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Rising school violence is a civic scourge

BY Carol Jago

Fights at Jefferson High School, Santa Monica High School and a number of other schools in Los Angeles recently have focused public attention on the tensions among groups of students. Unfinished business in the community often plays itself out on campus. Some counselors posit that the reason students choose to fight at school is that they know adults will intervene and break things up before anyone is badly hurt.

If it’s true that teenagers count on someone to make them stop, bystanders who get in the way and prevent administrators from breaking up brawls share responsibility for resulting injury. An assistant principal at a New York City high school told me of students linking and locking arms around their combating peers to prevent school authorities from intervening. What’s more, excited spectators wanted the show to go on.

Where did teenagers learn this kind of behavior? Is it possible that the nonstop violence of electronic games has left them hungry for the real thing? And why do so many young people lack restraint?

I have been teaching in public schools for 31 years and assure you that teenagers have always fought. What is new is the rapid escalation from individual fisticuffs to melee. The spark that ignites the incident — “she looked at me” or “he called me *#!!” — is often so small as to be hard to discern. Tough as they may look, teenagers are hypersensitive, particularly to criticism from peers, and are easily offended. What they need to learn is a civilized, rather than bellicose, response.

Part of the problem is simple overcrowding. Putting too many 17-year-olds in too small an area is asking for trouble. Los Angeles public high schools house 2,000 to 6,000 students on campuses with few trees and no sculpture gardens. During lunch, the cacophony is intense. Girls shriek with joy, fear, outrage, or maybe just the chance for an extra French fry. Growing boys, proud of new muscles, push and shove simply to move after hours at a confining desk. Add to this mix the dulcet tones of hip-hop music, and you have a perfect storm. Almost every day on every high school campus, an accident is waiting to happen.

Rather than sanctimoniously shake our heads every time school violence makes the news, maybe we should support the remarkable individuals who choose to spend their adult lives teaching young people restraint. It isn’t easy. I can’t imagine being a high school principal addressing issues of crime and punishment every working day. It’s hard enough for me to make my students sensitive to criticisms of their grammatical errors.

But I try to do my part by guiding students through Joseph Conrad’s classic, “Heart of Darkness.” In this novella, which inspired “Apocalypse Now,” the 1979 Hollywood hit starring Marlon Brando, the narrator Marlow travels down a snake-like river to find Kurtz, a man who has lost all restraint. Caught up in the pursuit of ivory, fame and power, Kurtz has forgotten the lessons of civilization.

How terrifying to consider a generation that has never been civilized. Without restraint, we are worse than untutored savages. We are lost.

Jago directs the California Reading and Literature Project at UCLA and teaches English at Santa Monica High School.