Hardening the Fortress
The idea of arming teachers in schools begs the question, What, exactly, is it that is in such dire need of protection? While the answer might seem obvious—it’s the students!—what’s actually at stake is even greater.
When it comes to our schools, what demands protection are ideals, the kind upon which, life, itself—and particularly the life nurtured within young souls—thrives and grows. If not our schools, then where? Where, I dare ask, are humanity’s remaining outposts and repositories for the safeguarding of ideals, and I’m talking about “ideals” in their only sense—that is the highest, loftiest, and, therefore, most cherished hopes? If nothing else, our schools should at least serve as oases of idealism no matter the moral desert of their surrounding environs, as fortresses ramparting our aspirations in spite of the decay that churns and in spite of any fever that rages. Any place that is in the business of nurturing and educating young souls must necessarily serve as palaces (of learning), as temples (for the mind), as castles (for teaching), as cathedrals (of enlightenment), as citadels (of knowledge), and, yes, as fortresses of hope for the best of what humanity aspires to be.
The aspirational projection of what humanity aspires to be at its best demands protection at all costs, and, like any redoubt, so fortified and hardened…but not with guns. Not with armaments of the steel kind hysterically cast upon our teaching regiments, but rather with resources in the way of robust support and full funding. While gun advocates and proponents alike can certainly agree that schools require protection and even fortification, the introduction of guns into that very fortress is a Trojan Horse to the ideals so guarded.
Schools-as-fortresses suggest a binary concept pitting that which is inside as needing protection from that which exists outside. And while this binary of inside/outside is true, we also know that, what must be the case, the quality and character of schools are intimately linked with the status, condition, and reality of the communities lying outside their walls, for the communities that lie just beyond are also the communities from which schools draw life, and are the communities which, ultimately, schools must serve.
Therefore, the violence occurring in our schools in the form of mass shootings, gang violence, etc, is merely symptomatic of violence that is consumed insatiably within society as a whole. It’s no wonder that any answer to violence by way of inviting guns into schools would be the nation’s way of addressing violence in schools. Solving violence with yet more violence is a circle of the most brutish and barbaric sort.
Essentially, if inside the school is a reflection of outside the school, and what’s in need of protection on the inside remains only the loftiest of our human ideals, then outside requires a drastic reformation with an address of the gun, replacing the gun with ideals so projected within the fortress, itself.
