stories, doing art projects – often very messy but with great latitude for creativity. The picture album I have from kindergarten shows a classroom with the tables in a jumbled fashion, lots of toys and art supplies. We dressed in costumes at Halloween and put on a Christmas play for our parents. The only evaluation my parents received was a hand written letter at the end of the school year, giving the teacher’s observations on my growth as a human being. This was a public school in West Virginia, by the way – not exactly a bastion of liberal, far out educational philosophies. It was just plain common sense. Kindergarten was where a loving, caring teacher gave you the first taste of school, with a focus on creating a love of coming to school and playing well with others.

The kindergartens Audrey observes (this year in Gadsden County) are sad descendants of my quite happy experience. The children are ordered into neat rows. There is little or no play. The emphasis is on inculcating obedience and cramming a pre-determined set of facts into the children’s heads. These are 5 year olds having to take spelling tests. By second grade, they look beaten, the love of school, of the experience of learning, wrung out of them. This reflects a situation found in schools all over the country. Everywhere, we see art, music and drama eliminated from schools. Teachers have less and less freedom to formulate how they wish to instruct their children. All that matters is to score higher on a test that determines the funding fate of the school. All of this comes at a tremendous cost to our children.

By now you might be asking the question, “What does this have to do with school safety?” My response is that there is no short term answer to preventing disasters in schools. Any policy, any law, any measure including posting guards at the doors, will not be an iron clad guarantee that the next shooting will not occur. A far better use of our resources would be to construct an education system that fosters love of learning, provides basic skills, teaches basic morality, inculcates creativity and creative thinking AND provides an environment where children can play together, be children together, and learn to interact with each other in positive and productive ways. By creating better, more emotionally healthy citizens, we reduce the prospects for the next mass shooting. Yes, it will take a generation or two, but we need to focus on long term solutions, not short term reactions to the disaster of the moment.

The next question is how to create these schools. I will tell you that they already exist. There are many successful models, but one is right here in Tallahassee – the School of Arts and Sciences – which is a charter school. A large number of the children from my congregation attend SAS, and as I work with them either in bar/bat mitzvah training or my Confirmation class, I can see the positive results of a loving and creative learning environment. Why cannot every child have this opportunity? Rather than spend resources on countless wasteful programs, I believe that no expense should be spared to create schools of excellence in every community.

Part of the money we invest in schools needs to be for what John Hankiar (a member of the discussion panel who is in charge of school safety for Leon County Schools) called “resource officers.” I am not really sure what he meant by that term. I would think they should be trained professionals who can spot the troubled, outcast child, and work with him/her. This professional should be engaged with families, attentive to domestic difficulties and provide resources to parents. While schools usually do have guidance counselors, they are far too few in number and overburdened by paperwork to properly serve their school’s population.

Further, if one looks at the countries with the most successful school systems (South Korea and Finland), there are some commonalities American schools need to adopt. First, they pay teachers on a level that attracts the best and the brightest. Too many of our teachers are mediocrities who cannot even speak proper English. (Audrey walked by a classroom one time and heard the teacher say, “Class, let’s sound out the word ‘air-o-plane’” actually breaking the word into 3 syllables!) Let’s elevate the teaching profession to an exalted level. Let’s get the best and brightest to want to teach. Second, every child, no matter where they live in the United States, should be learning the same material. The school board of Kansas should not have the right to deny science and the state of Texas should not have the right to edit history. Third, full programs of art, music, and drama should be part of every school’s curriculum. Often children having difficulties with the standard subjects respond to the creative stimuli the arts provide.

Yes, we should have a national discussion about the role of guns in our lives. Police departments have legitimate concerns about curbing criminal activity and 2nd amendment advocates have questions about how to safeguard constitutionally guaranteed rights. But none of this addresses the long term, root problem of creating well adjusted, secure, educated citizens who will lead our country to a better place. Isn’t that what all of us really want? Focusing on the guns just won’t get us there.