Using critical pedagogy to reduce violence in schools

    Violence in modern U.S. society has become one of the gravest issues
the nation faces. The murders at Columbine and other schools are but the
extreme effects of a culture of violence, and are far outweighed by the
sheer quantity of non-lethal violence prevalent in schools and the greater
society. A deep understanding of the roots of violence will enable critical
pedagogues to proactively work within both the schools and the community at
large to reduce the level of violence in society. Blessedly, one of the most
powerful tools to control violence is kindness.
        This paper will examine in detail the causes of aggression and
violence in human beings. Using the discourse of evolutionary psychology,
the psychological traits of the average human will be established. These
include: strong competitive urges regarding basic needs such as food and
sex, a strong desire for social acceptance, mutual altruism, empathy, and
most importantly for this study, an innate resistance to taking violent
action against and killing another human being. The military's discovery of
this resistance to killing, and their subsequent success at enabling
soldiers to overcome it by using classical and operant conditioning, social
learning and various killer-victim distancing techniques, is a crucial
element of this study. That is because the mass media and entertainment
industry is unleashing the same violence enabling experiences on our nation
as the military uses to train soldiers to kill, albeit with one critical
difference. In the military soldiers learn to use violence under the
constraint of orders; there is no such control in the lessons taught by the
media.  Understanding these violence-enabling factors is a prerequisite for
effectively collaboratively resisting them. There are multitudes of potent
actions which critical pedagogues can utilize to reduce the level of
violence in our society. It is my hope that this study will inspire its
readers to choose one of them and get to work building peace.
        Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman, in his book On Killing: The
psychological costs of learning to kill in war and society, speaks of "rifts
in our society [which] combine with violence in the media and in interactive
video games to indiscriminately condition our nation's children to kill." He
argues that society must come to grips with these issues in order to get
past them.  "The subject of killing [and violence] makes most people
uneasy...the root of our failure to deal with violence lies in our refusal
to face up to it. We deny our fascination with the 'dark beauty of
violence', and we condemn aggression and repress it rather than look at it
squarely and try to understand and control it." (Grossman). This paper will
attempt to understand violence, so as to enable readers to control it.
        The level of violence in the U.S. has been increasing steadily in
the post WW II era.  The aggravated assault rate, that is assault with a
deadly weapon or intent to kill, has been going up dramatically since 1975,
but the murder rate has stayed roughly level. This is because better and
faster emergency medical care results in fewer deaths from the assaults that
would have been fatal in the past, and an increase in the prison population
has put many potential violent offenders behind bars. (Grossman) Grossman
writes, "America's huge imprisonment rate and desperate application of
medical progress are technical tourniquets to stop us from bleeding to death
in an orgy of violence. But they do so by dealing with the symptoms of the
problem rather than the root cause."
        Not only have aggravated assault rates increased sharply in the past
few decades, but domestic abuse, child on child abuse, and school discipline
problems have as well. This is well documented in multiple statistical
sources such as Violence and Discipline in U.S. Public Schools: 1996 - 1997
by the U.S. Department of Education, as well as being anecdotally observable
in conversations with teachers, grandparents, and parents who have observed
children for a long time.
        An important point to make is that violence is not gender neutral.
It is predominantly males who commit it, whether multiple homicides or
simple assault. (U.S. Department of Education) Focusing on violence in the
schools, it is not a case of kids killing kids. It is a case of boys killing
boys and boys killing girls. All the shooters in the recent school shootings
were male. When girls have the type of problems that lead boys to extreme
violence they tend to commit suicide rather than shoot their peers, and they
tend to use less violent means than guns. Of course, some girls can be and
are extremely violent, but it is the statistical aberration rather than the
norm.
        Another important point to make is that it is very much an American
problem. Once, when I was an exchange student in Germany, a homeless man
followed me for several blocks aggressively begging. I was scared of him
attacking me. He saw my fear and told me, "I am a European." Which for him
meant, "You don't have to fear me, I am not a violent American." Until the
shooting in Canada a few days after Littleton, multiple-homicides at schools
by students against students were unheard of in other countries.
Unfortunately, this problem is exporting itself around the world along with
the products and byproducts of the U.S. entertainment industry, but because
most countries have much stricter gun control laws than the U.S., the gun
violence characteristic of the U.S. has not followed. However, studies show
that increases in a society's violence levels have a direct causal
relationship to the introduction of television to that society.
        During my one of my clinical visits this semester, I witnessed a
very common event. While waiting in line after lunch to go back upstairs to
the classroom, Dawada took his jacket off quickly and the metal tips of the
ties almost hit Raul in the face. A minor scuffle quickly broke out, which
brought Mrs. Robinson's attention. She told Raul to get in the back of the
line, and left Dawada where he was. Raul muttered to himself, "That's
fucking bullshit." Going up the stairs, Raul threatened Dawada with a
pointed finger, "I'll get you at home!" This is made more interesting by the
fact that Dawada has only been in the country for a few months, and Raul
knows that he probably didn't understand the words of the threat.
        Similarly, according to Chris Rohrer at the University of St. Thomas
child development center, very young children who have not yet mastered
speech, who have never known hunger or material need in their lives, and
whose parents have also surely never known it, and whose grandparents have
probably never known it either, show signs of "normal aggressiveness" at
wanting to be first in line, first to get snacks, and for possession of
toys. They will not receive any more cookies and milk than the other
children by being first, yet they still jostle in line. Dawada and Raul
entered the classroom at roughly the same time and the lesson did not start
until all the students were seated. Why did Raul care about being last in
line? Why do toddlers who have never been hungry show "normal
aggressiveness" to be the first to get a banana? The answer can be found in
the tenets of evolutionary psychology.
        Robert Wright, in  The Moral Animal, Why we are the way we are: The
new science of Evolutionary Psychology, establishes the psychological traits
of the average psychological healthy human being. These include: strong
competitive urges regarding basic needs such as food and sex, a strong
desire for social acceptance, mutual altruism, empathy, and most importantly
for this study, an innate resistance to taking violent action against and
killing another human being. The theory of evolutionary psychology is that,
just as the physical aspects of the human body have evolved to create a
being with maximum potential to pass on its genetic information to its
progeny, so too have the psychological traits of humans evolved. As male and
female bodies are different in some important aspects, so too are their
psyches. For example, the nerve that connects the left brain to the right
brain is ten times bigger in women than in men, and anyone who has not
personally observed fundamental differences between men's and women's
personalities, such as those depicted in Dr. John Gray's Men are from Mars,
Women are from Venus, has, in my opinion, not been observant enough. Human
beings do not have to consciously recognize the evolutionary psychological
urges for them to be in existence. Indeed, there is evidence that evolution
has made us blind to some of the underlying reasons for them, so as to have
a stronger power.
        Human beings are physically and psychologically evolved to have
maximum effectiveness of passing their genetic information on to future
generations in the ancestral environment, which through archaeological and
anthropological evidence is thought to be a small tribe of hunter-gatherers.
Of course the environments varied greatly, but one constant was the
necessity of social acceptance for individual and genetic survival. To not
be accepted by the group would drastically reduce an individual's chances of
personal survival, and more importantly, that person's ability to reproduce
and care for offspring to ensure future reproduction. Human beings are
social animals. The main purpose of this socialableness is to enable
individuals to acquire the basic necessities of life-food, shelter from the
elements, and a mate to reproduce the species.
        If a species is not successful in obtaining these needs, then it
will not thrive. Aggression is an important evolutionary tool to ensure the
acquisition of the basic necessities of life. These responses are influenced
by neural chemical processes. If I take your food, you will gradually get
madder and madder till you blow. Of course, through will power and
intellect, humans are able to control these aggressive urges. If you know
that you have an excess of food, you might not mind so much my taking a
little of it, but generally, there is only so much provocation that a being
can take before becoming aggressive.
        In most animals, including human beings, sex is perhaps the largest
cause of intraspecies aggression. Generally, females are not as aggressive
as males because it is easy to find a male willing to impregnate them. A
male's time is more available; he can impregnate many females in a short
time period. A female can only be impregnated by one, or, in some species
which have multiple births and where young in the same womb may have
different biological fathers, at most a few males. Thus fertile females are
a precious commodity in the economy of males trying to pass on their genetic
information, and it is worthwhile, in evolutionary terms, for males to spend
tremendous amounts of energy in order to mate. In species with high male
parental investment, like humans and many bird species, where in the
ancestral environment an offspring with both a mother and a father devoted
to its nurturing would have a better chance of survival, the competition
among the males for a harem is not as fierce, as it is more a mutual
selection process.
        Still, human males tend to be more aggressive in obtaining a mate,
while females' competition for the devotion of the most desirable males
tends towards emphasizing their attributes that signal they are fertile,
such as using makeup and jewelry. These traits can be seen in Scholinsky's
experiences in The Last Time I wore a Dress, which illustrates boys' sexual
aggressiveness, society's acceptance of her rape by Luke as normal, and her
treatment plan of being encouraged to be more feminine. Sexual jealousy is
one of the leading causes of domestic violence. Knox Silverstreet's
infatuation with Chris in "Dead Poet's Society" is typical of adolescent
love, as are the irrational actions he felt impelled to take wooing her.
John Keating in DPS summed this idea up best when he said, "We don't read
and write poetry because it is cute. We read poetry because we are members
of the human race, [and] the purpose of poetry is to woo women." Men's
sexual aggressiveness can also be seen in the popularity of many sports,
where one group of men try to force some type of ball (phallic symbol) into
a goal (vaginal symbol), and another group of men try to prevent it. Indeed,
the jubilation of the players and spectators upon a score is similar to
ecstasy of ejaculation, and most sport terms can have a sexual meaning in
American vernacular, "first base, homeplate." "Sport is a chance to have
other human beings push you to excel," said John Keating in DPS. It can also
be a healthy outlet for raging hormones.
        In order to succeed at reproducing, a person must be at least
minimally accepted by his or her social group. Thus, a strong desire for
social acceptance is perhaps just as powerful an evolutionary urge as hunger
or sex drive. In the ancestral environment, with an average ratio of one
male to one female for mating, a person's selection of a mate depended on
his or her social status, which was a complex mix of ability at worthwhile
skills, hereditary positions, and other factors, and was indicated by
multiple visual, verbal and non-verbal ways, such as who got to eat first,
how people addressed each other, and how to look at another person. Social
status was constantly in flux, and the struggle to obtain it began as soon
as individuals left the totally egotistical phase of infancy. The desire to
obtain as high a social status as possible, in order to better one's
prospects for a potential mate, is the answer to the question of why Raul
cared about being last in line, and why toddlers want to be first. This is
true even though the children are not aware of why they desire it.
        Mutual altruism and empathy are part of the human psychological make
up. Mutual altruism is expressed in some form in most of the major belief
systems developed around the world: "Do unto others as you would that they
do unto yourself;" "One good turn deserves another"; the golden rule; I'll
scratch your back if you scratch mine; and Anne Frank's belief despite her
experience with the Germans that most people are good. In the ancestral
environment, and even today, people working together could achieve much
better results at enabling survival than one person working alone. In order
not to get cheated by helping a person who never helps back, people evolved
to be very adept at figuring emotional debt. People can solve complex
logical problems much better if they are put in terms of emotional and
monetary debt among a group of people. (Wright) Empathy, the ability to
recognize another person's suffering, is, according to Wright, a type of
investment advisor on the future worth of helping another person. If I have
just caught two rabbits, and there is a person who has not eaten for a day,
and another person who has not eaten for two weeks because of an injury, the
latter person will probably be more grateful to me for giving him a rabbit.
        Despite the cynicism of Wright's logic for the development of
empathy in humans, it plays a tremendously important role in the
psychological trait most important to this study: the innate resistance to
taking violent action against and killing another human being. Rattlesnakes
and piranhas will bite almost anything that moves, but when they fight each
other, rattlesnakes wrestle and piranhas hit each other with their tales.
Two males fighting over mating rights rarely kill each other. Many primitive
tribes, who are adept at using weapons to kill food animals, deliberately
use less effective weapons, for example shaftless arrows or a coup counting
stick, when fighting other men. "The fight or flight dichotomy is the
appropriate set of choices for any creature faced with danger other than
that which comes from its own species. When we examine the responses of
creatures confronted with aggression from their own species, the set of
options expands to include posturing and submission. ... Posturing actions,
while intimidating, are almost always harmless. ... These actions are
designed to convince an opponent, through both sight and sound, that the
posturer is a dangerous and frightening adversary. ... When a man is
frightened, he literally stops thinking with his forebrain (that is, with
the mind of a human being) and begins to think with the midbrain (that is,
the portion of the brain that is essentially indistinguishable from that of
an animal), and in the mind of an animal it is the one who makes the loudest
noise or puffs himself up the largest who will win." (Grossman)
        If posturing fails, then the choice is to fight, flee, or submit.
When a fight is utilized it is almost never to the death, for at some point
one fighter will usually submit. "Submission is a surprisingly common
response, usually taking the form of fawning and exposing some vulnerable
portion of the anatomy to the victor, in the instinctive knowledge that the
opponent will not kill or further harm one of its own kind once it has
surrendered." (Grossman) It is better than flight because the victor knows
that the opponent is no longer a threat, and thus the loser can safely
remain in, or at least at the fringes of, the group.
        Posturing can seen in the plumed helmets of the Greeks, Romans and
various African, Asian and Native American tribes, Napoleonic uniforms, and
police officer caps, which make the wearer seem larger, and in the use of
noise. "Soldiers have always instinctively sought to daunt the enemy through
nonviolent means prior to physical conflict, while encouraging one another
and impressing themselves with their own ferocity." (Grossman) Examples of
this can be seen in various tribes' war cries, the Rebel Yell, Scottish
bagpipes, Muhajdein war cries, lines of Soviet soldiers running into German
machine guns yelling, "For Stalin, for the Motherland!" and in U.S. troops
in Korea. The use of size and noise for posturing is also evident in the
actions of children, standing on their tiptoes, puffing out their chests and
yelling at each other.
        Human societies have understood these traits for ages and have
created moral systems based on them. Most of these codes encourage
monogamous sex within marriage, preach the golden rule, and discourage the
killing of fellow human beings. Given all of this, how can the fact that
humans do take violent action against and kill each other be accounted for?
Grossman's "fascination with the dark beauty of violence" is the answer. The
fact that most people are not willing to use violence and lethal force gives
tremendous power to those who are willing to use it. I will give you my
chicken if you refrain from hitting me, and I might even let you rape my
children under the threat of death to them and myself. Why are people, men
in particular, fascinated with weapons, the tools for increasing their
violence potential? It is because we recognize their power to make people
bend to our will.
        However, because we live in a communal group, or at least our
ancestors did, we must find a balance between the effectiveness of
aggression in obtaining our goals and group harmony. I may steal or bully my
way into having six rabbits to eat and sex with everyone else's mates, but
creating a lot of bad feelings towards myself is not good in the long run,
because if I anger too many people, they will gang up against me. Also,
people with empathy have a conscience. When you personally commit violence,
you most likely will feel the guilt, because you are there to see the
effects of your actions. For example, as a child I hit Kevin LaPour in the
back for getting our keys out of our mailbox (a perceived violation of my
family's territory). After seeing him go home crying, I felt guilty and had
less of an inclination to do it again. When I punish my child using a
non-violent method of restricting her movement by putting my legs over her
body, I feel a little guilty. I can justify it to myself because I know that
I am not physically hurting her and I believe that the lessons of
self-control I am trying to instill in her are worthwhile. But there is
truth in the parent saying, "This is going to hurt me more than it is going
to hurt you," before punishing a child.
        Being able to justify one's violent actions against another human
being is very important for most people. There are many ways of creating
emotional, intellectual, and physical distance between the aggressor/killer
and the victim. Regarding the victim as something less than human is one of
the most common ones. Most primitive tribes called themselves by a name that
means "human being" or "man", thus classifying all other people not of the
tribe as another form of animal. This practice continues today with people
putting other people into categories such as barbarians, Huns, Untermensch,
Krauts, Japs, Gooks, fags, Commies, and other dehumanizing names so as to
make it easier to justify abusing and killing them. Depicting the enemy or
victim as having lower morals than the aggressor also creates this distance.
Weapons provide the ability to project lethal force over longer physical
distance. Although most adult humans have the physical capability to kill
another human with their body, for example by a crushing blow to the wind
pipe or gouging a digit through the eye to the brain, actually doing it is
so pyschologically difficult that most people cannot. (Grossman) The further
weapons put a killer from the victim, the easier it is for them to kill.
Riflemen still have a difficult task, for artillery and bomber crews who
cannot see the victims, it is relatively easy. Crews also have the masking
factor of being in a group, which gives them both anonymity for their
actions and accountability to that group.
        Grossman has identified what happens psychologically when a person
kills, and these stages can also be applied to non-lethal violence. "These
responses can even occur when aggression intrudes into our day-to-day
peacetime lives. They are far more intense when one kills in close combat,
but just a fistfight can bring them up." (Grossman) First, there is concern
about being able to kill, with a possible fixation with the ability to kill.
Then there is a killing circumstance, which might result in an inability to
kill and a fixation with the inability to kill. Usually right after a kill
there is exhilaration from the kill, with a potential fixation with this
exhilaration. Shortly thereafter there is almost always remorse and nausea
from the kill, which can lead to a fixation with remorse and guilt. Then
there is a rationalization and acceptance process. If the rationalization
fails, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is often the result.
        The clincher for why some people do aggress and kill is that some
people lack empathy. "When we combine this genetic predisposition [for
aggression] with environmental development we get a killer. But there is
another factor: the presence or absence of empathy for others. Again, there
may be biological and environmental causes for this empathetic process, but,
whatever its origin, there is undoubtedly a division in humanity between
those who can feel and understand the pain and suffering of others, and
those who cannot. The presence of aggression, combined with the absence of
empathy, results in sociopathy. ... The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders (DSM-IIR) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA)
indicates that the incidence of 'anti-social personality disorder' (that is,
sociopathy) among the general population of American males is approximately
3 percent." (Grossman) This lack of empathy can be a temporary condition or
longer lasting. Erich From states that "there is good clinical evidence for
the assumption that destructive aggression occurs, at least to a large
degree, in conjunction with a momentary or chronic emotional withdrawal."
(Grosmann)
    Once the military became fully aware of  "the existence of a powerful,
innate human resistance towards killing one's own species," (Grossman) they
took steps to overcome it. "There are compelling data that indicate that
this singular lack of enthusiasm for killing one's fellow man has existed
throughout military history." (Grossman) Texts on Roman army training exhort
centurions to make soldiers stab with their swords, which is usually much
more lethal, instead of slashing. Despite hours of bayonet drill, soldiers
usually turn the rifle around and use it in a clubbing action. Several
thousand of the muskets collected on the field after Gettysburg had been
loaded multiple times and not fired. In WW II, S.L.A. Marshall investigated
the firing rates of infantrymen and found that only 15 to 20 percent were
firing. Research indicates that this rate seems to be what it was in WW I
and previous wars. New training methods increased the firing rate to 55
percent in Korea, and 90 to 95 percent in Vietnam. "The triad of methods
used to achieve this remarkable increase in killing are desensitization,
conditioning, and denial defense mechanisms."  (Grossman)
Desensitization, or thinking the unthinkable, uses language to desensitize
soldiers to the suffering of enemy and instill an aggressive mindset. It is
accomplished by using dehumanizing names for the enemy, as mentioned above,
and exercises like chanting, "Kill, kill, kill," every time the left foot
hits the ground on a five mile run. However, "desensitization by itself is
probably not sufficient to overcome the average individual's
deep-seated-resistance to killing,"  (Grossman) so conditioning, or doing
the unthinkable is also necessary. Pavlovian classical conditioning,
Skinnerian operant conditioning, social learning, and group dynamics are
used in modern training to enable killing. The training is made as realistic
as possible. Targets are not round bull's eyes but man shaped ones that pop
up on the range at random intervals. Soldiers are rewarded for quickly and
accurately engaging the targets with medals and three-day passes, and given
more practice if they fail.
        Through social learning, the drill sergeant role models aggressive
violence as an admirable quality. Our first learning is from watching our
parents and others around us and imitating them. It requires a desirable
role model who is somehow similar to the learner, who has social power and
who has status that the learners envy. Through the evident advantages that
the role model possesses the learners receive vicarious reinforcement of the
desired behavior. It is why my two-year-old daughter likes to brush her
teeth when she sees me doing it, and it is why humans enjoy stories and
literature, which is something that will be addressed later.
        Making the training as realistic as possible is important in
ensuring that the training will come through in an emergency. "You fight
like you train," was a constant maxim in my ROTC courses. In a crisis
situation, your brain automatically reverts to what it knows. In killing
enabling training, this includes shooting at ketchup filled mannequins, man
shaped targets, and training in full battle dress. This is also true of
non-violent training, for example fire drills, lifeguard and first aid
training, and even choir and play practice. My lifeguard training for active
water rescues was more stressful than the few actual rescues that I made.
Similarly, the CPR training mannequins, and the bloody makeup and bruises on
an "injured person" for my Emergency Medical Technician certification test
helped instill a confidence in me to take the correct action in a real life
emergency. My EMT training also had desensitization to injured or dead
bodies, through a slide show detailing minor abrasions to decapitations and
charred babies. There was an educational value of recognizing the difference
between abrasions and lacerations, but more importantly it desensitized us
to human carnage, which is a necessary trait for an emergency medical
technician.
    The military has successfully developed a method to enable killing. "If we
have reservation about the military's use of these mechanisms to ensure the
survival and success of our soldiers in combat, then how much more so should
we be concerned about the indiscriminate application of the same processes
on our nation's children? ... Violence in television and movies ... is
classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and social learning, all
focused toward the violence enabling of an entire society." (Grossman) In
the military the drill sergeant teaches soldiers to be aggressively violent
within the constrains of obeying orders, but "the aggression taught by
Hollywood's new role model is unrestrained by any obedience to law."
(Grossman)
        Why would the entertainment industry want to inflict such horror on
society? Why, during on of my clinical visits, did Sameh ask me, "Did you
see "Rush Hour"?  There was a guy and he kicked Chris Rock in the head and
it was so cool." The question of why people enjoy stories, literature, and
movies must be answered first. Through social learning, humans observe and
imitate role models that they have personal contact with. However, humans
are also capable of learning just by hearing about something that happened
to another person. If I hear about a man who was mauled by a bear after
going into a cave, I will be a little more careful around strange caves. We
can vicariously experience various feelings by just listening to or seeing a
story. Bio-chemical processes happen to our bodies, even though we are
seated safely around the campfire, or in the movie theater. We get scared by
ghost stories, men get erections just hearing about sex, and people cry over
tragedies that happen to fictitious characters. I believe this to be one of
the main causes of all literature, along with creation myths and
explanations of the mysteries of the natural world.
    Going back to the 'dark beauty of violence', through stories about violence
we can vicariously experience the power of violence, and get the
exhilaration phase, but we do not have to go through the remorse, because we
did not personally commit it. Violence is a common theme in literature, from
the Bible to Shakespeare to Hemmingway. Indeed a necessity of a plot is a
conflict, an individual against either another individual or group of
individuals, society, nature or self. If there is no conflict in a story,
there is no plot, and most people find that story boring, as there is
nothing to learn from it.  The message or moral of many stories has been,
"Be good and fight evil." Most people identify with that, because that is
socially acceptable and most conducive to maximizing reproductive
possibilities in the ancestral environment.
        Hollywood heroes started out with that "good" message. The man in
the white hat, represented for example by many of John Wayne's characters,
killed only when forced to by the bad guys and within the authority of law.
Then came the cop who works outside of the law because bad guys need to be
killed, for example Dirty Harry. Then we got bad guys who kill because
somebody wronged them in the past or their victims are doing immoral acts
(drinking and having sex), as in "Carrie", "Halloween", and "Friday the
Thirteenth." Now we have killers who kill for no reason other than it is fun
and entertaining to them, as in "Scream" and "Natural Born Killers". "Notice
the sequence in this downward spiral of vicarious role models. We began with
those who kill within the constraints of the law. Somewhere along the line
we began to accept role models who 'had' to go outside the law to kill
criminals who we know 'deserved' to die, then vicarious role models who
killed in retribution for adolescent social slights, and then role models
who kill completely without provocation or purpose. ... At every step of the
way we have been vicariously reinforced by the fulfillment of our darkest
fantasies. This new breed of role models also has social power; the power to
do whatever they want to in a society depicted as evil and deserving of
punishment. These role models transcend the rules of society, which results
in great 'status' to be envied by a portion of society that has come to
adore this new breed of celebrity. And of course we have observed a
similarity to the learner in the role model's rage. A rage felt by most
human beings towards the slights and perceived crimes inflicted upon them by
their society, but which is particularly intense in adolescence." (Grossman)
        In addition to these horrible role models, very often with violence
in the media there is no empathy with the pain of the victim. The killer
goes bang bang and then moves on. Of course there can be anti-war movies
which work because they focus on the effects and let the viewers empathize
with the victims. For example, in "The Last Exit to Brooklyn" a group of
young punks brutally beats a man who has tried to sexually molest a
neighborhood boy. The focus on the beaten man after the punks leave him
hanging on a fence was very powerful to me. I remember his suffering. In
most shoot-'em-up video games the player is kept in a constant exhilaration
stage with no possibility of empathy for the victims. Opponents who are shot
fall down and disappear from the screen with the player quickly moving on to
more opponents. Sometimes there are distancing factors-the player is usually
a "good guy"  and the targets are either aliens, monsters, or criminals, at
times "innocent" people, like women with baby carriages, police officers, or
hostages, appear on the screen and the player is penalized for shooting
them, but for the most part, these are very killing enabling games.
        The special qualities of movies and video games restrict a viewer's
ability to think for him- or herself about the messages being received. As
Henry Giroux writes in Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy
of Learning, "the enshrinement of the image, the spectacle, finds some of
its manifestations in the star system, the identification of the aesthetic
with 'entertainment', and the glorification of sensational and violent
themes. ... Rapid camera work and sharp editing create the immediate effect
of appealing to the emotions while, at the same time, short-circuiting
critical reflection. ... the image subsumes reality. ... The critical eye
that reading ideally demands puts a check on the manipulation of the
message." But the critical eye is never given a chance in these mediums.
Specifically, these media enable violence and killing through the same
techniques that the military uses. The prevalence of violence in the media
and entertainment is classical conditioning. Point and shoot video games are
operant conditioning without the stimulus discriminators to ensure control
of the violence. Through observation and imitation of extremely violent
vicarious role models in movies, viewers are using social learning to an
extremely anti-social effect.
        Why has society let this happen? Of course the First Amendment has
something to do with it, but more importantly, sex and violence sell. I have
personally spent thousands of dollars playing video games. Many people buy
expensive computer systems just for the ability to play CD-ROM games on
them. The home entertainment industry generates huge profits from these
games. Giroux writes, "as an ideological expression of the dominant society,
the dominant culture is deeply tied to the ethos of consumerism and
positivism. ... Progress in the twentieth century was stripped of its
concern with improving the human condition and became dedicated to material
and technical growth. ... Greed has replaced compassion, and the drive for
profit relegates all social concerns to a form of individual and social
amnesia. ... [Thus] the development of technology and science, constructed
according to the laws of capitalist rationality, has ushered in forms of
domination and control that appear to thwart rather than extend the
possibilities of human emancipation." (Giroux)
        If these movie and video games are so horrible, why do people enjoy watching
and playing them, and why isn't everyone killing each other? The attraction
of vicariously experiencing violence through a story or movie has already
been discussed. Video games are also very attractive. They are purposely
designed to be addictive. The player is tricked into thinking that his or
her life is in danger, so they get an adrenaline rush which causes dopamine
to be released in the brain, and an addictive habit is formed. Generally,
after playing a game long enough, a player becomes so adept at it that he or
she no longer feels threatened by it, so the adrenaline stops, and the game
becomes boring rather than exciting. Then they move on to another game. I
have seen the development of video games from pinball to asteroids to today.
Today's virtual reality graphics are a quantum leap from the triangle
asteroid ship. The sophistication of the software has greatly increased the
realism of the experience, and thus the adrenaline rush. Players experience
the exhilaration stage of violence without the remorse stage, because the
player knows that the victims are not real. They do not cause everyone to
kill because most people realize this, and most people still have empathy.
For the psychopaths who lack it, these games are killing trainers. An
article in the May 10, 1999, edition of Time indicates that this is exactly
what Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold did. They made a video of themselves
killing classmates, and they modified the game "Doom" to have two shooters
with unlimited ammunition and opponents who could not shoot back. Even for
non-pyschopaths, I believe that these media put many of us on a very short
fuse.
        I believe that thoroughly understanding these violence-enabling
factors is a prerequisite for effectively collaboratively resisting them.
Giroux writes, "radical pedagogy has to provide the theoretical basis for
teachers and others to view and experience the nature of teacher work in a
critical and potentially transformative way." Unfortunately, a potentially
violent student body which has been subjected to the violence enabling
factors described above is most likely going to be part of any teacher's
work in the U.S. Teachers who understand the foundations of violence will be
better able to transform those impulses into more beneficial activities.
        The media is of course not the only reason for the increase in
violence in U.S. society. Gang affiliation, loosening of family and
religious ties, racism, and class differences exacberated by the ever
widening gap between rich and poor, provide emotional distance between
aggressors and killers and their victims. Peter McClaren, in Life in
Schools, writes that violence is often a reaction to economic and cultural
dislocation and oppressive schooling. An oppressive curriculum can foster
student violence, as Giroux notes, "educators locked into [the perspective
of positive knowledge] responded to student disinterest, violence, and
resistance by shifting their concerns from actually teaching positive
knowledge to maintaining order and control. ... Boredom and/or disruption
appear to be its primary products." Child to child abuse and peer violence
another is cause of the increased violence. According to Barry K. Weinhold,
Ph. D., in "Why Kindness is and effective weapon to stop violence", 80
percent of children enter school feeling good about themselves, but by 5th
grade only 20 percent do, and by 12th grade only 5 percent do. Students
receive an average of 30 put downs per day. Eighty percent of a student's
behavior is directed toward recognition and approval. That is how they build
and maintain a positive self-image. These put downs, teasing and bullying
are tools students use to gain such recognition. The teasers feel empowered
by essentially saying to their victim, "You are different and I'm not so I
have more social status than you do." People who are teased too much can
potentially explode in violence.
        The availability of weapons, especially guns, added to this noxious mix, is
the truly lethal ingredient. But gangs, drugs, poverty, racism, and gun
availability have always been present in U.S. society. Why do today's kids
bring guns to school and use them when their parents didn't? Grossman
answers succinctly, "the vital, new, different ingredient in killing in
modern combat and in killing in modern American society, is the systematic
process of defeating the normal individual's age-old, psychological
inhibition against violent, harmful activity toward one's own species."
        The struggle against this monstrous evil will require all of society
working together. Its vileness is becoming so apparent that it has already
generated a large opposition. Giroux writes, "in both objective and
subjective terms, the technology of the mass culture industry creates
pockets of resistance fueled by its own contradictions." Giroux quotes
Sharon Welch, who writes that "hope with plan and with connection to the ...
possible is still the most powerful and best thing there is." He maintains
that a critical pedagogy can create a better world. "The values and social
processes which provide the theoretical underpinning for social education
include developing in students a respect for moral commitment, group
solidarity and social responsibility. In addition, a nonauthoritarian
individualism should be fostered, one that maintains a balance with group
cooperation and social awareness." His idea of schools collaboratively
working with society to transform it is exactly what is needed,
"counterpublic spheres cannot be created solely within teacher training
institutions or school classrooms, but must eventually merge with other
communities of resistance." This is beginning to happen. Programs and
strategies from all over the educational philosophy map are coming together
to work against violence, and they are beginning to have an effect.
        Lisa Delpit, in Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the
Classroom, writes, "if we plan to survive as a species on this planet we
must certainly create multicultural curricula that educate our children to
the differing perspectives of our diverse population. In part, the problems
we see exhibited in school by African-American children and children of
other oppressed minorities can be traced to this lack of a curriculum in
which they can find represented the intellectual achievements of people who
look like themselves. Were that not the case, these children would not talk
about doing well in school as 'acting white'. Our children of color need to
see the brilliance of their legacy, too." There are a plethora of violence
prevention strategies, some developed through non-profit agencies, and
others developed for profit, available to schools to proactively combat
violence in the schools. According to the U.S. Department of Education, 78
percent of schools already have a formal violence prevention program in
place. Many of them promote active building character and values in schools.
Others, such as the Kindness Campaign in Colorado with KKTV and many other
local and national sponsors, promote focusing on kindness. Attorney General
Janet Reno and MTV have developed a CD-ROM and resource guide to stem teen
violence. Teachers on the Partnerships Against Violence listserve have
argued that bullying should be regarded as deviant behavior, not as "normal"
cruelty by children. A week after Columbine, a Twin Cities elementary class
decided to return their violent video games to the manufacturers and are now
trying to start and state and nationwide campaign to get other kids to do
the same.
        Even though "the electronic media are in the hands of the corporate
trust, and it would take a redistribution of power and wealth to place them
at the public's disposal," (Giroux) the public is not powerless. The demand
for goods is in our own hands, and through changing our desires we can
change the market, and thus what the corporate trust provides. Guides such
as The Family Guide to movies on video: The Moral and Entertainment Values
of 5,000 Movies on TV and Videocassette, are powerful tools for concerned
parents. In addition, as Grossman writes, "perhaps the time has come for
society to consider the price being paid for the implications of technology
on some First Amendment rights. There is no more reason to constrain the
print media than there is to control bowie knives, tomahawks, or flintlock
rifles, but there might be a justification for controlling the technology
that goes beyond print media and flintlocks. The more advanced the
technology, the greater the need for control. In the realm of weapons
technology that means controlling explosives, artillery, and machine guns,
and it may mean that the time has come to consider controlling assault
rifles or pistols. In the realm of media technology, that may mean that the
time has come to consider controlling TV, movies, and video games."
        We already do control these in regards to sex and drug content. You
do not see Bugs Bunny having sexual intercourse with Elmer Fudd, and Porky
Pig never shoots up some heroin or drinks beer. However, Daffy Ducks gets
his feathers blown off and his bill turned 180 degrees by a point blank
blast of a double-barreled shot gun, and poor Willy E. Coyote and Tom the
cat have died a hundred thousand deaths inflicted by every conceivable
weapon. If the media does not influence our society, then why have we banned
Joe Camel and the Marlborough Man from showing their ugly faces in public?
Why do advertisers spend billions of dollars in order to show us images of
their products for thirty seconds? Why can't you say those seven words on TV
and why don't soap operas show detailed shots of totally naked people
engaged in sexual activities instead of having them under the covers? The
answer is, of course, that we do believe that the media has a great
potential to influence society, especially our youth, and that we are trying
to protect them from things that we do not want them to be exposed to. I
argue that violence is more of a danger to our society than sex or drugs,
and that we should apply the same standards towards it as we do towards sex
and drugs.
        One argument against such censorship is, who will determine what
depiction of violence is acceptable? How could "Saving Private Ryan", or
"Shindler's List", or African-American history, or the American Revolution
be discussed realistically without depicting violence? Of course, they
can't, but the question should be, "What message is given with the
violence?" "Saving Private Ryan" is a tremendously graphic, violent movie,
with a similar number of violently inflicted deaths as "The Matrix" or "True
Lies". Yet its moral, which is similar to the main theme of most great
literature, from Cain and Abel, to MacBeth, to A Farewell to Arms, which is
that violence is a bad influence on humanity which should be used sparingly,
even if some heroes are occasionally compelled by the bad guys to use it in
furtherance of the greater good, is fundamentally different from the message
of the new violence idols, which is that violence is an acceptable, fun and
effective method of dealing with all problems posed by other human beings.
        It is possible for humans to discontinue doing something after
having recognized that its cost-benefit ratio is on the extreme negative
side. After WW I, gas was not widely used. The nuclear test ban treaty and
other arms reduction talks have greatly lessened the risk of mutually
assured destruction. Grossman writes, "as we have de-escalated instruments
of mass destruction, so too can we de-escalate instruments of mass
desensitization. ... In recent years we have exercised the choice to move
ourselves from the brink of nuclear destruction. In the same way, our
society can move away from the technology that enables killing. Education
and understanding are the first step." I believe that Giroux would agree. He
writes, "human agents possess the capacity to remake the world both through
collective struggle in and on the material world and through the exercise of
their social imagination." Dolphin safe tuna is on the market because
elementary school children created a demand for it, thus truly affecting the
fishing practices of many tuna-fishers. Similarly, non-violence enabling
media can be encouraged to develop by creating more of a demand for it and
by obtrusively denouncing violence enabling media.
        The differences in our society that are now fanning the flames of
hatred and violence can be harnessed to foster peace. Delpit writes, "rather
than think of these diverse students as problems, we can view them instead
as resources who can help all of us learn what it feels like to move between
cultures and language varieties, and thus perhaps better learn how to become
citizens of the global community." Teachers who understand the violence
enabling factors can teach students to resist them. Giroux writes,
"transformative intellectuals are concerned with empowering students so they
can read the world critically and change it when necessary," including their
own or their peers' violent actions. Giroux's "primary concern is to address
the educational issue of what it means to teach students to think
critically, to learn how to affirm their own experiences, and to understand
the need to struggle individually and collectively for a more just society.
... The most important referent for such a position is 'liberating
memory'-the recognition of those instances of public and private suffering
whose causes and manifestations require understanding and compassion. ...
Then we can begin to understand the reality of human existence and the need
for all members of a democratic society to transform existing social
conditions so as to eliminate such suffering in the present." Critical
thinking students can better interpret the messages of mass media, and thus
have a better chance of resisting the violence enabling influences.
        Giroux believes that "schools need prospective teachers who are both
theoreticians and practitioners, who can combine theory, imagination, and
techniques." As for myself, I plan to use the knowledge presented here to
promote friendship, kindness, peace and non-violence to the fullest extent
possible and struggle against violence and evil in my classroom and in my
life. It is my hope that this study will inspire its readers to take up this
good and noble cause as well.
 

Bibliography

Delpit, Lisa, Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom
        The New Press, 1995. ISBN 1-56584-179-4.
Dave Grossman, David, Lt. Col.,  On Killing: The Psychological cost of
        learning to kill in war and society Little, Brown and Co. 1995, ISBN
        0-316-33000-0.
Giroux, Henry A., Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of
        Learning, Bergin & Garvey, 1988. ISBN 0-89789-156-2.
Gray, John, Ph.D., Men are from Mars Women are from Venus,
        HarperCollins Publisher, 1992. ISBN 0-06-016848-X.
Herx, Henry and Zaza, Tony, editors, The Family Guide to movies on video:
        The Moral and Entertainment Values of 5,000 Movies on TV and Videocassette
        Crossroad, 1988. ISBN 0-8245-0817-3.
McLaren, Peter, Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the
        Foundations of Education,  class handout.
Pooley, Eric, "Portrait of a Deadly Bond", Time, May 10, 1999.

Scholinski, Daphne, The Last Time I Wore a Dress, class handout.

U.S. Department of Education, Violence and Discipline Problems in U.S.
        public school 1996 - 1997, http://nces.ed.gov/pubs98/violence/98030011.html
Weinhold, Barry K.,  Ph. D., "Why Kindness is and effective weapon to stop
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Wright, Robert, The Moral Animal, Why we are the way we are: The new science
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