They give spice to life. Now there are people who like spicy food and those who don't. But we seldom give persistent ear to individuals who condemn spicy foods because they find them not to their taste. Yet the condemners of vigorous physical activity receive all too much forum for their animadversions. And they pollute rational discourse about the proper place of violence in our culture with their careless expatiating.
Violence can be a tool.
It is morally neutral. If so, or potentially so, we must, especially in school, regulate their performance. What is so insidious about the propagandistic use of the term violence as a general term of condemnation is that it distracts from, if not completely obscures, real and important moral and social problems in our schools. The second error is that the focus of our concern as educators should be not on violence, but on victimization. Although we are rightly concerned with improper forms of violence, this narrowing of focus isolates our attention to the relatively rare, though often sensationalized, cases of physical assault that occur in a relatively few schools, particularly in poor neighborhoods.