In Australia suicide is the major cause of death under the age of twenty-four. What is the connection between this and the school killings? The connection is very direct.
Youngsters grow up in a world of passive input. They spend hours watching television (3hours 15 minutes a day in Australia). They spend a great deal of time on the internet. Then there is the time spent listening to pop music.
As a result youngsters never develop any identity for themselves as 'people who can take charge of their own lives'. In short, they never practise thinking. For clothes and general behaviour they go along with the peer group or gang. But when it comes to a personal problem the gang is no use - so you fall apart and commit suicide.
Because youngsters have never developed any self-identity they need to belong to a gang or a group. In Denver it seems that the killers felt they did not belong to the general group so they formed the "trench coat mafia". Such groups seek role models because they are incapable of doing any individual thinking: cults and Nazism provide such models.
The killings were not out of anger or hatred as most people suppose but out of despair. You cannot belong to society and you do not know how to belong to yourself - so you seek a way out.
What is the answer? If these youngsters are taught "thinking" at an early age in school their self-esteem rises and they feel they can take charge of their own lives. In the Karee plainum mine in South Africa the direct teaching of thinking to totally illiterate miners reduced fights from 210 a month to just 4. Heroin addicts have given up heroin after learning to think. The head of the correctional establishment in Fremont, California told me he had tried everything with the youngsters and the only thing that worked was teaching my (CoRT) thinking.
When David Lane was head of the Hungerford Centre in London (a school which took youngsters too violent to be taught in other schools) the level of serious incidents dropped from eight a week to one a week after teaching thinking. There is now research going on in the prison system in Norway in this regard.
Teaching thinking does not mean the usual thinking taught in school which is concerned with analysis and judgement. Nor does it mean "critical thinking" which is only a small part of thinking. Teaching thinking means "operacy" and the skills of doing. Ninety percent of the errors in thinking are errors of perceptionm (Professor David Perkins at Harvard). Changing perceptions changes emotions - logic does not. This is what the CoRT program is about. It is now very widely taught in many countries. In Venezuela, by law, every pupil in school has to spend two hours every week on developing thinking skills directly.
So who is to blame? Technology for supposing that more technology is better without regards to values. The media for giving space to sensational aspects (like the killings) but ignoring constructive changes and possibilities. Pop musicians for failing to provide more constructive albums.
Even the Bible is not above blame. There is very little reference to thinking in the Bible. There are role models: the wise man does this; the foolish man does that etc. In contrast the prophet Mohammed in the Hadith says that "one hour of thinking" is better that one year of "praying".
It is essential that youngsters be taught the thinking needed to take charge of their own lives. Value systems are not enough. The purpose of thinking is to arrange the world so you can enjoy and deliver your values.
The second point is that seventy-four percent of youngsters regard "achievement" as the most important thing in their lives. Gangs are only negative because negative achievement is so much easier than positive achievement. Achievement in school is limited to academic or sporting achievement. There is a huge need to 'design' positive achievement.
These reflections are based on thirty years experience in running the most widely used program (cORT) around the world in the direct teaching of thinking in school. Recently in Johannesburg I taught thinking, one morning, to 5300 youngsters aged 6 to 12 in a large sports arena. I am currently working on a 'Campaign for Constructive Thinking' in South Africa.
Edward de Bono
Argentina
22nd April 1999
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