Also: how does the time investment here compare in terms of preventable deaths to training in CPR? About other common medical problems (eg allergies)? Training in counseling for depression, suicide, abuse, rape, and pregnancy?
In other words, if your goal is to prevent harm to children by better training teachers to handle it, I don’t find it at all obvious that training teachers to handle an armed assailant is the best use of that (limited!) training time. I’m also not sure whether added training aimed at that is better than simply trying to train them to be better teachers (I suspect in some cases it is, but I still consider it unproven), or whether that additional training prevents enough harm to be worth the cost (again, I suspect it does, but I consider that unproven as well).
While a school shooting is what got me thinking about this, I didn’t mean to limit to that specifically; my pre-cached thought on mass murders is “if people in the crowd had been armed, the shooter would have been stopped quickly”. I phrase it that way to emphasize that I have no real evidence there.
Spending time training people to help those around them, in general, as a possible solution, though … I admit that I’d honestly never thought of that. It doesn’t just apply to teachers, either; one can imagine corporate “sensitivity training” that included basic lessons in how to identify/help/console a coworker who seems to be having a rough time lately.
I’m not sure that we are culturally capable, even in theory, of identifying the actual impact of such a program, but it’s a hell of an idea.
Also: how does the time investment here compare in terms of preventable deaths to training in CPR? About other common medical problems (eg allergies)? Training in counseling for depression, suicide, abuse, rape, and pregnancy?
In other words, if your goal is to prevent harm to children by better training teachers to handle it, I don’t find it at all obvious that training teachers to handle an armed assailant is the best use of that (limited!) training time. I’m also not sure whether added training aimed at that is better than simply trying to train them to be better teachers (I suspect in some cases it is, but I still consider it unproven), or whether that additional training prevents enough harm to be worth the cost (again, I suspect it does, but I consider that unproven as well).
Those are both really good points, thanks.
While a school shooting is what got me thinking about this, I didn’t mean to limit to that specifically; my pre-cached thought on mass murders is “if people in the crowd had been armed, the shooter would have been stopped quickly”. I phrase it that way to emphasize that I have no real evidence there.
Spending time training people to help those around them, in general, as a possible solution, though … I admit that I’d honestly never thought of that. It doesn’t just apply to teachers, either; one can imagine corporate “sensitivity training” that included basic lessons in how to identify/help/console a coworker who seems to be having a rough time lately.
I’m not sure that we are culturally capable, even in theory, of identifying the actual impact of such a program, but it’s a hell of an idea.