Freedom in the Hills of New Hampshire

My husband and I have a running joke that revolves around the fact that Finland is always number one in every international study. PISA Study? Number 1. Least Corrupt? Number 1. Best social system in the world? Finland! Highest number of school shooting deaths per capita? Finland!

After reading the news today, (you can read a German account here) it looks like Germany has a serious contender looking to retake the number 1 spot: a 17 year old killed 17 people in a school shooting in the town of Winninden.

But that’s making light of a very serious and very sad situation. I can’t imagine how scary it would be to have this happen to me or one of my loved ones, it’s bad enough to read about it in the news. In the aftermath of this shooting, surely the same questions will be asked around the world: Why do kids keep shooting up their schools? What can we do to prevent it? Does Germany need stricter gun laws?

I can answer the first question very bluntly: Because school sucks.

Okay, too blunt? Allow me to expand on my answer. While school sucks, it does not suck 100% of the time for 100% of people, but the vast majority of attendees experience its suckiness at some point during their school career. For a small minority of attendees, school does suck 100% of the time and they are offered no way out from this misery. Add to that a pschopathic personality and you have Columbine, but I wouldn’t say that all school killers have some sort of personality problem. The vast majority of them are probably having a miserable time there and a miserable time at home. So they decide to end it all and take a few others with them.

Germany being Germany, it adds a few special ingredients to the school shooter phenomenon. The most notable is that in Germany, you do not merely have the right to go to school, you have the duty. Schulpflict is written into the basic law of Germany that from age 6, all children must attend school. There is no exception written in for homeschooling or independent education for children experiencing difficulties–all education must take place inside a school. It’s popular among homeschoolers to blame this on Adolf Hitler so as to discredit it and make it seem like a nazi thing. That’s completely false—mandatory education as it’s known today originated in Prussia and spread to the U.S. (beginning in Massachusetts) in the 19th century.

How does Schulpflict relate to schoolshooting, you might ask? Simply because there is no way out for someone who is miserable. The German system allows for zero flexibility and is designed, according to Wolfgang Drautz, to prevent “parallel societies.” In other words, all square pegs will be pounded into round holes.

You start school at age 6, your work then and your teacher’s recommendation will determine whether or not you go to Gymnasium or a Realschule of somesort. Gymnasium will determine if you go to university.If you go to a Realschule, you can then go to a Berufhochschule where you learn a trade and become an apprentice or later on a Fachhochschule, which is equivalent to a community college in the US. You might, as an adult, be able to go back and get a Gymnasium degree and then go to college via night school. But for most, your entire life is set out for you by the system. If you don’t fit in the system….

I get the feeling the school-shooter in Wenninden didn’t fit in the system. One kid at the Gymnasium I attended in Germany shot himself the day before graduation (not while I was there). I asked my host sister why and her reply was something along the lines of, “he had a shit life.” He lived in a system where he had no choices and was unhappy with the options presented to him, hopelessness set in…and he killed himself.

While children in the United States can get alternative education, be it long-distance education, private tutoring or homeschooling, for the vast majority, no alternative to traditional schooling is presented. For the majority of 7th and 8th grade, I could not fall asleep Sunday nights because each time I breathed I felt a tight, panicky feeling in my chest. I dreaded going to school because I feared my peers. Some of my friends had turned on me and made it their goal to make my life as miserable as possible. I didn’t think of killing myself because I didn’t know that was an option. My parents were otherwise distracted and wouldn’t have offered a way out aside from talking to the administration–a solution that usually brings more ridicule. I had no choice but to keep right on going and to keep putting up with it.

My point is that school shootings are simply a by-product of the system. We take kids and lock them away for 12 years and tell them what they must learn and how. They are not allowed to do anything that might distract from this and are banned from working until age 16 in most places, thus keeping them economically enslaved to their parents, to the state, and to the schools. Most people who find themselves unable to quit a job they hate consider suicide. In this recession, people who are losing their jobs, their homes, and are becoming financially insolvent are killing themselves because they see no way out. Some of them might even go on rampages. And yet we act surprised when minors do the same?

The answer is not stricter gun laws because it is not the guns that are the problem. Germany already has ridiculously strict gun laws, which were made stricter after the Erfurt school shootings. What we need are looser schooling laws. Allow children to seek out alternatives. Allow children who are miserable in school and are not reaching their goals in life to drop out. Allow them to get jobs. Allow them time to choose, time to make mistakes and time to learn. Allow them, simply, to be free.