Andrew Robinson
Writer/Director “April Showers”
Ten years ago today I was a senior at Columbine High School when two of my fellow classmates, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, opened fire. Their actions that day took the lives of 12 students and one teacher before they turned their weapons on themselves and took their own lives.
While I try to avoid such phrases as “a day that will live in infamy” it seems, ten years later, we still remember Columbine. However, I’d like to take this opportunity not to reflect on the day, but about where we’ve come as a society since that terrible day. Recently, I took part in a panel discussion in Colorado with Darrell Scott the father of my friend and slain student Rachel Scott. In the years since Rachel’s death, Mr. Scott and his son Craig have founded Rachel’s Challenge, an organization that speaks to school aged kids, mainly high-schoolers, about Rachel’s life and message surrounding acts of kindness and how they can create a chain reaction.
However, on top of his daughter’s message Mr. Scott speaks about the nature and status of today’s modern education system. It seems when our education system was founded it was founded upon a system that involved the three H’s. I’m going to paraphrase, but in a nutshell the three-H approach goes like this: by speaking and touching a child’s heart you’ll stimulate the head and produce results via the hands.
This methodology has been around for a long time, but these days we have abandoned the three-H approach to education in favor of statistical performance. We’ve put such a high price on results. It’s my opinion that we’ve lost sight of the purpose of education, which isn’t just about learning, but about understanding as well. By bringing up understanding I don’t mean simply knowing the why behind the facts we and our children are expected to memorize, but more importantly a basic understanding of who we are and who the people we go through life with are as well.
Here’s a personal example: On the evening of April 20, 1999, I, along with countless others, were in the gymnasium of Leawood Elementary School in Littleton, Colorado. The mood was somber to say the least as we were waiting for the last of the survivors to be bussed in so that we could determine who didn’t make it out of the Columbine H.S. alive. As the night wore on we began absorb the news, which was made official by the local media a few hours later. I remember watching the first broadcast where the names and faces of the deceased were flashed upon the screen. My first reaction was, of course, deep sadness and grief but another feeling crept into my consciousness. Shock.
I wasn’t in shock over what had happened as much as I was in shock over the idea that after four years at Columbine High School I didn’t know or recognize half of the victims being named. How is that possible? I understand it’s improbable to befriend everyone at Columbine but to be a complete stranger…that was jarring. I began to wonder how many others shared my feelings. Over the past 10 years I’ve grappled with a number of issues pertaining to that day and the days that followed, but the one thing I haven’t been able to process and/or explain is how I seemingly was a stranger in my own school.
Since making “April Showers” I’ve been lucky enough to speak to a number of high school-aged kids across the country and have found that my feelings and fears surrounding the stranger phenomenon in our schools isn’t a singular or isolated occurrence. In fact, it may be getting worse. So I ask, what is the purpose of our education system if the very people who inhabit it don’t take the time to learn from and about one another, let alone learn from a textbook?
We trail in most academic categories and now we find our children becoming more isolated in an ever growing, over-populated environment. While I believe this is a poignant observation, how does it tie into Columbine and school violence? Simple. There are many leading school safety experts that agree that metal detectors, ID cards, uniforms and other means are last resorts for a safe school and more often than not their implementation is usually a sign of defeat versus prevention. I’m not a statistician so I can’t speak to the validity of these claims but all the experts agree, as do I, that school safety begins not with the safety of the physical building but with the safety of the students; students being the operative word.
I posed this scenario to a classroom full of students at a recent lecture. When I’m cut off in traffic, perhaps I’m late for a meeting. My reaction, depending on my mood, can vary but can encompass rage, which can manifest itself in several ways; a vocal outburst, hand gesture etc. Now, these are all acts of aggression and/or violence and while I’m not proud of my response it does occasionally happen.
Now, when someone I know, not a best friend, but a friend, wrongs me does it illicit the same response? Most of the time, no. I’m more inclined to speak to that person or to approach him or her on a personal level to resolve the difference. Sometimes we can, sometimes we don’t, but the important observation is that in most cases the confrontation was dealt with in a non-outwardly aggressive manor. Why? Because the person that cuts me off is a stranger, a faceless, nameless person that if I assault from the safety of my car will have little to no recourse upon me. Whereas, dealing with someone face-to-face humanizes the exchange. I’ve found, and in speaking with teenagers, it’s a lot harder to cause a person physical harm if you know them or share a commonality with them for they’re not nameless or faceless. They’re like you.
Now, we have hundreds and in some cases thousands of teens sharing a common space for a sizeable duration of their impressionable lives that know little to nothing about one another. That doesn’t strike me as safe, let alone conducive for true learning, because what many of these kids don’t know is that in a Columbine-like event they, and they alone, are their own best support system. And being a stranger means someone isn’t going to necessarily get the support they need from those who could truly understand their plight and that, dear readers, is a very slippery slope.
At times, we — as a culture — tend to fear what we don’t understand. Fear can wear many masks and take many forms. Fear can cause someone or a group of people to become ostracized. It can cause a class system. It can create power struggles. It can result in violence. We see it in our schools. We see it in our lives. We see it in our government and our world. Where does it stop?
It stops, or better yet, starts — with our children. We must engage our children’s hearts and minds. It seems the education system has transformed and exists to talk at our children versus to engage them. What if we did away with devoting every second of a class to the “learning” of facts and dedicated a small amount of time towards allowing children and teens to steer the discussion?
In our attempts to “protect” and “shield” our kids from the real world we miss out on wonderful opportunities to learn from their unique insights and perspectives about the world as they see it. At the very least, by allowing them to share openly with one another they may learn a thing or two about one another and stop being strangers in the hallway. Who knows, perhaps the student in the back of the class may have an awful lot in common with the student sitting in front. Over time, social barriers and stigmas will be over come and our children will find themselves existing in an environment that is truly open and based on compassion, not fear.
I’m often asked what I hoped to achieve by making “April Showers”. My answer is simple, but often unexpected. I made “April Showers” to shed light on a side of a story we actually know little about, and by exposing teens, not to violence, but to the effects of violence in a way they can relate to so they can begin a discussion that didn’t have the ability to really begin ten years ago.
When events like Columbine occur we often focus on those who speak the loudest, which in my experience means focusing on the shooters themselves, the victims and their families and causes. In regards to causes, following Columbine issues dealing with faith and gun control became very hot topics and for good reason.
The violence that took place that day mobilized a large group of people for and against issues of gun control and faith for better and for worse. But did we miss the point? We were quick to ban items that we associated with our fear. We instituted ID cards. We asked for cameras. We forbid dissenting discussion and adopted zero tolerance policies. We created a place where kids felt watched and hindered, versus allowing their pain, expression and ultimate voice to be truly heard. In doing so we created the illusion of safety yet when you speak to students in schools today they don’t necessarily feel any more safe than we did on April 20, 1999 when our fellow students opened fire upon us.
Sure, we have policies in place that allow for first responders to potentially curb the loss of life more effectively, but I’m talking about curbing the issues long before we ever get to that point. Furthermore, I’m also not talking about cliques or bullying for it’s not that singular or simple and to sum up Eric and Dylan’s actions that day as a response to those issues isn’t really addressing the larger problem.
We need a massive overhaul in our educational institutions and instead of policy makers and administrators deciding what that entails we should ask those who look to us for guidance in steering them towards the future. Education is dialogue, not lecture. Instead of learning about the past, we need to see how the past continues to influence us so that we may truly understand who we are, where we come from and keep the past from happening to us in the future.
