When society gets frightened, it flails, and it shakes hardest at its edges. What's more, the trouble that turns kids into shooters is not so readily identifiable. Despite that, we tend to focus on the unusual, and the consequences are profound. Here, a mural is painted over. There, a student with a streak of blue in his hair is told not to come back to school.
Classrooms retract like a muscle.
Experimentation is seen as dangerous. The spirit of inquiry is stifled. A smallness of mind sets in that strangles education. The kids who feel the tightening most severely these days are those who identify themselves as Goths. These are teenagers for whom the world is not a field of daisies.