Tuesday’s NY Times had an article with this bracing title: “School Shootings Put Teachers in New Role as Human Shields.” When I got into this profession, my parents worried about what they thought were its limited job prospects and low salaries. In those tense conversations, none of us factored in the prospect of a premeditated attack with automatic weapons on my future school, college, university, office, or classroom. But that, unfortunately, was a long time ago, and, back then, there was really no good reason to imagine students wandering the halls firing automatic weapons at their classmates and teachers. To some younger readers this might sound strange, but that sort of thing did not used to happen back in the old days, i.e., not so very long ago really. Somewhere out there in the US, there are probably parents talking to those of their children who are interested in teaching now and asking them whether they are sure they want to combine a low teacher’s salary with the prospect of having to step in front of a gun. Let me be clear: it is not something I anticipated doing when I embarked on this career, nor is it something I want to do going forward.
I am a teacher, and I am teaching talented young people, who are, among other things, potential future teachers. I doubt I am alone in preferring not having to worry about on-the-job or in-the-classroom mass murders or how to run with one’s arms above one’s head. Now, my university, like so many others, has upgraded the deadbolts inside every classroom door in the building, and, like so many others, offers “active shooter training” to its faculty. These are both sensible responses to the world that we—Americans—live in, but I propose we do all we can to make it so that people—usually white males—don’t collect guns and train them on their fellow humans. I wonder whether Americans can imagine how much positive human potential might be unleashed if we were not all living with the constant threat of violence, mechanized violence. If so, then I wonder why we prefer the current, repeated losses of that great human potential, precisely what we teachers strive to develop. If I understand the current discussion correctly, people who have these sorts of questions today are considered “liberal.” But I do not think that anything could be more conservative than believing that young people in a country at peace should be able to develop their abilities without the threats of dying in, being injured in, witnessing, or running from an attempt to murder them, their classmates, and their teachers.