A school tragedy occurred in the Columbine High
School in Littleton, Colorado. Everybody is asking "why" and how can
it be prevented?
The Ready-to-Use
Social Skills Lessons & Activities and
the Ready-to-Use
Violence Prevention Skills Lessons &
Activities curricula developed by Society
for Prevention of Violence (SPV) are used by the SPV to teach school
staff, children of all ages, and workshop participants, proactive
social and violence prevention skills combined with conflict
resolution methods. This training, when continually reinforced, has
been recognized to be very effective with children and adults in
learning to predict and prevent violence situations and to cope with
them using the learned skills to rapidly react and achieve peaceful
resolutions.* This is possible since the applied learning methods of
practice engraves the skills as well as the manner of using them in
the minds of the students and thus the skills are readily available
as tools to be used without hesitation.
Thus SPV suggests that such training be made a mandatory part of the
teachers' college education to train teachers not only to recognize
early the warning signals of forthcoming tragic violence in schools
and to cope with violence before it gets out of hand, but also to
become role models for the youngsters and teach them the necessary
skills. Most similar tragic violence situations in schools as
occurred on April 20 in the Columbine High School in Littleton,
Colorado, can be prevented, SPV believes, by appropriate education of
teachers since teachers spend a great portion of time with their
students and are familiar with their family inter-relationships.
Therefore, they are in an excellent position to train their students
in those skills and to recommend to parents to seek help, if
necessary, by contacting appropriate social agencies. Education of
teachers, parents and students seems a more productive way to avoid
similar tragic violence events than the use of mass suspension and
expulsion and thus should receive serious consideration.
Listening to teenage students following the tragic event of April 20,
and others of similar nature, the youngsters clearly blame
insufficiency of mutual respect, defining boundaries of discipline,
caring and time with parents for violent student behaviors. The
police forces talk about hatred and revenge. How to cope with all
these different factors and many others is treated in the above
mentioned curricula.
SPV is fully aware that teachers alone cannot shoulder the entire
burden. Therefore this or similar curricula should be included as a
mandatory part in all branches of education so that everybody learns
these life skills in pre-school and up, in fact, during their entire
educational experience.