Nikki Giovanni found one of her Creative Writing students a trial.
“And every class I’m saying, ‘Mr. Cho, take off your (sun)-glasses please, take your hat off please. Mr. Cho, that’s not a poem. Can you work on it please,'” Giovanni recalled. “And then I finally realized that something is not wrong with me, something is wrong with him, and I said to him, ‘I’m not a good teacher for you.'”
One day, she arrived and found her class of about 70 students had dwindled to fewer than 10. When she asked a student after class about it, he confessed that “everybody’s scared of (Cho).” Giovanni later had him removed from her class after she threatened to resign.
Why did it have to come to that? Imagine if every class Cho Seung-hui had attended had taken place at the invitation of the teacher- an invitation that could be rescinded at any time.
In reality his memories of school were of humiliation, but imagine if, from the age of twelve onwards, or from even earlier if your imagination can stretch that far, school had been an option he could choose if he wanted it.
What if Cho’s concepts of “school” and “college” had been formed by classes like the Karate class described by Brian Micklethwait?
What struck me, so to speak, about these “martial arts” classes was that although the children present may have supposed that all there were learning was how to be more violent, what they were really learning was no less than civilisation itself.
The children were all told to get changed into their Karate kit in an orderly fashion, and to put their regular clothes in sensible little heaps. They all lined up the way he said. They all turned up on time. They left the place impeccably clean when they’d finished, all helping to make sure that all was ship-shape and properly closed-up when they left.
Were these children being “coerced”? Certainly not. They didn’t have to be there, any more than The Man had to teach them Karate if he didn’t want to. If they wanted out, then out they could go, with no blots on their copybooks or markings-down on their CVs.
Having reached the age of twenty-three, Cho was no longer forced to be taught – but his teachers were still forced to teach him and his fellow students to associate with him. True, there were a few last ways out from his menacing presence; the students could jeopardise their education by skipping class and the teacher could jeopardise her career by threatening to resign. Unfortunately by the time these sanctions were employed Cho had already got away with too much.
I sometimes think that practically every problem, inefficiency and cruelty of our education system has at its root compulsion. People who are forced into each other’s society tend not to behave well to each other. Wherever the doors are locked, be the locks visible or invisible, those inside seem to revert to the hierarchy of the baboon troop. There is still room for free will: most do no worse than learn a few habits of obsequiousness or sullenness that can be shaken off. Cho was not forced to become a mass-murderer. (In fact I see his own claim to the contrary in his video as a sort of twisted acknowledgement of this fact; the thought that “I don’t have to do this” had to be actively denied.) No, he was not forced to pull the trigger – but force did play too large a part in his life. Imagine if the doors had been open for the bullied Cho Seung-hui to walk away, or if the adult Cho Seung-hui had been shown the door at the first sign of discourtesy. Imagine this was the case not just for Cho Seung-hui on certain pivotal occasions but for everyone on all occasions. Then, I think, he would have learned differently.
I don’t agree with compulsory schooling but then, his parents might have made him go to school. But then if he hated school so much why did he voluntarily go to college?
Nobody made him do this. Nobody deserved any blame but him (not even the college itself which prevented students and staff from defending themselves, as they had been able to do at the Appalachian School of Law, also in Virginia, in 2002).
With compulsory schooling in the UK being extended to 18 years we shall soon have a lot of angry young men in our classrooms. It is therefore a good job that they will not have any access to guns. (At this point I understand it is conventional to say, “Oh, wait…”)
I’m not sure what to make of the first comment, but I thought your post was insightful into an aspect of this young man’s descent into an apparent nightmare of mental illness and violence.
What strikes me about the overall situation is remembering an article I read a few months ago, in which the point was made that, under the current CW, it is acceptable to coerce and make demands on any citizen as long as he or she is an ordinary member of society.
If, however, the person becomes a member of an officially sanctioned “victim” group”, such as the mentally ill have become in our society, suddenly that person’s right to any and all eccentric and bizarre behavior, even that which would normally be considered threatening, lewd, or disorderly, becomes absolute, and cannot be sanctioned.
This “Bizarro world” attitude is very clear in the V-Tech case. The more disturbed this man became, the more threatening, the more disruptive, the more the college authorities tied themselves into knots trying to avoid any hint that they were taking serious action against him due to his clearly deteriorating mental state.
The approach, as a very insightful column described it today, was an odd combination of therapeutic concern and utter coldness, as if the actual fate of this person and those who were forced to deal with, and endure, him were aspects of a clinical situation devoid of any need for true human concern and decisive action.
As with just about anything that happens, I have no confidence that the MSM will get much of it right, either in the facts of the case or any logical and meaningful conclusions that might be drawn.
Instead, as we have already seen, and I have studiously avoided, the tragedy of this man’s madness and the deaths of dozens of innocent people is nothing more than fuel for sensational tabloid journalism, and a ratings driven crassness even more grotesque than the usual “special reports” on just about anything that has to do with sex and naked women, or scandels that just happen to mature during “sweeps week”.
What is the obvious lesson we can learn from this gruesome slaughter? That mentally disturbed people who are constantly threatening everyone around them should be taken seriously, and placed in a secure, controlled environment for the safety of all concerned.
Will that be the lesson enunciated by the makers of our society’s CW? I doubt it.
(And, yes, I refuse to even use this man’s name. It would have been best if none of the sensational, and copycat-inspiring, publicity he has received had occurred. He should have become an anonymous madman, and the front pages and TV screens filled with the images and stories of his victims.)
Evil defies rational explanations.
I think one lesson we can take from this, is the need to stand up for ourselves. To not blindly adhere to authority (which I think, in this case, was also political correctness, i.e., “tolerance”).
If those students who decided to “cut class” because of Cho’s behavior had instead felt empowered to stand up for their rights to attend cla$$ without feeling threatened, there would have been pressure put on the ‘system’ to deal with the problem student.
And every one of us who has willfully or negligently bowed to ‘unfair tolerance’ needs to review our role in society.
Fear not to stand up and speak out for your rights.
I bet he learnt some other things that were much more lethal, and in particular some incompatible notions of the individual’s proper relationship to society and social conduct that are well-established in the US and becoming more so in Britain, too: that you have a right to respect and recognition which you ought to demand; that actual social and personal worth is synonymous with popularity, wealth, and arbitrarily determined high status activities; that you can’t blame individual luck, or circumstance – it is all your fault; at the same time that your life is determined by race, sex, sexuality, and you must blame others for that; that you have a permanent record that you can’t fix if it deviates from perfection.
Students at UK universities from outside of the EU are cur an enormous amount more slack in many ways including behaviour and the quality of their work. I know a civ eng prof who basically had to re-write one student’s PhD thesis because the English was so poor. Why does this happen?
Non-EU students pay vastly higher fees. Is it a possible that VT had a similar policy?
In general, I think we see the result here of selective gun-control. If you have a society that is heavily armed and then “havens” that are gun-free they will attract nut-cases to them.
Much of the media-focus in the UK is on the “shooting” aspect of such atrocities and perhaps too little on the “school” aspect. Schools banning guns make them very soft targets. I mean, why would anyone shoot-up an Amish girls’ schoolroom? Rather than the local US Marines base?
I do not know whether lecturers were forced to teach Cho (or whether, if they were, it would have been better if they had not been). But, as you point out, he was not forced to go to class. Perhaps his being forced (years before) to go to school was a factor in his state of mind and perhaps it was not – I do not know.
However, I do know that Virginia Tech administrators supported the blocking in committee of a measure before the legislature of the Commonwealth of Virginia that would have allowed people to have their firearms on the property of State colleges.
All the “gun free zone” policy at Virginia Tech did was to disarm honest people (the only people who are going to obey “gun control” regulations) and turn them into helpless victims.
Cho was never going to respect a “gun free zone” (someone who is prepared to violate the basic law against murder is not going to respect “gun control” regulations), and experience shows (time and time again) that to depend on the government to protect people is folly.
Nick: I doubt that this guy paid higher fees, because , as has been reported, he came to the US with his parents several years ago, and most likely had a green card, if not citizenship. He may have paid higher fees if he was not a VA resident, but that’s irrelevant to your point. No, I think VR has it right: being mentally disturbed automatically puts one into an “untouchable” category, just like being black, gay, female, or any one else who belongs to a group of people that a century ago was routinely discriminated against.
Alisa,
I didn’t appreciate he was probably classed as a VA resident. And I know the difference that makes to fees at a state college.
But… There must be some reason his unhinged behaviour was tolerated for so long. From what I’ve read he was taking phone-camera pictures of girls under the table and that would violate very strongly the sexual harrassment policy of any University I can think of.
It is possible that he was allowed to get away with that sort of thing because the irresistable force of him being Asian clashed with the immovable object of the sexual harrasment rules to the extent that nothing much happened.
What I do know is that he would have been severely dealt with (and expelled if he persisted) at any of the Universities I’ve been to. So, it’s still a bit of a mystery.
In general though, what does PC do when the “rights” of protected minorities clash?
Exactly. The only reasonable answer to that is to do away with PC, and instead just be reasonable.
BTW, there is also a possible slight variation on the “irresistible force of him being Asian”, which is not necessarily the fear to offend, but the idea that his bizarre behavior maybe just a “cultural thing”. I mean, who knows, maybe this is how these weirdos all behave wherever it is they came from. Does not mean they all shoot each other all the time, does it. Never underestimate the power of ignorance, even in academia:-)
to depend on the government to protect people is folly
It is not just folly, it is simply absurd to expect it.
No society can provide the resources necessary to afford the level of protection its members need.
A military and / or police force can provide a broad brush protection, but it cannot provide individual ad hoc protection.
Any government which seeks to deny the individual the right to self defense is complicit in murder.
Also, I don’t know what the standards are in VT’s English department, but Cho’s play, ‘Richard McBeef’, would have contributed at least as much as his sexual harassment to his expulsion from any sensible university.
Imagine if cooking at home was illegal, and everyone had to report to government restaurants. You know, because more people die of bad nutrition, obesity and food poisoning than guns. Also, as they always say, it would be more economical. Plenty of people would sing the praises of govfood and it would of course be big business.
But it would be bad.
Now, why do people think that government development of the intellect would be better? Of course, how would many people know, since it is all they have experienced and cannot imagine anything else?
Government schools are the equivalent of public housing projects. At best.
Whaaa? Et tu, Natalie? You’re going to use this opportunity to give your hobby horse a workout? You’re going to validate his whiny post-mortem manifesto? “Waaa, waaa, you made me do this, you big bullying Mercedes-driving, trust fund-owning, cognac-sipping meanies! It’s nothing to do with me! The blood’s on your hands! Waaa!”
Sorry, Natalie, I’m going to have to put you on the list.
Cho didn’t have to go to the school where he was bullied. He could have gone to another school. His parents could have home-schooled him, which is perfectly legal in Virginia.
Perhaps, as immigrants, they did not know this. If they are typical Korean immigrant parents, they might not have cared. They would have insisted he go to school. So unless you’re arguing for the emancipation of mentally ill twelve-year-olds, I don’t see how making school non-compulsory would have helped in this particular instance.
Now the other side of your point — that forcing Cho to go to school meant forcing the school to accept him — is more sensible. I believe much of the problems in American schools, at least, is that they no longer have the ability to expel troublemakers. But I have not heard that he was trouble in high school.
As some others have said, it’s a mystery why he was allowed to stay at Virginia Tech after numerous incidents. We often hear about some high schooler who has to attend a re-education camp because he drew a war scene in his notebook, or a kindergartner who is accused of sexual harrassment over some trifle. These would be public schools, who are compelled to teach the children who are compelled to attend. And yet here we have an actual creepy, violence-obsessed sexual harrasser, and a college, allegedly for grown-ups, does nothing.
It is naturally a question of who is to blame now that the tragedy has happened. And to do to prevent such things from happening again.
My opinion it is Virginia Tech Administration who is mostly responsible for the deaths of their students.
Problem students is no news no matter what school or college. It is about how you deal with them to ensure good schooling environment.
I would not like the idea of studying at VT. There must be something wrong with their staff there, for sure.
It is naturally a question of who is to blame now that the tragedy has happened. And what to do to prevent such things from happening again.
My opinion it is Virginia Tech Administration who is mostly responsible for the deaths of their students.
Problem students is no news no matter what school or college. It is about how you deal with them to ensure good schooling environment.
I would not like the idea of studying at VT. There must be something wrong with their staff there, for sure.
Nut-jobs often react by calling evil people ‘mentally ill’.
Angie,
If one has a political opinion then presumably one got it by observing (directly and indirectly via the media) the world and its events, and listening to arguments.
(I am not saying that everyone is a good observer or knows a sensible argument when s/he hears it.)
Every new event that comes along is a new data point. Sometimes the new data is dramatic enough to change one’s view (9/11 did that for many), sometimes it just gives rise to a small doubt, sometimes it is just one more slight piece of evidence for one’s previous opinion, sometimes it makes one cry, “I told you so” while shedding sincere tears. In general, the better founded one’s opinion was in the first place, the less likely is it to be overthrown and the more likely it is to be confirmed by a new data point.
Here is an extreme example from our present discussion on guns and murder. As you are aware (although my impression is that some of the earlier commenters are not) I believe that an armed citizenry would reduce crime. A while ago a neighbour of Perry de Havilland, John Monckton, was murdered by a home invader. I got into a debate about it with a blogger called John B whose argument about jumping to conclusions proving what you believed anyway was similar to yours.
Unfortunately John B’s provocative but interesting blog was forced off the internet by some nark telling his employers about an admittedly stupid post, so I can’t link to his exact words. However my response was
I had no personal experience of Cho or Virginia Tech (my deepest condolences to those who did) but I would still say something similar here. I have long held that where there is the lack of free association /disassociation, people behave horribly. I have long cited bullying in schools as an example. It is not controversial, or a denial of free will, that spree killers and violent people generally have often been bullied. It would be absurd of my to refrain from pointing this out when an event of the very type that led me to this opinion takes place. I want to persuade people. I want the situation to change.
Natalie, you may find this essay interesting.
There are so many comments grounded in ignorance that this subject begins to take on aspects of satire.
Peope are writing as if he was forceed to go to school? This guy was 23 years old. He was not required under any law to go to school for at least the last 7 years of his life. He was occupying space at a competitive Universtiy. He was privileged to be there.
As to his economic status. That is not clear. We can make some assumpitons. 1. His family was well-to-do, since his sister had graduated from one of the most prestigious (and costly) Universties in America; or 2. He and his sister had benifitted from some of the munifecent financial aid that is readily available to “disadvantaged” youth.
His problems started long before he arrived at VT. It is now becoming clear that he did not meet ordinary public school requirements going back to his pre-teen years. Yet, he finished public schools. He was accepted at, and allowed to remain in, a respected University despite obvious aberrant behavior.
This whole thing stinks of modern day Political Correctness run amok.
As to the reason his behavior was tolerated to the extent that it was, one can only conjecture. I would hope that the impending official investigation will enlighten us, but don’t hold your breath. The upper levels of the English Department at VT appear to be staffed by protected minorities in their own right.
OldflyerBob: I am not sure I agree with Natalie’s general point either, but one obvious point that could be made is that his years at VT are irrelevant, and what counts is him being forcibly schooled during the more formative years of elementary school through high school. Whether it is forced schooling that is to blame or not, it is obvious that by the time this guy went to college he was broken beyond repair. I certainly do agree that VT should have had the power to expel him, as soon as the troublesome signs appeared.
No one is responsible for the killings but Cho himself.
Yes VA Tech did a few things that probably enabled him to kill more but from the first killing it was all down to the vile Cho.
I disagree, Andrew. Cho was responsible for the first 2, 3 or 4. But the next 25 – 30 are squarely on the hands of the school. They forceably took away the right of self defense from people many of which were strongly unwilling to part with it. The school, with typically self-rightious self congratulations, forced a condition that led to those additional 25-30. They must be held accountable for the consequences of their actions.
Let’s not lose sight of the magnitude of this and why it has that magnitude.
It is not the case that Cho’s responsibility for his crimes is diminished if one holds that other people or factors – the school, the gun laws (whichever way you see that working), the culture – also played a part in causing the crime to happen.
It is not even the case that Cho’s responsibility for his crime is diminished if one blames named individuals for making the crime more likely. The model we use for car accidents – if Driver A is 75% responsible then Driver B must be 25% responsible – simply does not apply here.
I made a similar argument in the case of rape here.
Natalie, the issue of gun control is germane to the events at VT (and to the Monckton case, which I do remember), as is Steyn’s “culture of passivity” (even though I’m not convinced actually exists).
But I’m afraid that I believe that ascribing Cho’s problems to compulsory education, of all things, is firmly in the territory of “arbitrary and contrived”. Children are not compelled to attend school by the state, they are compelled by their parents (who are compelled by the state). Unless you believe that Cho’s parents would have allowed him to quit school when he was bullied, the compelling agency makes no difference. As I have said, there are other options open to parents who don’t want their children to attend a particular school.
If you had said that bullying was the problem, I would still have believed that it smacked of excusing Cho’s actions, but acknowledged that it might be an element.
You are of course correct when you say that people’s experiences inform their opinions. My experiences lead me to the opinion that without compulsory, free (to the parent) schools, very few parents would bother to educate their children. I believe that most people (which obviously doesn’t include you) feel that their duty to their offspring has been discharged simply by delivering them to adulthood alive. But then, those are just my experiences.
As to another point: I don’t want to give the impression that I blame VT for the massacre because they didn’t expel him. I just blame them for not expelling him when his presence was disruptive and his work sub-standard. I would feel the same if his illness manifested itself as a propensity to giggle during class and the deployment of canned snakes. (In which case, though, we would probably never had heard of him.)
It is possible that he was allowed to get away with that sort of thing because the irresistable force of him being Asian ….
There is no shortage of Asian students in the US schools – they are not a cultural oddity. In fact, teachers consider children of Asian immigrants a joy to teach.
He was not confronted about his behavior because he was perceived to be a special needs student. Children with special needs are mainstreamed – i.e. not segregated.
Cho may have been accepted into Virginia Tech because he had the right combination of high math SAT scores and grades. He had been enrolled in an Advanced Placement course in calculus in high school.
Parents are not compelled to send their children to school in the UK, yet – the government clearly wants it. I don’t know what it is like in the US.
Once the child is in school, if the buerecrats don’t want them to leave, it’s verging on the impossible to remove them.
I am a professor at a medium-sized private university in the Northeast US. To all those who say that VT should have “done something” to stop Cho before he went on his rampage: as long as a student is making minimum passing grades, paying the tuition bills, and not harming fellow students in a physical way, he cannot be expelled without a legal battle. Almost every university in the US, private or public, gets federal and state money and has to observe civil rights/anti-discrimination regulations. You can’t expel someone for “acting weird.” Were that the case, many students and half the faculty would be gone! Universities will, however, probably start looking surreptitiously for evidence of mental health problems in admissions procedures, since the mentally ill make their peers feel uncomfortable in class and in social settings (and universities do not want to upset the paying customers).
Apologies for these rather scrappy responses, but I wanted to get something down before the Samizdata caravan moves on.
Veryretired, if you could find a link to that article that described how “it is acceptable to coerce and make demands on any citizen as long as he or she is an ordinary member of society” I’d be interested to read it.
Angie, much seems to hinge on what is and is not contrived and arbitrary as an explanation for Cho’s rampage. I admit that looking back to his schooling is a “further back” link but I don’t see it as contrived. Spree killers usually have two main criteria in deciding where to carry out their killings.
(1) Where their grudge is focussed
(2) Where there are most helpless victims.
I attribute the prevalence of schools as targets for spree killers to the fact that they often fulfil both criteria.
I think if a Martian new to Earth were considering this it would seem to him asonishing how much nastiness we tolerate in schools relative to other places.
OldflyerBob, I specifically said that at the age of 23 Cho was no longer forced to go to school. In general I noticed much more assent to my views about the undesirability of Virginia Tech being forced to teach Cho than to my views about Cho being forced to go to school. If I may say so, I think that some of this difference stems more from the difficulty of imagining a changed state of affairs than from the actual merits of the proposals. It is much more politically feasible to make it easier to eject disruptive students from tertiary education without facing a lawsuit (and I sincerely hope this happens) than to overhaul the entire secondary education system – but by the time an unstable person reaches tertiary education it may be too late.
Another point I’d like to make is that what I’ve called “force” or “compulsion” is a continuum, not a yes-or-no thing. Between slavery and voluntarism lies a whole territory of social pressure, legal pressure, not being aware of alternatives etc.
Natalie—check with Shannon Love over at Chicagoboyz, he might have been the author.
People are not forced to send their children to school in Britain – IF they can prove that they home school them to acceptable standard (acceptable to the state that is).
Schooling has been thus semi compulsory in England and Wales (in places that had opted for a School Board under the Act of 1870) since an Act of (I seem to remember) 1876.
School boards have been compulsory (even in towns, such as my home town Kettering, where the people voted against having one) since the Act of 1891. Government schooling (at the primary level) has also been “free” since then. Elected school boards were abolished by the Act of 1902 – with their reponsibilities being taken over by the general county councils and (increasingly) national government (although the first, experimental, annual grant from national government to a few schools goes back all the way to 1833).
I believe Natalie has started up a special education blog to explore the matter of compulsory education (and government education – which is not quite the same thing), but I do not know anything about the blog.
Thanks, veryretired. I haven’t yet found it at Chicagoboyz, but given the interesting material there, continuing to look is not too unpleasant a task!
Paul, it wasn’t me who set up the specialist blog (Educational Conscription) campaigning against the raising of the school leaving age, although I have been quoted there.