By Karl Miller
In early November, a seventh grade Texan class was asked to write a "scary" story. One student read his story out to the class. The teacher awarded the student a mark of 100%.
Later that day, the school staff informed the district attorney, who took the student to court. His story had involved guns and violence, including a humourous segment, which the class had laughed at, in which he shot some of his classmates and, by accident, the teacher.
The student was sent to jail for 10 days. He was released after seven days when his defence lawyers won an admission from the district attorney that no charges could be laid.
This event was the latest, if one of the more extreme, examples of life at school in the United States.
Statistics on the US Department of Justice web site at indicate that overall youth violence in the US continues to decline sharply from a 1993-94 high. School-related homicides are not, and have never been, very high: roughly one in 1 million students each year.
Despite this, the US media and establishment figures have focused attention on events like the Colombine High School shootings in Littleton, Colorado, in late April. They use such isolated incidents to justify attacks on the rights of young people and create an atmosphere conducive to repression.
The internet has provided US young people with a form of communication that allows them to describe what is happening to them and to discuss how to defend themselves. A good example is the Slashdot web site at .
After the Colombine shootings, the establishment media claimed that "violent" computer games like Quake and Doom caused violence. An article posted on Slashdot defended computer game-playing. Several hundred e-mails were generated in response, in which young people outlined the treatment they had received at school since the Littleton massacre.
Some students were interviewed by school staff or councillors and sent home if they admitted playing, or role-playing, computer games such as Dungeons and Dragons.
Because the Colombine High killers called themselves "The trench coat gang", anyone who wore trench coats to school became a target (only 3% of US schools require their students to wear uniforms). One trench coat wearer arrived at school late because the vice-principal had asked the sheriff's department to search the person's house. Nothing incriminating was found but, based on rumours generated by the search, a police investigation of the student began.
Several other young people were "asked" to leave their trench coats at home under threat of being suspended.
One of the Colombine killers wrote in a diary that school was an unhappy place: "We want to be different. We want to be strange and we don't want jocks or other people putting us down." Many students who expressed sympathy with such commonly held sentiments to councillors or teachers were threatened with suspension or expulsion unless they agreed to undergo weekly counselling. There are at least six personal accounts on Slashdot describing similar experiences.
In the new US academic year (beginning around August), the repressive atmosphere worsened. Some schools have banned students from including derogatory comments about the school on personal web sites. In one case a student was banned from participating in certain public online discussions.
The US government is actively supporting these attacks. In a telling example, the Federal Department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has commissioned a private security organisation to develop software for schools to use to create psychological profiles of students. The software, Mosaic-2000, is being trialed in 20 schools.
Students answer a questionnaire and the program ranks each student on a 1-10 scale of increasing likelihood to commit violent acts. The school can then take "preventative action". One Ohio principal told the New York Times that Mosaic's "immediate virtue would be in producing detailed documentation of its evaluation of a troubled student so that doubting parents could no longer challenge an administrator's judgment as too subjective".
This is straight out of George Orwell's 1984. A student need not do anything wrong to justify "preventative measures". A derogatory comment from an informant or a teacher, a "wrong" answer on the questionnaire, or an unsubstantiated rumour may condemn a student to being branded a potential danger for as long as his or her file exists.
Luckily, Australia has not advanced so far along this path of student repression. However, in the NSW election last March, both the Liberal and Labor parties ran on "law and order" platforms, including measures directed specifically against the democratic rights of young people.