From the Blog of Mr. Shiver, a Democrat State Representative Candidate, 2018
https://shiverforthestatehouse2018.com/my-blog/f/two-teachers?fbclid=IwAR1h0WtDDKoFf5AicAF4_7YlRen_gncAjJz-NrD8We7gzGoP6WzywH4ckCY
My commentary in response to his Blog:
Mr. Shiver states his opinion well, and many of his points, particularly about the bureaucratic regulation of teachers and infringement, by the State Department of Education, within their local classrooms ring true to the sensibilities of most conservatives. The issue is not money as much as it is the State Board of Education treating local school systems as vassals and demanding costly and time-consuming tracking and testing paradigms, none of which have been proven to improve academic success in Secondary and Post-Secondary Education.
And as much as many of us agree with Mr. Shiver on these issues, we must disagree with his conjectures as to the causes of the lack of academic progress and the continuing plateau of academic achievement in Georgia’s classrooms.
The fault, if indeed that is an appropriate term, lies solely with parents of school age children, K-16, who continue to support the same failed and unproductive systems enacted and applied by elected and non-elected government officials.
In doing so they deny the parent’s responsibility as the primary cause our State’s failure to properly and compassionately educate the children of Georgia. Discipline in the home, and the corresponding respect between parent and child, are at a modern low; a nadir of immaturity, concupiscence and consumerism of the part of parents, and boredom, unstructured activities, and a lack of ambition on the part of children.
Firearms, in and of themselves, have little to do with the occurrence of horrific acts terrorism on school property. They do provide a weapon of convenience to deranged and mentally unstable youth (and adults) who are seldom diagnosed and treated for common, if often exaggerated, childhood behaviors. Children need love and attention, as well as guidance and discipline to fulfill their potential. Parents must be the focus of fulfilling such needs; teachers, while occasionally aware of pathology through parent teacher conferences, private discussions and information disseminated by school administrators and support staff, cannot function properly as educators if they are required to act as the primary caregiver, therapist and chief influence in a child’s life.
It is the parent who has been ignored as a focus of failure in school homicides by firearms. It is the parents who are responsible for the health, both physical and mental, of each child attending school, and it is the parents of these mentally unstable and ill children who bear responsibility for the senseless deaths and wounds of school shooting victims.
It is not politically correct, in a society that constantly excuses the failure of adults to provide a safe, nourishing and affectionate homes for their children; that inevitably excuses the lack of good parenting on the part of absent fathers and often overwhelmed single mothers, for society to properly lay the cause of these tragedies at the feet of the very person or persons who most often have spent the most time and shared the most intimate details of life with those who commit these atrocities.
When did you last hear an interview with the parent of a “shooter,” when was the last time read or even heard of an in depth forensic interview conducted with the parents, and close friends and relatives of the parents, of these mass murderers? Too sensitive, too likely to find parental failure, especially if those parents were doing all that the law requires, and what “everyone else” was doing to raise their child? How many other mal-adjusted and potentially pathogenic children are there? Empirically, not politically, what are the tells of potentially anti-social behavior? What are the symptoms, what are the common predicates, what is missing in modern parenting?
Modern Parents are, in the majority, irresponsible as adults and ignorant of childhood needs and their obligation to raise a good child and a good citizen. Disagree? Just ask any Public School teacher, and even quite a few private school teachers now observe ennui, resentment and regression.
Mr. Shiver should step up, and stop blaming the instrument of mayhem, most often now a firearm. Rather he should acknowledge our society’s laxity and apathy in creating responsible, well-informed and educated parents. What can the Georgia Legislature do about parents, all of them, not just those from ethic, cultural or racial demographic subsets, but for every parent in Georgia?
And Mr. Shriver, if you are ‘worried’ concerned about firearms, consider this, in today’s media and information driven society, it is possible, even as you read this, for a child, a middle schooler, to read on the Internet and learn how to easily make horrible toxic and lethal compounds such a Sarin or VX, with chemicals readily available on store shelves. See for instance:
https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/sarin#section=Top
Are you aware that even toxic Chlorine Gas (the same Gas used extensively by the Vierbund against the forces Triple Entente and the USA in WWI) may be made in volumes sufficient to effect mass killings with products found under many kitchen sinks? When will the morally neglected and materially pampered juvenile and adult miscreants figure out what real weapons they possess?
I hope Mr. Shiver; with electoral success or absent victory, will consider the need to create methods to teach young adults parenting as a positive and compassionate lifelong experience boarding on a sacred obligation… Nothing could do more to insure all children’s safety and security and metal and physical wellness.
Carpe Diem!