Photo by Marjan Blan | @marjanblan on Unsplash

Whenever we have fire drills in school (and the Law says we must have them monthly) a student invariably asks me why we do it. It’s a reasonable question if you are ten years old. Ten year olds actually ask more reasonable questions than adults. Fire drills are loud, disruptive, half-chaotic. The teachers yell at the kids to stay silent, stay in line, stay calm, even though nothing is actually going on but that damned shrieking alarm.

So I explain that we practice for a possible event that might make us panic and do the wrong things and get hurt. Not stay calm. Not know where to go. Not leave the room.

But sometimes another kid will then ask, “But why do we practice if we never actually have fires?”

Teachers call this a ‘teachable moment’. I explain that we do all kinds of things to prevent fires, everywhere. We build a certain way, have fire stations, put smoke detectors in our homes. We even make it illegal to make clothes out of some fabrics that burn easily. In the wild we have forest rangers and laws about campfires. We make sure the wires we use are safe. We put lightning rods on our houses now. But even with all that, fires still happen, because of lightning, or accidents, or things we didn’t think of. So we prepare. And when it does happen, we do everything we can to make sure it either doesn’t happen again, or doesn’t do the damage.

I have to tell the children I teach that as destructive as fire is, it’s an inescapable part of the world. That like many dangerous things, we need it and use it, but as a society we help each other stay safe. Not everyone is careful all the time, not even adults, and sometimes there are things in nature that we cannot control, such as lightning. The adults, we tell them, try always to prevent danger, but sometimes they can’t, and so we do other things to stay safe. We prepare and we practice.

It’s like a hurricane, I tell them, since we live in Florida. We make sure our roofs are strong and we have supplies. We figure out ways to predict the weather, and leave if we need to. We can’t control a hurricane (yet), I tell them, but we can keep ourselves safe.

Schools are for ‘teaching’. We teach and the kids learn, but it’s the teaching that comes first. What we ‘teach’ in schools are the ideas and behaviors and skills the collective adults of the nation consider necessary, important, or valuable. What we teach is what our society considers ‘normal’.

And what we are forced to ‘teach’ now, every year in every school, is that another human being coming to kill them with a machine gun is an unavoidable part of the American adult world. That it’s normal. That we cannot do anything about it and so must prepare for when it comes, like fire or storms.

When we practice, as we now must, for an active shooter in our school, my students ask, again, “Why are we doing this?” If they were adults, like me, they’d say ‘what the fuck?’ But they are not, and so they ask innocently, “Why?”

“Just in case,” I say. “So we can be safe and make the right decisions. Just like if there is a fire.”

Unlike too many adults, children ask good questions. They don’t stop at one answer. They keep probing, one ‘why?’ after another.

“Why would anyone do that?” they ask. “Why can’t you stop them?”

No teacher has answers. Because we know that lots of things could be done, by adults. It’s just that they have chosen not to. Like the children, we know that an assault rifle has no use other than to kill many people. Like the children, we know that people must respond to dangerous things, even make hard choices, to prevent harm. Like the children, we know that selfish excuses are no excuse.

But that’s not an instruction, that’s not something to ‘teach’. What we teach is embedded in what we do, and every active shooter drill, every news story, every tragedy, is a lesson. A lesson about what we allow. A lesson about what we must accept. A lesson about what is beyond our control.

The ten year old understands that guns are not lightning. They understand that people make guns, and buy them, and use them. They know that people are not hurricanes, that people live together, and follow each other’s rules, and look out for each other. They know about laws, and police, right and wrong. They know more about bullying than we ever did.

The ten year old, or twelve year old, or fifteen year old, asks, in a thousand different ways, “Why haven’t you done something?”

Our only answer, really, is: “We are doing something. We’re doing this drill.”

Here’s the thing, though. Here’s the horrible, frustrating, rage-inducing, tragic thing: What we ‘teach’ to children normalizes it.

Schools are where we teach our children the attitudes and actions that our society considers acceptable and important. School is where we normalize our nation’s adult behaviors. Everything we have been forced to do to protect the children we teach actually normalizes the insanity and horror.

It is depressingly, frustratingly, enragingly insane that schools must say, with complete and necessary seriousness, that ‘we are doing our part to protect children’.

Why are we doing it? Because the adults have decided that guns and gun violence are an inescapable reality over which we are powerless to control in any way other than to lock every door, fence every school, and then cower in terror when it inevitably arrives.

And to keep our children safe, teachers must accept this ‘truth’ despite its corrupt, cowardly, shameful implications. We must, through our actions and implications, ‘teach’ children that horrific gun violence is either something we must allow, or something so embedded in the world that the only response is to prepare for it as best we can.

Our drills teach children that assault weapons and mass murder and inexplicably evil men are as inescapable, as unavoidable, as inevitable, as fire or hurricanes.

And it doesn’t matter if what you teach a child is a lie or a truth.

Teach it to them and it becomes their truth.