Failure to Hold: The Politics of School Violence.

By Julie A. Webber. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. 232p. $72.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

What do conventional accounts of shooting rampages in public schools fail to reveal, and what might qualify as a more adequate analysis? Why do such incidents occur, and how might we begin to address the circumstances that provoke them? What is the relationship between the routinized forms of violence that define much of everyday life within the United States and the more episodic forms that provide the stuff of newspaper headlines? These are some of the questions taken up by Julie Webber in this provocative but uneven book.

Webber's argument is built around her often insightful examination of three incidents of public school violence that took place between 1997 and 1999; in West Paducah, Kentucky, Jonesboro, Arkansas, and Springfield, Oregon. Conventional explanations of these incidents, especially those purveyed by the mainstream mass media, invite educational policymakers to respond by adopting strategies of containment, such as those involving restrictive dress codes, metal detectors, surveillance cameras, and so on. Each of these strategies is aimed at preventing weapons of not-so-massive destruction from passing through the schoolhouse door, and all are predicated on a deep distrust, if not profound fear, of the stated beneficiaries of these disciplinary practices.

Practices of this sort, Webber argues, merely intensify the more pernicious effects of what she, adopting a concept from neo-Marxist scholarship, calls “the hidden curriculum of schooling” (p. 3). Although not elaborated as thoroughly as it might be, the central principle of that curriculum appears to postulate that at its best, the public school is to assume the character of a home of happy harmony, a place where real conflict is absent, where socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic inequalities are overcome, where history is a progressive flow of so much pabulum, where the prevailing norms for success in twenty-first-century America are unproblematically reproduced. For many adolescents, the socio-psychological pressure spawned by the tension between the idealized exhortations implicit in this curriculum and the reality of strategies of confinement generates the very rage the former seeks to deny and the latter seeks to quell. Ironically, Webber argues, the students who most intensely experience the gap between what the hidden curriculum promises and a culture that routinely contravenes that pledge are precisely those most likely to turn to violence, whether directed against themselves in self-destructive conduct, such as risky sexual conduct or suicide, or, alternatively, against their peers, whether via the fantasized violence of video games or in the form of bullets sprayed throughout the cafeteria. Those who expect little from school, as well as those who are already severely victimized, by racism, class deprivation, homophobia, or whatever, are far less likely to be disappointed by their educational experience and, so far, less likely to transmute that disillusionment into mayhem.

Not surprisingly, given her Marxist and equally evident Foucauldian theoretical sympathies, Webber holds that public schools “reproduce the dominant relations of production in a given society” (p. 4), which, in the United States, means that students are trained to think of education simply as a means to (possible) employment, and to value that employment as a means to unrestrained consumerism. Perhaps surprisingly, given these same Marxist and Foucauldian sympathies, when Webber seeks to imagine a public school that might foster the emancipation of young minds, she turns to John Dewey and the progressive educational reforms he espoused. In thinking through this issue, in addition to Marx, Foucault, and Dewey, who already make for strange theoretical bedfellows, Webber also draws on Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes, D. W. Winnicott, José Ortega y Gasset, and others, thereby creating what she calls “a mishmash of theories pulled together to explain a very complex social problem” (p. 10).

The obvious question to ask of such an enterprise is whether such a theoretical hodgepodge is adequate to the task Webber sets herself in this book. In asking this question, I do not mean to reject theoretical eclecticism per se, but I do mean to ask whether the particular mix employed by Webber enables her to offer a coherent account of school violence, as well as the measures that might be taken in response to it. Two brief examples suffice to indicate the sort of problem I have in mind. First, on the one hand, in turning to Dewey, Webber's aim is to ask what sort of public schools might teach students the critical intelligence that will enable them to flourish in a democratic society. More specifically, her vision of a school that is worthy of a genuine democracy is one that appears as a “free public space of experimentation for the social good” (p. 9). Yet such liberal humanist discourse, as well as its implicit vision of a possible future in which students engage in creative problem solving under the gentle tutelage of nonauthoritarian instructors, is sure to be skeptically greeted by those who, following Foucault, have learned to hear such discourse as a veiled rationale for ever more insidious forms of social control. Second, Webber's belief in the possibility of creating schools that facilitate the emergence of a more robust democracy appears at odds with her Marxist sensibilities, which suggest that the public school is little more than a “kindergarten-to-twelfth-grade assembly line” (p. 29) aimed at producing the sorts of docile bodies required by contemporary capitalism.

To note that Failure to Hold does not entirely succeed in its own project is not to deny its real merit. Webber's argument offers a welcome alternative to the mass media hysteria that typically accompanies incidents of exceptional violence in public schools, the containment strategies that invariably follow them, and the facile explanations proffered by talking heads, who point to the proliferation of firearms, the seductiveness of Goth culture, the banishment of God from the public school, and the fine line between adolescence and psychopathology.