Commentary : Violence Creeps Into the Classroom

As he made his way along, Kyle, with an uncompromising round from his Uzi semi-automatic carbine, methodically killed five Viet Cong.

During morning recess, he ambushed four more who were lurking around the swings, rendering them bloody heaps in the sandbox. He hurled a hand grenade at a suspected enemy camp before joining the others on the rug for sharing. In the cafeteria, he was briefly imprisoned in jungle confinement for attacking a notorious spy in the lunch line. He masterminded a brilliant suicide raid during kickball and, before departing for home, stabbed an errant Viet Cong who had foolishly paused to drink from a fountain. All in all, it had been just another day in school.

Violence is creeping into my classroom, leaving me defenseless with no guerrilla training. It is choking out the whimsy of free play and filling the doodled corners of work sheets. The confiscated G.I. Joes and Rambos that crowd my desk drawers are now making way for Laser Tag guns. The irony is, as a dove of the ‘60s, I am now a POW of the ‘80s, with only escalation in sight.

As a teacher in the Chula Vista City Schools District, I am concerned that children are being subjected to inordinate amounts of violence through the media. According to the National Coalition on Television Violence, there are 250 episodes of war cartoons each year, equivalent to 22 days of classroom instruction. Each hour presents approximately 41 acts of violence, with an attempted murder every two minutes.

The antics of “Sesame Street” are being slammed into the military maneuvers of combat. The capriciousness of fantasy has taken a new turn, exchanging its innocence for deadliness. We shudder to read of children in Beirut enlisting to fight, and yet we clothe our own in fatigues and sanction the folly of plastic weaponry. While children in Nicaragua suffer the realities of war, ours are eagerly pretending, oblivious to the horrors we hope they never know.

More frightening is the number of young children who watch violent adult movies, especially on home video recorders. Many of my third-grade students have seen “Rambo” and “Friday the 13th,” yet have never known a Disney movie.

The repercussions of such viewing choices are evident in my classroom. During a recent art project, I was sickened as I listened to a little boy excitedly describe for me his tissue-paper collage of “blood,” and I silently cried as another showed me his collage of a gun. Where, for our children, have all the flowers gone?

A dangerous ramification of this insidious media violence is that children are learning aggressive problem resolution rather than peaceful compromise. For them, violence, real or imagined, has become a justifiable means for reconciling differences because their media heroes resolve conflict with gunshots and stabbings. Children are simply remodeling problem resolution as they have come to know it, softened only with imaginary guns and knives.

Another troubling phenomenon is the pervasive numbness toward horror, often characteristic of children who have seen countless media acts of violence. Such children react indifferently, even amusedly, to graphic scenes of cruelty. For them, the fine line of sensibility has been erased as emotion has become immune to hours of manufactured war dramas and prime time murders.

Media violence occurs in a vacuum, relieving the viewer from any responsibility for pain or grief. Brutality becomes entertainment, with no causal relationship to suffering. As they are watching, children are learning to tolerate the intolerable.

It is time that we as parents assume responsibility for the burgeoning media invasions of our homes. We have been lax in qualifying what we will allow our children to view, tolerating violence and failing to mediate it. We have permitted the cartoons to soften the edges, making it easier to ignore the subtleties. We have modeled an approval for violence as entertainment, and we have exposed our children to that which they should never have seen. The media are merely satisfying a demand for a market; we have allowed that market to thrive. A choice is there to be made, as soon as we choose to do so.

We need to help our children reclaim their innocence, to foster the innate frivolity of their youth. We can let their whimsy prevail, before reality has a chance to curtail it. We can teach them rational problem resolution and then hope that the world will allow it. We can remove war and violence from their lives, when others are not blessed with that choice.

Within the jungles of their imaginations, we can enable our children to recapture their childhoods, peacefully.

DR