The Moral Collapse That Metal Detectors Can’t Fix

We are asking schools to act like prisons because we are raising children who behave like inmates. A fight at North Forsyth High School in Winston-Salem, North Carolina made headlines in recent days, because what would have once been a routine scuffle amongst teenage boys turned deadly. It was the last altercation of one boy, because a teenager drove a knife into his classmate, causing the wounded boy to stagger away for a few steps before collapsing. He died not long after.

A video of the incident is already circulating on social media, which clearly evidences the perspective of the boys who were on-scene. It only became real to them when their classmate slumped onto the floor and stopped moving. Now it is something that they will remember for the rest of their lives: evaluating where they were, what they said, and what they did or did not do.

Parents of schoolchildren in the city are now demanding that metal detectors be installed at the entrances of their schools. Thus, the trend continues: doors that only open from the inside, law enforcement on campus at all times, arrests for any violent infractions. All of it would have been confusing to parents and schoolchildren alike several decades ago. Now, we are in a perpetual arms race in which we try to protect children at their places of learning, at the expense of creating an increasingly prison-like environment. There’s a helplessness to it all—nobody actively wants the schools to feel incarcerating, but that appears to be the cost of safety.

The problem is that a society with too many unscrupulous people will necessitate an authoritarian state. Order must come from somewhere, and if it does not come from within, it must come from without. If the people are not moral, they cannot sustain a free society. Thus, a police state is required to offer a modicum of safety. This reality is being lived out in our schools.

We do not want to blame children, because they are the product of parents and external influences, but we must cast judgment upon the moral vacuousness that pervades so many schools. The issue is not that a child brought a knife to school, for it was once the norm to have gun clubs, and for students to keep rifles in their trucks for after-school hunting. Fights happened, but they were fistfights, not fatal ambushes. The difference now is that a student would bring a knife with the intent of stabbing his classmate. A modest acquaintance with the news cycle shows us that this is becoming a regular occurrence, with a variety of weapons.

Of course, the wicked culture exemplified by students is largely learned at home. Teachers who work in public and private schools tend to lament how little they can do when children come from ignoble environments. They cannot simply imbue a healthy understanding of respect, hierarchy, order, and zeal for knowledge on a student who idolizes gang culture, for example. That must begin at home.

The problem is made worse by the fact that public schools (and most private ones) do not attempt to enforce cultural standards (which would mean quickly expelling dangerous and troublesome students). In fact, the schools teach the very anti-values that make reckless indifference to life more likely, and encourage immersion in the popular culture of our age, which likewise leads to moral ruin.

The encouragement of transgender ideology in schools, for example, teaches children to be confused about the most fundamental elements of their anatomy, their function in relation to the opposite sex, their sense of purpose, and ultimately about the most common vocation of marriage. Further, school environments alienate children who are properly cultured and who are not plugged into trashy music and TV shows. Then the institutional rejection of religion is lived out as the rejection of Christianity, depriving students of staunch moral direction. If schools teach that the body is meaningless, sex is self-expression, identity is self-creation, and feelings are supreme, then objective moral norms dissolve and violence becomes just another form of expression.

In an environment of cultural homogeneity, the moral values of the home would be roughly paralleled in the schools, because those would simply be the values of the culture. This enculturation should function as a kind of herd immunity against the occasional individual who came from a difficult background, and against some evil ideologies. Yet as we have stopped enforcing cultural expectations, and instead primarily lauded “openness” and “tolerance” as our chief values, we have lost this immunity.

If the values imbued in schools promote an understanding of the body as a “flesh sack” as a YouTube commentator recently put it, and a view of life that is ordered towards acquisition and covetousness, it should not surprise us that violence has become so common and prison-like safeguards are required to keep the peace. If we want to live in more than a prison, we must create people who can live in freedom.

We must reject wholesale the perverse attitudes that have permeated so much of modern life, because we can see their result. Building a culture begins with us, and it happens in the home first. If we cannot or will not change the value system of our society, then the state will keep building more cages—metaphorical and otherwise.