The Discourse on Violence Prevention: What are the Implications for Smaller Schools?

Abstract

A seemingly rigorous positivistic scientific research that claims only to record the "objective facts" about school violence (e.g., by identifying "persistently dangerous schools" or recording the numbers of "violent incidents" in a particular school) in fact constructs the very subject (the violent student) that it purports to describe. This dominant discourse, reinforced by funding agencies that insist on "evidenced-based" results and randomized controlled trials (said to be the "gold standard" for establishing "what works"), have reduced the unit of analysis to the individual adolescent (who finally becomes defined as the "perpetrator") instead of investigating the societal institutions (e.g., large overcrowded schools, the prevalence of guns, violent films) which undergird the violence. This paper rejects such simplistic and reductionistic explanations for youth violence and argues that psychoanalysis, ethnography, and social interactionist disciplines reveal a much more complex picture of the contexts in which youth violence occurs. The small school movement in conjunction with the appearance of the initiative known as social and emotional education are two hopeful phenomena that have emerged to address some of these social inequities and injustices.