Killin’ It in Government Funded Education

My sister, Kirsten, texted me a briefly worded prediction the other day – one that filled me with sadness because it felt so poignant and, in all likelihood, entirely plausible. She wrote, “Our democracy will fall apart when we do more killing than educating.”

Kirsten is a public school teacher in Portland, Maine – the seat of our shared childhood. Portland is thirty-eight miles south of Lewiston -  the small, unassuming city built on the Androscoggin River where, on October 25th, 2023, a single man armed with an assault rifle went on a twelve minute killing-spree that left at least eighteen people dead and thirteen injured (sidenote on semantics: I intentionally used the term “killing-spree” as opposed to “on a rampage” as a spree, much like a shopping-spree, a drunken revel or a burst of unchecked, feel-good activity, is light in tone and better connotes how inured so many of us have become to what should never, ever be).

Back to the scene of the crime: if you do the math, 31 victims in 720 seconds is 2.6 casualties per minute. With today’s advanced weapons technology, some may consider that poor marksmanship, but bear in mind that the Lewiston assailant traveled four miles between the two locations wherein he opened fire. If what you’re counting is how many innocents a single citizen can take down while on the move, that’s remarkable speed and awesome efficiency. Truly a fine performance.

For two days, while law enforcement searched for the suspect-at-large, Kirsten’s school district shuttered their doors. No teaching would take place during those days - no chance for kids to gather and comfort one another or for the school community to collectively grieve and then, hopefully, deconstruct that grief and learn from the experience.

Don’t get me wrong; I am not criticizing the district’s decision to close shop. The safety of students, faculty and staff must remain paramount. There was an armed madman on the loose, for heaven’s sake; a man who was also a firearm’s instructor and U.S. Army Reservist. How utterly terrifying. In light of the circumstances, of course the only choice is to close the schools and instruct everyone to stay at home and “hunker down” (instructions our nations students fear hearing far too often these days).

What I am criticizing, however, is the fact that prioritizing safety from murder by assault weapons has now toppled education – the very purpose with which our public schools were originally intended. As a country, we were founded on the right to a free and public education. Schools are meant to educate – not protect, just as hospitals are erected to provide medical care and farms are established to grow food. Doctors are required to take the Hippocratic Oath for a reason – it serves as an invaluable moral guide to remind them of their ethics as physicians to first do no harm.

Many evolutions past, I was also a public school teacher and I clearly remember not only sensing but wanting my primary duty as an educator to fall squarely in the field of honing the critical thinking skills of our young; in the most simplistic terms, my job was to educate. My understanding was that my essential purpose was to engage children in the discussion of ideas, in the learning of new concepts, and in the thoughtful exploration and reflection of what they were learning. To squish and to poke and to knead concepts and ideas much like bread dough.

I believed this to be the primary objective of all public school teachers, regardless of subject. Whether you taught math, history, art or science was immaterial to the underlying and unifying mission: to help our nation’s children lead fulfilled lives wherein they could contribute meaningfully to the community at large. My hope was to help kids become empathetic adults with the capacity to think deliberately and intentionally so that they could develop the talents and skills that would, in time and in turn, move our culture forward as a whole. 

Yet I often see a culture that is stepping backward not because our collective teachers have failed, but because we as a people are allowing our values to erode at remarkable speed. I also fear that our de-evolution is due to our general passivity, although I’m not sure which comes first: does passivity result in weakened values, or is it the other way around? What does seem evident, however, is that this erosion is cascading into the classroom – into the very walls of the academic institutions which, I like to think, were originally intended to serve as our shared bolster.

We have lost our compass and are now toppling as a result. Relaxed access to automatic assault rifles continues to be permitted because of our own confused notions of certain inalienable rights; because of media and entertainment outlets that sensationalize violence; because of lobbyists who are consumed with profit; because of politicians who are enslaved to campaign funding and don’t know how to reach across the aisle; because of personal devices that have proven so effective at providing constant, endless drivel that we can no longer focus and organize our thoughts, let alone stay committed to a worthy cause.

How do we come to terms with a government that pledges to educate us at the same time that it allows us to be, time and again, picked off like fleas, and by our very own people? It’s illogical and akin to trying to hold water in a bottle that’s open on both ends. From the teacher’s perspective, why bother educating? And from the student’s perspective, why bother learning? In this instance – that of the contorted relationship between public education and relaxed gun laws – we are fed by the very same parent who laces much of our food with arsenic. You can never be too sure which barrel will have the poison apple.  

 I am tempted to say that we are faced with an intractable problem; that we will never do away with gun violence because of the endless lawsuits that would erupt if we were to simply stop the manufacture of assault weapons; that lobbyists and politicians would never permit a zero tolerance approach; that guns will always be available on the black market and that there will always be enclaves who can manufacture them despite intercessory efforts to thwart supply chains. I could go on and on.

But I stop myself short because believing that our nation’s problems with gun violence is intractable is evidence of lazy, passive thinking. Our innate capacity for complicated, sophisticated thinking has built cathedrals and space stations; has resulted in life-saving medicine and surgical procedures; has allowed for the development of renewable energy sources that, if we just allow for it, could potentially be brought to scale. If we have the capacity to reverse engineer climate change, surely we can think ourselves backward from that moment in time wherein a single American man picks up an assault rifle and murders eighteen people.

Maybe the solution is not complex so much as it is frustratingly simple. Perhaps we need only stop long enough to see that we have lost our way, to come back to the place where we value ourselves and our children sufficiently enough to say Enough. I pray that the solution is this simple at the same time that I feel embarrassed at being so simplistic. At the very least, perhaps the solution starts with the conviction to stay in conversation and committed to a cause; in kneading, poking, prodding and squishing our way out of the rather shameful box in which we find ourselves. If our own government can’t reconcile its conflicting interests, perhaps the job of unwinding so much senseless violence lands in the laps of its citizens alone. Because if we peer far enough down the road, surely we can see that our government will eventually be peopled by our own children and our own children are sourced from none other than you and me.