School Violence

A major line of dramatic action in the 1955 motion picture Blackboard Jungle, based on Evan Hunter's novel, involves an idealistic high-school teacher's quest to make administrators, including his own school's principal, acknowledge that the tough urban school has a problem with juvenile discipline. Vandalism, gang activity, racially motivated fighting, assaults on students and teachers--all of these are features of the film, and all reflect what in the 1950s was termed juvenile delinquency. Hunter (1955) asserted the novel to be a commentary on a major US social problem of the day and claimed that narrative was based on fact. So strong was the impact of the film on popular culture that Clare Booth Luce, wife of Time magazine publisher Henry Luce and Eisenhower's US ambassador to Italy in the mid-1950s, intervened with the Venice Film Festival to prevent Blackboard Jungle from being screened there (Kael, 1996). Violence is a part of the film Blackboard Jungle; a teacher is assaulted, saved from a gang rape by the hero, who proceeds to explore mutuality and hope for the future with the one delinquent who is portrayed as having a chance in life. But a remark in Kael's review (1996) of the film Blackboard Jungle is instructive for the present research: "Once again, a 'daring' Hollywood movie exposes social tensions--touches a nerve--and then pours on the sweet nothings." Equally instructive is that Blackboard Jungle is set in a public school for boys, a school that

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set forth here is not exhaustive, but it is decisively representative because all of the incidents share certain important characteristics. What marks off this list from the previous one is that the violence was perpetrated by students, not by outsiders and not by adults. Equally, this list is distinguished from the account of gang activity in and around school settings. To be sure, as of 1995, 41% of urban students were reporting the presence of street gangs at their schools, whereas only 26% of suburban students were doing so (Riley & Reno, 1998). But the high-profile incidents of violence in US schools were not taking place on the mean urban streets but in well-groomed suburbia. The shooters in these incidents were not members of an impoverished urban minority group but instead came from relatively comfortable socioeconomic segment. With the exception of Nicholas Elliot, an African-American, they were all white, and all were fundamentally middle class in background, not demographically alienated in the manner of gangs or ethnic enclaves overwhelmed by poverty. Yet the aftermath of the incidents of the late 1980s and through the 1990s vividly demonstrated patterns of alienation among those who killed parents, teachers, students

Category: Psychology - S