David McElroy

As 15 teachers sat in a meeting last Friday at their school in Halfway, Ore., two gunmen suddenly burst into the room with handguns. The assailants wore hoodies to hide their faces, and they immediately started firing. Within moments, almost every teacher was dead — or would have been if it hadn’t been a drill.

I don’t know who thought it was a good idea to scare these teachers by making them believe they were being killed, but some of them claim that it was an effective teaching tool. What’s interesting, though, is that these teachers had already received training from the local sheriff’s department about how they could react in the even of an active shooter.

It apparently made no difference when they weren’t expecting an attack. For me, this brings to mind several points.

First, these are teachers, not a team of armed security guards. Just as those on the progressive left are completely unrealistic about the effects of taking guns away from law-abiding citizens, those on the conservative right are just as unrealistic about the effectiveness of arming teachers. I’m sure there are the occasional teachers who would be effective in a firefight, but I’d say they are few and far between. Trying to turn them into security guards isn’t going to work. It’s not their job and they’re probably going to panic if a real shooter shows up. That’s Halfway teacher Dollie Beck in the picture above. Does she look like someone you’d hire as a security guard?

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A Bartow, Fla., high school student was arrested and now faces felony charges after she mixed a couple of household chemicals together in a plastic bottle and put the top on one morning last week.

Kiera Wilmot said she thought the combination would make smoke, but it actually produced a tiny explosion. The girl did her experiment about 7 a.m. while she and other students were waiting around for the school day to start. A nearby student described the explosion as sounding like a firecracker. Nobody was hurt or threatened. Kiera stayed where she was and explained to school employees exactly what had happened.

Then this student with a perfect record was arrested and taken to a juvenile jail and charged with the felonies of “making, possessing or discharging a destructive device” and “possessing or discharging weapons on school grounds.” In today’s schools, there can be zero tolerance for mistakes born of teen-age bad judgement.

Everybody agrees that it was just an experiment that went wrong. Although Kiera called it a science experiment, it wasn’t an official school experiment of any kind. It appears she was just curious. So she did what many of us did as children. She tried it to see what would happen.

The school’s principal told WTSP-TV news that Kiera isn’t a troubled teen.

“She is a good kid,” said principal Ron Pritchard. “She has never been in trouble before. Ever.”

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When I was a student at the University of Alabama, I never seriously asked myself why I was in school. It was just understood that I was there to get a degree that would prepare me for a career. My parents both had degrees and it was just an assumption in our family that everyone gets a university degree.

If you had asked me why I was in school, I might have struggled to answer. I might have wanted to say that the purpose was to be an intellectually well-rounded and thoughtful person, but if I’d been honest with myself, I would have admitted I was there to get a piece of paper that marked me as acceptable as socially acceptable for employment. (The photo above from a UA graduation two years ago suggests to me that students still mostly see graduation as a ticket to employment.)

As much as I love learning, I’ve come to have serious doubts about the way the university system works in the United States today. (For readers in other countries, “college” and “university” are used interchangeably for practical purposes here in most usages.) I’ve come to see college as a long series of expensive hoops to jump through — which mostly just show that someone has the tenacity and willingness to stick to a plan and follow orders.

On Monday, a friend posted a link on Facebook to an article questioning the value of getting master’s degrees in library science and suggesting that some sort of apprentice program would be more useful. My friend is a librarian and a very bright woman. She’s decided to get a master’s in “library science” — which in itself as an odd name — but it’s not because it will help her do her job better. It’s because she’ll be paid more.

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