It’s a chilly, rainy May morning here in New Hampshire, one that provides no motivation for me to do anything other than sit on the couch and waste time on the internet while my husband and baby sleep. Haakon woke up around 6 am this morning, despite going to bed at 9 and, despite my best efforts to convince him otherwise, really wanted to be up. So we got up. And he fell back asleep before 7. Then he woke up a little after I laid him back down in bed, and then fell asleep again and is currently laying next to me on the couch. If it weren’t for that, I would be laying down sleeping, too.
He’s a funny little guy, really. He is absolutely determined to explore everything and be a part of whatever Lasse and I are doing. He loves to be in the sling while I’m working in the kitchen, preferably carried on my hip so he can see everything I’m doing and lend a helping hand, when necessary. And it’s always necessary, as far as he’s concerned, which means I really can’t hold him while I’m cooking. He likes to touch raw meat, he likes to touch the pans (fortunately, thus far they’ve never been hot) and he loves to help clean out the dishwasher, regardless of whether the dishes are clean or not. It’s amusing to watch him. He knows I do stuff in the kitchen and he knows it’s vaguely similar to what he’s doing, but he hasn’t quite grasped the fact that the things I do rarely end with “…and put it in your mouth.”
Using the laptop has become dangerous around him. He has decided that my laptop is the coolest thing in existance and he likes nothing more than to pull the wires out of it, knock it over and grab at the keys. Thus far, he has pulled off the backspace key and the 1 key. My husband put them back in, but the backspace key is irreparable. I know have to delete instead of go back. I’m also trying to avoid using the laptop in front of him as it just provides too much temptation.
The plants are mostly out of reach now on the balcony, so our ever fun game of “how close can I get to the plants before Mommy pulls me away?” has ended its season with the answer “close enough to pull out a few plants if I’m super sneaky and go towards them while mommy’s distracted, with a minimal amount of excited baby squeals.” Any time I was watching, he would start crawling towards them, I would ask him here he was going, he would pause, look at me, grin and start baby speed-crawling towards them. I’d say “ei!” which is Finnish for no and he’d pause, look at me again and I’d move him away. This would continue until he got frustrated and realized he just wasn’t going to be eating the plants today.
Walking is his current frustration. He started pulling himself up when he was 6 months old, started crawling right at 7 months and then started cruising shortly thereafter. He has learned to go from the coffee table to the couch using a quick turn and reach. He stands alone for a few seconds before falling over. Falling over has been a painful thing for him. After landing on something bumpy and uncomfortable, he’s learned to look before he sits down and then backs down as slowly as he can before gravity takes over. Unfortunately, he has not learned that head first is not a recommended method of getting down from couches, beds, and other elevated objects. I’m sure he will eventually, though.
He has learned to climb onto the futon by himself, using the printer as a step. He’s only done it once and I missed it, but Lasse called me in to witness the proud baby sitting ontop the futon with a grin on his face. Success! The coffee table is next in his list of mountains to climb. A box sitting right next to it is the desired platform and if it were upside down would almost certainly provide enough support to get him where he wants to go. But, alas, it’s open-side up and all that happens is he gets stuck in the box and I have to free him. He’s working on this problem, however, and I’m sure he’ll find an adequate solution, or find something easier to scale.
Now that it’s warmer out, Haakon has been introduced to the great outdoors and discovered that it’s delicious. He makes more expressions of disgust eating real food than he does when he puts woodchips, gravel, grass or pine needles in his mouth. Fortunately, he spits most of these items out and the ones he doesn’t I sweep out of his mouth for him, officially making me Party Pooper Mommy. I’m sure he thanks me when he isn’t pooping out woodchips. But being outside is a joy and as soon as we exit the apartment, makes baby gasps of joy and excitement and jumps up and down in the sling. Can you imagine how much more fun the world would be if everyone maintained such an open display of joy? He gets overwhelmed with joy–and sadness–by the tiniest of things. Swinging is a delight, especially when he sees others swinging. Sliding he isn’t so sure about. But being outside—absolutely.
It’s fun to watch him learn and discover. I’m so glad I get to be around to see it (except at 6am when he pops his head up, sits up, meets my eye, grins, and then pulls himself up using the headboard so he can look out the window and assess the new day. Then I contemplate baby sleeping pills.)
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.
