Hamilton Bertie “Tony”
Gibson (1914-2001) was a British anarchist, conscientious objector (for
which he was imprisoned) and psychologist. Gibson wrote Youth for
Freedom (1951), a provocative pamphlet. From this work, we may extract
a theory that explains school violence, which is a worldwide phenomenon and
not uniquely American. Being worldwide, youth violence cannot be explained by
the means of violence used, be they guns, clubs, knives, rocks, spears, fire,
or whatever.
The theory can be partly
stated as follows. Children have certain behaviors that come naturally to
them, instinctively one might say. If they are allowed to have a childhood
that lets them vent and live through these instincts, they will develop into
adults who are not unusually aggressive. But if adults make the child live in
ways that go too much against these natural instincts, then the child retains
its asocial and ferocious instincts into adult life, rather than living
through them as a childhood stage of development. Adults then look adult and
act adult but retain child instincts and behavior. As he says “The nice young
men who lightheartedly fly bombers and devastate towns are simply neurotic
beings who have had to wait until their twenties to give proper expression to
the instincts of infancy.” Later he writes “The children who grow up with a
satisfactory gratification of their instinctual life in the various phases of
their development are more likely to have sound adult instincts at a
comparatively early age and therefore resist the fantastic demands of the
State in the matter of military service.”
The more that a culture
(mainly through public schools) anywhere in the world attempts to suppress
mildly aggressive or simply physical behaviors that are peculiar to children
and make them behave in adult ways that restrict them too greatly, the more
likely we are to observe extremes of aggression breaking out and the more
that aggressive instincts will be nurtured in adults. Giving drugs to
children to suppress their activities and tendencies will tend to produce a
greater tendency toward excessive violence, not simply or only by the
physical aspects of the drugs but also by psychological reactions to the
behavior control. The same outcome will come about by preventing boys from
being boys, over-controlling rough and tumble play, overly suppressing
taunts, fights, shoves, pushes, and rough sports. Children need the freedom
to play with other children, to shout, to roughneck, and to play all kinds of
games. They need the freedom to roam around on their own. They shouldn’t be
prevented from learning how to shoot rifles or bows and arrows, if this
appeals to them. Vicarious video game experiences may or may not provide
adequate substitutes for play; I suspect that they do not in general do so.
The basis of this theory
is Gibson’s observation that children are weaker than adults, and that to
survive as weak beings under the thumbs of adults, they have behaviors
peculiar to being children. “The child is a gregarious but not a truly social
animal; when in mental and physical health, it is aggressive to the point of
ferocity and capable of a ruthlessness which normal adults do not possess. It
is entirely self-centered, and its love for other persons is of an essentially
different nature from the affection which an adult may feel for another
person.”
Aggression in adults and
therefore approval of the State’s aggressions is, according to this theory,
fostered by social systems and adults that overly control children. Since
public schools exercise such control, they produce more adults who support
the State, not simply or only by indoctrination or false history but by
psychological means that make people comfortable with violent aggression and
immorality.
“The well-meaning social
moralists who bring up children according to an idealized adult code of
behavior have to bear their full share of the blame for the supreme
immorality of adult behavior.”
“The State in its drive
towards totalitarian dominion assumes more and more the aspect of a
hypocritical and repressive adult controlling a lot of children. In all the
aspects of State interference with individual liberty we see the nasty
schoolmarm, the pompous father.”
Guns do not explain youth
and school violence because it is worldwide
and
doesn’t always involve guns. There are other theories than Gibson’s that
attempt to explain school violence. There are theories that directly
challenge Gibson, arguing that childhood aggression is not a playful thing
that children grow out of. They argue that aggression is learned and
therefore must be countered or suppressed in one way or another by adults.
But if this is true, why are Americans and others experiencing even greater
school violence as the attempts to suppress it are heightened?
I think Gibson’s theory has merit. If we are observing
greater school violence, it is at the same time that we observe society
constricting the schools, enforcing more and more rules, attempting to
feminize boys, and going to extremes to suppress even mildly aggressive, even
verbal, behavior. We see greater amounts of drugs being administered to
children to dampen them down. This is tending to prevent normal childhood
development. In the vain quest of reducing person-on-person violence, it is
enhancing it. Not only that, it is producing adults who are comfortable with
high amounts of State-inflicted violence and aggression.
T
