Here are the Reasons School Violence Is Through The Roof
Here are the Reasons School Violence Is Through The Roof
Teachers and other authorities did it to themselves
I heard a few minutes of The Five on Fox News tonight.
The subject was school violence. It seems a female high school senior beat the living hell out of another girl in class while the teacher and students stood around watching. Some laughed.
The discussion quickly turned to the proliferation of violence in schools. They weren’t talking about lunatics walking into schools with guns ablaze—they were talking about student-on-student, teacher-on-student, and student-on-teacher violence. Public schools are veritable three-way death matches these days.
Someone (I believe it was Dana Perino) suggested that parents in many school districts are demanding full-time, permanent remote learning because of the violence alone.
Moreover, the violence is not limited to inner-city schools with 3-percent graduation rates. Nor is this limited to actual fights and beatings. Teachers and principals have found that students just don’t give a damn anymore and have zero respect for authority. From ASR Alert Systems:
According to the most recent EdWeek survey, 44% of all school and district leaders say they are receiving more threats of violence by students now than they did in the fall of 2019. More generally, two out of three teachers, principals, and district leaders say students are misbehaving more these days than they did in the fall of 2019.
Notable increases in school violence and antisocial behavior (including disrespect for authority) owe to two factors: masks and official lies.
Masked Men Behave Badly
If you’ve been reading Hennessy’s View, you would have known this was coming.
On April 17, 2020 (one month after the lockdowns began), I wrote about the psychology of masks.
Some of the essential points I predicted:
Wearing masks in public will change the way people behave, and the consequences for society could be devastating.
Luckily, psychologists and sociologists have studied the behavioral effects of masks. The findings should alarm everyone, especially employers. And police.
I should have added “teachers” to the mix. And parents. For that matter, students who don’t want to get beat up.
People wearing masks are meaner, more selfish, less moral, and more violent. And I’m not talking about people who don masks with the intent of behaving badly. I’m talking about otherwise decent people who change when they put a mask on.
Children wearing masks are almost twice as likely to break rules as children not wearing masks. In a study, children were told they may each take two pieces of candy. Half of the kids were wearing masks as part of their Halloween costumes; the other half were barefaced. Sixty-two percent of the masked children took more than two pieces, but only 37 percent of barefaced children cheated.
In a 1976 study, researchers recruited college students to walk around campus carrying sexually suggestive signs. (Remember, this was 1976.) Students were offered money to perform the stunt. One group was also offered masks to wear while performing the feat. The students who were offered masks asked for only $29 while students who were not given masks demanded $48.
In a study to test the prosocial behavior of people wearing sunglasses, which are less concealing than masks, researchers found that sunglasses made people more selfish. Asked how much of $6 they’d be will to share with a stranger, people in clear eyeglasses offered almost twice as much as those in sunglasses.
Think about this: I’m a marketing-techie guy in the Midwest. When mask mandates began, I realized someone should find out if there exist any psychology studies reporting the effects of masks on social behavior. I found four studies in an hour. An hour later, I published an article that predicted increases in violence, rudeness, and antisocial behavior if mask mandates lasted too long.
This isn’t rocket surgery. But Bill Hennessy should not have been the only person to do this research.
First, the doctors who were pushing mask mandates should have done the research before prescribe that treatment. Then, politicians should have had their staff do the research before pushing mandates. And, frankly, the education industry should have done a little homework before demanding students wear masks.
(BTW, the teachers I know were, are, and will go to their graves furious about the mask mandates. How would you like to be responsible for keeping masks on the faces of 20 five-year-olds with learning and emotional disabilities? While you’re also responsible for teaching them?)
Those studies did not provide enough data to make numerical predictions on the effects of masks. So, I couldn’t predict a precise 44 percent increase student violence. But they did provide clear and unchallenged directional forecasts: people in masks behave badly.
I wrote recently that the social effects of masks, lockdowns, distancing, and force vaccination will take generations to unwind. I’ll give a number to this prediction: two generations (40 years) of increased criminal and antisocial behavior, using the previous 20 years (1999 to 2019) as the baseline.
Now, to explain disrespect for authority.
Children Watched Authorities Lie About Covid and Break the Law
Many teachers and teachers’ unions refuse to obey the law, and their students know it. If teachers, superintendents, and school boards can break the law without consequence, why should students follow their teachers’ direction? Look at this headline from The Gateway Pundit posted only yesterday:
Following Statewide School Mask Mandate Suspension, Illinois Teachers Begin Harassing and Threatening Students – Teachers Union Vows Maskless Children “Will Be Dealt With”
In Missouri, Rockwood and other school districts refused to drop mask mandates in defiance of a similar court order last December. Even after the state’s attorney general threatened Rockwood with legal action, the board, the superintendent, and teachers continued to punish and humiliate unmasked chidlren.
Meanwhile, mask-mandate queen Stacey Abrams posed for a photo-op with a group of masked students. Abrams wasn’t masked.
Police in New York City recently ignored a brutal assault because they were too busy arresting a 12-year-old in a restaurant for failing to show proof of vaccination.
Thus, children now view school authorities, police, doctors, and politicians as frauds and criminals—and rightly so.
What a lot of people don’t know, unless they’ve been reading Hennessy’s View for years, is that young people are harder to con than older folks.
From puberty through early adulthood, young people are more adept at spotting liars, crooks, and frauds than older adults or younger children. I’ve talked about this before.
Those disobediant, disrespectful, and violent students are only imitating the examples they’ve gotten from school superintendents, politiicians, and doctors. They’ve seen BLM and Antifa loot and pilage without punishment. They’ve seen the hypocracy and lawlessness of this Covid era, and they’re simply doing what the authorities do.
That’s why this loss of social cooperation will last a long time. America’s institutions—all of them—are broken. Our culture is an immoral disgrace. We’ve abondoned the faith of our fathers and kicked off a free-for-all.
Our hope is in the name of the Lord because He is the last authority who has not changed, has not lied, and has not cheated.
As C.S. Lewis said, there are two kinds of people: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, “All right, then, have it your way.” We are having it our way, and our way is hell on earth.