A teacher’s vocation is to educate, not to obliterate

An English teacher of mine once told me, among others, that you do not bring a pea- shooter to a gunfight. The metaphor started and ended there, and it had nothing to do with guns. However, in light of recent comments straight from the Oval Office on how best to stem the tide on mass shootings in American schools, the metaphor takes on a new meaning for me.

President Trump took to Twitter to suggest that a new avenue on the road towards safer schools may be to arm the teachers themselves.

Fielding a lot of criticism for this comment, he followed up saying that he didn’t mean every single teacher in the country should be armed, but that there exists a 20 per cent of teachers who have military experience and they would be eligible.

Trump’s initial comment suggested all teachers would be in receipt of the firepower necessary to put a stop to mass shootings. Needless to say, this created (yet another) media frenzy- obviously teachers should not bear the responsibility to be a collective armed force against evil. But the follow-up statement was even more puzzling; it would only be a select 20 per cent with ‘military or special training experience’ who would take the mantle. That is to say, America’s solution to countrywide mass shootings in schools is to arm their teachers. But not every teacher, just a fifth who have the relevant know-how when it comes to operating a weapon!

Hypothetically speaking, neither idea is worthy of the word solution. The first idea would hand over huge responsibilities to a mass of teachers, many of whom may never have operated a gun in their lifetime before.

The second brainwave whereby the governance of life and death is bestowed only upon 20 per cent of all American educators is clearly a mathematical impossibility.

You are assuming that a mass shooting will take place in one area, apparently more secure because of a teacher who has the necessary experience, rather than another area which may not have a teacher of the same expertise. Clearly, in the wake of either one of these wild ideas, the elephant in the room is being overlooked: the availability of guns in America is damning to each and every citizen as far as the White House, whose powerful proprietor thinks rather than stopping the problem at its source, the problem should oscillate throughout the country and perhaps be culled by none other than its hardworking educators.

Perhaps military-grade security standing outside each and every school in the country would be a solution of sorts, but that seems to me like shutting the stable door when the horse has bolted.

However, the stable door would prove an awful lot stiffer were it to be left in the hands of teachers. It’s hardly a slight on any teacher- aside from maybe some who do own a weapon- to say that they should not be entrusted with a weapon in a school environment to wield upon a crazed mass shooter. That has never been a part of any teacher’s job description, and I would worry for the day that it becomes so.

How could a teacher focus on the job at hand with this other weight lying on their shoulders? Wouldn’t they naturally lose sight of the lessons they actually get paid to teach?

The killing of young students throughout the last number of years has been devastating to say the least. That the solution could also be to the detriment of the education system is a travesty.

It’s hard to say what exactly the solution to the weapons epidemic in America and its filtration into schools is, but it is easy to see that it cannot be to put the lives of innocent children into the hands of those there to teach them what they need to know in the early stages of their lives. A teacher’s vocation is to educate, not to obliterate.