A Reminder of February 1995

Until last week, the spotlight on school violence had faded. Obviously the problem hasn't.

The problem first moved into the media spotlight in 1995 when Barry Loukaitas shot and killed one teacher, two classmates, and wounded two more at Frontier Junior High in Moses Lake, Washington, the town in which I grew up and where most of my family remains. The media spotlight faded following the Columbine High School shooting spree that was the impetus for youth safety summits nation-wide and new initiatives and legislation to "address the problem of youth violence." We could all sigh a collective sigh of relief ... after all, the government was "on the job", the problem was being addressed, the behavioral "experts" were being called in, solutions were being found, the problem was being taken care of.

The Moses Lake School District was involved in the Virtuous Reality Program. Student were among the first to receive a full dose of "fuzzy" education wherein social and life-related issues became the center of real-life learning experience in the classroom where conflict

resolution and peer mediation were touted as the way to settle differences yet the "Barry Loukaitas" of the world seemed to have slipped through the cracks.

Following each tragedy, the media focus came to bear on the parents ... Loukaitas' parents were going through a divorce, there were domestic violence issues. In each instance, the media spotlight rested on the parents, the family, with school personnel wringing their hands and asking "why".

Why, indeed? While some of the blame certainly rests on parents who have largely abandoned their responsibilities as parents in the raising of their children and allowed themselves to be bullied by the government whose reasons for doing so are self-serving and not in the best interests of the child, the blame also falls on many others.

Following the incident at Moses Lake, the public asked for more "conflict resolution" and "peer mediation" training in schools. What a crock! Conflict resolution and peer mediation, contrary to what parents have been led to believe, are not about right and wrong, they are about "unifying perceptions" ... no right, no wrong, just consensus thought.

Who wins in such a situation -- the child who is being bullied, who has a more reserved personality, or the bully who has a more aggressive and outgoing personality, who has perfected techniques to get others to agree with him? The bully, of course, which means under conflict resolution and peer mediation, the individual with the more dominant personality will emerge the leader, the one to be agreed with without consideration for whether his actions are right or wrong.

This results in unresolved issues for the child being bullied, unresolved issues that affect the child's self-worth, interaction with others, his perception of the world and his place in that world. In short, it produces an angry child who sees his survival in terms of self-preservation.

This is but one piece of the pie. Another piece has to do with the focus of education under education reform. The focus is no longer the teaching of knowledge, of facts, with the child being taught to use the scope of his knowledge to formulate a reasoned, thought-out conclusion. The focus of education, under education reform, is to alter the child's behavior which may necessitate altering the child's belief system in order that the child may demonstrate the wanted attributes: teamwork, critical thinking, making decisions, communication, adapting to change and understanding. And how parents may believe these terms to be defined, and their reality under implementation are not the same.

In short children are being psychologically brainwashed in classrooms by teachers who have neither the training, the experience, the license, nor the clinical setting necessary to do this properly and in such manner that it does not damage the child's normal brain function. The result can be a child poised to go off the "deep end", whose brain function hovers at the edge of oblivion, who becomes mentally unstable.

And until the public recognize and deal with this, juvenile violence is going to continue to increase. The problem has not been solved by government. As with so many things, the problem has been used by the government to further its agenda, which is not necessarily in the best interests of the American people or American society. Under a system where "all" really does mean "all", the margin of error, i.e., the number of children adversely affected by brainwashing, is acceptable in attaining the goal.

Yes, I know the most recent incident at Virginia Tech. involved a young adult and not a child however it is noted that there was evidence that this person was disturbed yet nothing was done to help him. As they say, "a little intervention is worth a pound of cure".

And a sidebar in reference to our most recent casualty. The Korean community is getting some backlash with this tragedy. When did this become a race issue? When Andrea Yates killed her own children, did we all go on a rampage against all moms worried that they might all drown their children? Give me a break!