NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

School Violence in Germany and the USA from the 1950s to the 1990s

Dirk Schumann, Jacobs University, Bremen

School violence is not a novel phenomenon. Early 19^th century school and college teachers who had to fight off attacks with and without weapons by their students found themselves in a position not much different from that of their successors in the “Blackboard Jungle” of the 1950s and subsequent decades. And the canes they were wielding were not much different, either. If we include non-physical forms of intimidation and threat in the list of forms of school violence, school violence in the 19^th and the 20^th centuries may largely appear as a continuum. Public debates about the issue, however, center on a model of discontinuity. When concerns are voiced about school violence in the broader public, the prevalent notion is that of a dramatic rise posing a grave threat to the very foundations of public education. From this perspective, the school of earlier periods becomes the “safe haven” it never was. The debate about school massacres, triggered by the Columbine shooting and subsequent incidents on the other side of the Atlantic, is only the most recent example. Yet, it also draws attention to features of school violence that may indeed be novel (with respect to the more recent past) such as the occurrence of deadly violence in a small-town setting. Historical research on school violence has to disentangle its old and new elements and place it in its broader social and cultural context, thereby focusing in particular on how it was perceived and construed in public debates and how experts of various stripes sought to gain hegemony over its definition and its treatment. A transnational and transatlantic approach is very instructive, not least for the past fifty years, as the media on the European side of the Atlantic watched with particular interest the U.S. and experts across Western Europe and America greatly intensified their contacts.

From October 2007 to January 2008, I had the chance to work on a comparative project on school violence in Germany and the U.S. in the period from the 1950s to the 1990s as a member of the interdisciplinary and international research group “Control of Violence” at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research at the university of Bielefeld (for detailed information on the group and the individual projects see www.uni-bielefeld.de/(en)/ZIF/FG/2007Control). Chaired by historian Heinz-Gerhard Haupt (Bielefeld/Florence) and sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer (Bielefeld), the group discussed the hypothesis that we are witnessing a loss of control of violence worldwide, which manifests itself in an increase of individual and collective violence of criminal and political character. The validity of this hypothesis is not to be discussed here (suffice it to say that a fair number of members of the group were rather skeptical about it). It may be said, though, that by drawing attention to the discourses and practices of “control” in various institutions as well as to the data that are behind the apparent rise of incidents of violence it helps avoiding the somewhat stale debates about the “causes” of violence.

The conceptual framework of my project is based on Stanley Cohen’s concept of “moral panics”. According to Cohen, such a panic occurs when troubling incidents in a society are perceived as not only as dangerous in themselves but also as indicative of a larger threat to basic values and interests. The media play a key role in presenting the nature of this threat to a wider public, politicians and other pivotal public figures make their voices heard, experts join the fray to analyze the threat and propose strategies of handling it, new (or old) ways of coping are resorted to, and eventually the issue may fade away from public view, at least for some time. While Cohen’s social constructivism does not intend to dismiss “moral panics” as completely false and dangerous in themselves, it raises the question why certain problems become objects of a “moral panic” whereas others that are essentially similar fail to attract massive public and expert attention. Thus, Cohen’s model helps refine the historical analysis of school violence in at least two respects. First, it precludes a simple linear conceptualization of the issue. Whether such violence is perceived as being on the rise or declining is predicated not only, as standard criminological theory has it, on ‘labeling’ certain behavior as violent, but also on the attention cycles of the media. Secondly, the model emphasizes the importance of “experts” – broadly conceived as scholars as well as academically trained top staff in organizations and institutions – who not only provide analytical categories for dealing with violence but also help shape public opinion in the media and translate political decisions into daily practice in schools, clinics, and refomatories.

The main focus of my research was on examining the discourses in which school violence was defined and ways of controlling it discussed. The comparative look at the U.S. and (West) Germany is instructive, not least because references to the U.S. - both to the actual situation in the schools and to the explanatory model of social scientists - were common in West German debates. Let me summarize two basic results of the comparison. First, public concern about school violence peaked at very similar points in time in both countries in the second half of the twentieth century, i.e. in the mid-1950s, the mid-1970s, and the early 1990s. This is by no means self-evident, given not only the differences between the two public school systems – the most important one being that between a three-tier system of secondary education in West Germany and the American high school – but also the importance of racial issues in the U.S. Here, the migration of Blacks and Hispanics to the big cities influenced concerns about youth and school violence in the 1950s, and desegregation had a major impact on the discussion of the 1970s as had the gang and drug problems of the inner cities on the discussion of the late 1980s and early 1990s. None of these factors were present in West Germany. This suggests the conclusion that public debates about school (and youth) violence in both countries may have been primarily an expression of unspecific anxieties in society (related to a new youth culture in the 1950s, the end of postwar growth in the 1970s, and the end of the certainties of the Cold War in the early 1990s) that crystallized around a tangible issue rather than a reflection of specific problems of public education. Secondly, the debate in West Germany seems to have become similar to that in the U.S. over the long run. A closer look at the 1970s is instructive. The starting point of the debate in the U.S. in this decade was a moral panic about an alleged “crime invasion” in the schools that found a striking manifestation in the published report of the hearings of a Senate subcommittee under Indiana Senator Birch Bayh. It painted a dramatic picture of vandalism and violence in America’s schools. Much less dramatic were the results of the subsequent empirical study Violent Schools, Safe Schools (1978), which for the first time amassed a wealth of data and provided the basis for a number of scholarly analyses. While the Bayh report was widely noted by West German education experts, triggered a lively discussion among academic experts and teachers, and may have contributed to hearings in several West German state parliaments about violence in the schools, the scholarly sound Safe Schools study was hardly noticed. While explicitly following Albert Cohen’s and James Coleman’s concepts in identifying social marginalization as one of the root causes of school violence (and thereby acknowledging that the situation in both countries was essentially the same), West German scholars preferred grand designs of a new relationship between school and society to proposals for concrete measures in the schools when it came to conceiving of strategies to deal with the violence. This “political” approach gave way to a more pragmatic one in the 1990s, when German education experts, now for the first time embarking on thorough empirical studies, concurred with their American counterparts in defining the problem of school violence basically as one of public health that required a wide variety of strategies and instruments of intervention and prevention focused on the school system.

These short remarks may indicate that even the recent history of school violence, more so than the history of criminal violence with its long-term statistical data (which, of course, also require interpretation), has to be broadly conceptualized as part of the general history of anxieties and expert discourses of the post-1945 decades. Differences between countries, in the final analysis, may have been grounded less in basic differences between nations than in how pedagogical, psychological, medical, sociological, and other experts were able to make their specific voices heard and have their ideas translated into political decisions and institutional practices. My subsequent research will focus on this point.