School Violence, Historically

This article from the Philadelphia Inquirer is a good reminder of the consistent history of violence in American schools.

An excerpt.

“Four boys assault their teacher, who later dies of her injuries. Across the country, newspapers compete to unearth the most lurid details of the episode. It seems the boys were annoyed at being detained after school.

“So they threw rocks and other debris at the screaming teacher, until she couldn't scream anymore.

“A modern-day example of inner-city youth violence? Hardly. It happened in the small town of Canton, Mass. - in 1870.

“I thought of the Canton tragedy as I watched Attorney General Eric Holder at last week's news conference about youth violence in Chicago. Standing beside Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the former schools chief in Chicago, Holder expressed outrage at the recent murder of 16-year-old Derrion Albert as he walked home from school. Holder called for a return to America's "old-time" values.

“But school violence is itself a time-honored American tradition, dating to the very dawn of the Republic. Despite our nostalgia for the good old days, America's schools have always been disorderly and violent places. By pretending otherwise, we might miss what is truly new - and truly troubling - about present-day violence….

“School violence would spike in the 1960s and early '70s, echoing the overall rise of crime in American society. Increasingly, though, it involved guns. By 1991, 26 percent of high school students reported that they had brought a weapon to school in the previous 30 days; of those, about a third said they had carried a gun.

“Contrary to public perceptions, most forms of school violence have decreased since the 1990s. So has the reported carrying of weapons, to about 18 percent of high school students. But roughly a third of those still carry guns, which remain the most common cause of youth homicide in America.”