We've come to the end of our journey together. I wanted to summarize here some thoughts I had about your progress as thinkers and writers through the semester, but I find that with the events of last week (and all the grading!) I'm out of gas. So instead I'm going to close with a few very brief thoughts about them. 

 

There's always lots of talk about gun control after these nightmare shootings, and for my part I don't see how this can do much to help. I will not be much consoled if the Federal government, for instance, forbids those with psychiatric histories from owning guns. As we now know, Friday's shooter acquired his weapons from his mother who owned them all legally. 

What we can do to successfully deal with this problem will ultimately depend on a better analysis of its causes. In this regard I want to gesture toward something that no one (with the exception perhaps of anti-sexist educator Jackson Katz, especially in his movie Tough Guise) seems to be talking much about: With few exceptions shootings of these sorts all are perpetrated by men. Why is that? And if mental illness has anything to do with it, why don't mentally ill women do this as often as men? What is our society doing to young men in particular that it breaks their minds in just this way? 

 

These are the questions that are plaguing me right now, not least because no one seems to be discussing them. They are certainly germane to many of the issues of this class, moral education especially. According to Katz anyway, we have a cultural problem in which masculinity is associated with power and violence. In Tough Guise he asks what seems the obvious follow-up question: Is it any wonder then that boys and men express their anger or sadness through violence? 

I don't claim to know whether Katz's analysis is correct. But at least it seems to be speaking to the real underlying causes of school shootings. If it is correct, it isn't too difficult to see the mission that is given to educators as a consequence. We have to break the association between being a man and being aggressive and exerting power over others. At the least, we need to find ways to identify boys in trouble and help them find their way in this cruel, hard world.