'Hardening our schools implies hardening our hearts and minds, while we cede yet more power to security experts and police forces.'
Here's the simple formula for it all: no more limpness, America, it's time to get hard. Johnny and Janey may still find it challenging to read books or balance a checkbook , but, hey, there must be an app for that, right? At least they'll stay alive in our newly hardened schools. Or so we hope.
In essence, politicians like Graham and Cruz seem way too eager to turn our schools into some combination of fortresses and bomb shelters, baby versions of the massive nuclear shelter I occupied in the 1980s during my first tour of duty in the Air Force . Button up and hunker down, America—not from the long-gone"red" enemy without, armed with nuclear missiles, but from the red-hot enemy within.
In fact, the whole"hardening" idea represents not a defense against, but a surrender to the notion of schools as potential sites of gun combat and mass death. To submit to such a scenario is, in the view of this retired military officer and educator, a thoroughly defeatist approach to both safety and education.