[lbo-talk] German school gunman 'kills 16'

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Fri Mar 13 05:15:35 PDT 2009


At 09:53 PM 3/12/2009, Gar Lipow wrote:
>One type of killing, school killings are actually lower today than
>they were in the 60's. (Of course the 60's and early 70's had
>especially higher levels of internal U.S. violence than the present -
>at least the present through 2007. Don't know figures for 2008, or the
>past few months, yet.) So I'd want to see statistics before I was
>convinced that this kind of "spree" killing is higher today than at
>other times in recent history.

Joseph Kett who surveyed the history of youth in the U.S. in Rites of Passage has spoken and written quite about the issue of school violence (not spree killings in general). Basically, taking the long view, Kett shows how schools were pretty violence places in the past. One of the reasons for age grading was that the violence of teen males was said to be better controlled by grading them off from younger boys. He quotes liberally from Horace Mann, an educator in the 1800s, who wrote about student violence against teachers. He tells stories of violent disruptions, torture of teachers, outbursts and uprisings, etc. There was resistance to women as teachers for a long time because people didn't think women could handle it.

There were also shootings in the past. The one I know about from Kett is that, in 1840, a student killed a professor with a muzzle loader at University of Virginia. It got brought up a lot after the shootings at Virginia Tech.

shag



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