Usha Nellore
2008-05-08 07:00:00.0
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BALTIMORE -

W ith student violence escalating in Baltimore public schools, adults seem stumped as to how to end this horror. Examiner photographer Arianne Starnes was assaulted by a male student when on assignment at Reginald F. Lewis High School in Baltimore. This was the same school where teacher Jolita Berry was brutally attacked by a female student last month. That incident created a national furor because it revealed the ugly mob mentality of the onlooking students, one of whom captured the incident on a cell phone and posted the video online.

Maybe these students do not have a moral core, as The Examiner noted in an editorial. But they certainly are looking for the applause of their peers and the attention of society using society’s tools to poke a mote in its eyes. They are allowed to bring cell phones, awful distractions from the act of learning, into schools. The cell phones imbue them with a sense of power and the ability to attain instant notoriety with graphic pictures they can take and then disseminate online for millions to see.

The euphoria of celebrity pushes on these children into uncharted territory, and society watches helplessly because society is now a slave to and an apologist for runaway technology.

It is inexplicable to me that students who do not study algebra, calculus or physics in school are experts at Facebook, YouTube and other social sites and that students who come from poor neighborhoods have the money to pay for cell phones. The priorities of these students and their parents are obviously skewed. Of all people, poor students should pour their hearts and souls into learning.

Instead, just like their well-off peers, these students waste time indulging in cell phone colloquies and online chatter and games, making it impossible for the fluid morality, the bravado of anonymity, and the intoxication and instant gratification that online life generates not to seep into our schools and our society. This is a bad harbinger for our republic.

The Mahatma Gandhis and the Martin Luther King Jrs. of this world, proponents and courageous practitioners of nonviolence, are not created in this environment. They steep themselves in the great books of this world and find their heroes among those who will do to others as they want done to themselves.

Gandhi learned from Henry David Thoreau and King from Gandhi, and for each, nonviolence became a way of life as natural as breathing itself. On the other hand, recurrent exposure to violence, as in city schools, desensitizes the spectators and the perpetrators and creates a coliseum atmosphere filled with decadent mob thrills.  

Not too long ago, I went to Baltimore City to savor its museums and to walk around. In my wanderings, I stumbled upon the Enoch Pratt Free Library, a treasure trove for the people of Baltimore.

On that day in Baltimore, I walked out of the Enoch Pratt and soon after ran into a young man no more than 15 or 16 years old. He was standing on the sidewalk with many people as witnesses, engaged in a battle of obscenities with a group of peers.

I wanted to tap him on the shoulder and ask him to stop his nonsense. I wanted to point out the library to him, the great Enoch Pratt, free and just a stone’s throw away, available to expand his mind, and ask him why he should not be there rather than on the streets hurling profanities.

Instead I crossed to the other side of the street, afraid of his wrath. Could it be that the principals of the high schools in Baltimore have the same psychological reaction to what they face — one of fear for their lives and for their person? In their cowardice perhaps they hide and send their foot soldiers — the teachers — to face the dangers.

It takes a village to raise a child, but it takes only one terrible child to hold the village hostage. Unfortunately, zero tolerance for the students who are too far gone, with early intervention for those students in the lower grades who can still be molded, may be the only long-term solution for this seemingly intractable problem.

Usha Nellore is a writer living in Bel Air. Reach her at unellu@gmail.com.