It has come to my attention recently that my local high school will no longer be the “fighting cardinals”, but now just the cardinals. This means a complete overhaul on the mascot logos(currently it looks like a cardinal walking upright and cruisin for a bruisin).
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised since this school also forces students to wear I.D. tags and there are always active police on duty. I just wonder if they’ll put metal detectors in. By the way, this public school has no record of mass violence, and has above average academic students.
So I guess the grand question is, are schools turning into prisons?
I think the school administrators are shaking in the panties, that’s what. They’re so worried about ANYTHING violent ever happening at their school because it might demonstrate badly on their own job taking care of the school.
Personally, I think it’s this attempt to eliminate all violence in the school that’s (partially) to blame for most school shootings… since nobody’s got the option of swinging their fists to get their aggressions out, there’s more of a chance of someone’s pent-up rage causing them to snap.
It’s all just feeble attempts to look tough, without dealing with the actual problems.
Hey, all you guys in the rest of the world, is there anywhere besides British Columbia that’s dealing with a rash of high school kids committing suicide because they’re extensively bullied?
Well, in the U.S they bring a gun to school and start poppin’ people semi-randomly. I would say that more than half intend to kill themselves afterwards but lose the nerve.
US schools have become the most hyper-sensitive location on Earth, I swear. Any UnGoodThink is immediately acted upon, whether the threat is real or imagined.
Of course, when people fail to report someone’s actions like this, they go on to actually do what they said they would, making it all seem justified. (See the recent San Diego shootings)
There was even a turn-in-the-outsider (my cynical definition) initiative sometime back whereby kids would be rewarded for narcing on classmates they thought were unstable. The definition of ‘unstable’ were so broad that it easily encompassed everything that just about everyone that I knew way back in HS would have been turned over to the Thought Police.
I agree wholeheartedly, SPOOFE, but for different reasons.
These measures (ID Tags, metal detectors, etc) do nothing but make High School students feel like they’re living in a police state for seven hours a day.
When the first thing that you do in the morning is walk through a set of metal detectors amidst police officers, violence is always at the forefront of your mind. You’re forced through this routine several times a day, for weeks on end, you become desensitized to the proximity of violence. I believe that it, in effect, makes violent acts seem more commonplace, so there is less of a barrier to committing them.
Also, such extreme security measures make students feel like they’re being condescended to, (which they are) and removes some of their already fragile confidence. No matter how indifferent to adults they may act, teenagers do put some stock in adults reactions to them, and those reactions shape their perception of the world more than they admit to.
Hmm, the only reason my school ever gave for ID tags was to identify bodies destroyed beyond recognition. No teacher could honestly say to their students that it would have any affect on school violence:)
It is probably because they are academically better they do it. They cater to the overprotective parent
How about not wanting to be “politically incorrect”? I mean a fighting cardinal might offend someone. If he is a male cardinal it could even be thought of as sexual harrassment towards the female student body or even female cardinals.
Actually Kniz, both genders are represented, but I suppose the logo could be classified as male. However, no student has ever said anything about that.
Menacing thought…When the logo gets phased out, I can just imagine the some cops going into the locker room to paint over the picture of it. Bow to the thought police!
schools around the country are doing this kinda thing, and it is compltely absured. I think that if a kid is gonna start a school shooting, or something of that nature, it will happen wether their mascot fights or not. It seems to me that video games and movies have very little effect either. I have been an active participant in violent movies, and playing Quake and the equivelant for many years, and I could never see myself killing other people.
Public schools are set up to get the PUBLIC in and out as quickly as possible. That means everybody - the smart ones and the stupid ones. And believe me, not all kids are poor little victims of the evil system. Some of them are little assholes.
As I said in another thread today: You know all those mean stupid adults you don’t like? Guess where they come from?
Anyway, what would you have the schools do? Remove all security? Have the place become a gigantic “Summerhill” with no rules? (Look up A.S. Neill if you don’t know about Summerhill…)
I can tell you that the people who work in schools are just as baffled by this problem as the OP and everyone else. When we (yes, I’m a teacher) are too timid in our enforcement of rules and security we are pounced upon. When we are too strict and enforce “zero tolerance” policies we are lampooned for being inflexible.
For God’s sake people - I just want to go to work and teach some kids without anyone being bullied, beat up, teased. Oh yeah, or shot.
You tell ME how we’re supposed to do that since EVERYTHING we try is apparently wrong!!!
The primary motivating factors for our school’s administration are these: force the students to get high standardized test scores, and don’t get sued. The reason that these two things are important is because of what would happen if they weren’t important.
If the kids get low test scores, then the ignorant whiners would further claim “The schools aren’t doing their jobs!” and “Let’s cut funding!”
If something bad happens (like a fight or, heaven forbid, a shooting), then the school gets sued. It has happened often at my school. In order to reduce the risk of something bad happening, steps must be taken to remove any and all possible contributing factors – including violent mascots, bodily piercings, inappropriate websites, and any other seemingly harmless entity that might cause something awful to happen.
In other words, it’s better to be OVERprotective than UNDERprotective. The rules are made to constrain the bad people, and the good people have to follow the rules as well. This is life, and it happens in school.
Are schools prisons? Only if you make them so. Better to ask: is our society a prison?
I suspect that often, they want to die without doing the deed themselves; they want someone else to kill them. When they bring guns to school and start shooting, they’re expecting/hoping to be killed by the police.
Barbarian, has British Columbia has a rash of teen suicides?
Years ago a kid got a whipping (not spanked, but whipped) and he tried his best to keep his folks from knowing about it. Today, if the teacher should touch a kid, he/she is the one that hopes the folks don’t hear about it. I raised 5 kids with a 14 year spread. The first one knew he didn’t have any rights, the last girl told me she had rights that I didn’t have. There’s the problem and it is in every nook and cranny of our society.
Kids in the U.S. dont randomly shoot people. They often pick out their victims, which are most likely the people that have been bullying them.
There are two problems here: the bullys, and the kids that can’t handle it. First of all, it’s the bullies who need to beat up on some little kid to feel superior. It becomes a big problem when they pick a kid who already has problems and decides to let out his rage on that bully, and innocent people get caught in the cross-fire. The third problem is the access to guns. The U.S. is the only country without serious gun control, and it’s obvious that we need it. But with a Texan for a president, i dont think that will be happening soon.
The fourth problem is environment. I live in a nice little town, only 800 kids go to my school. We live next to the beach, and the mountains. Any hostilities at my school are settled over a nice joint, or a bowl. Most kids dont live in paradise, and are forced to deal with living in crowded conditions and working in crowded conditions.
So the solution, fix all the problems presented; which could get done, if we had a good president who cared about his country more than he did about other countries and their problems.
It has been proved in roughly 14,000,000,000 other threads that the rate of violence in our schools is not going up. The entire point of this thread is that people or overreacting and being entirely unreasonable and strict with regard to this issue. Could you explain to me what exactly “the problem” is?
You just said what the problem is right there, people over-reacting. School violence is actually going down, according to statistics. People are just more aware of it than they used to be, just like with gay people. Don’t take that as saying gay people are bad, im just saying they’re alot more in the open then they used to be.