The kids are not okay, still

Schools and classrooms are supposed to be safe places, even if they induce the kind of anxiety or panic that surprise tests and recitations bring. Now, they’re also places where you can get shot dead.

Recent news reports in the Philippines are particularly jarring. An ex-girlfriend is gunned down in front of classmates. A boy murders his teacher over a grade. Elsewhere, kids film themselves beating a smaller peer while the rest cheer, as if it were halftime entertainment. That something in our young is fracturing violently is an understatement.

The United Nations Children’s Fund tells us that nearly six in 10 Filipino children under 14 endure violent discipline at home — abuse disguised as “parenting.” In schools, the picture is grim as well. The Philippines still ranks highest among participating countries in the Program for International Student Assessment. In 2022, one in three Filipino students reported being bullied at least once a week — roughly 43 percent of girls and 53 percent of boys, far above the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development or OECD average.

The Philippine Institute for Development Studies estimates the annual economic loss at P10 to P20 billion — nearly the entire Department of Education budget for textbooks and computers. Globally, the World Health Organization reports that youth aged 15 to 29 account for about 37 percent of homicide victims — nearly 200,000 young lives erased every year.

This doesn’t remain “schoolyard ugly.” It bleeds into everyday life, with funerals, not just bruises. Yet, the explanations are too familiar: broken homes, violent media, schools that teach algebra but not empathy, parents burned out or disengaged. As this Contrarian noted in a previous column, “The kids are not okay,” none of these are revelations. What’s new is the escalation — or maybe our tolerance of it. We’ve gone from fistfights to firearms, and we keep telling ourselves we’re surprised.

Really? More like we’ve been desensitized until someone we know becomes part of the statistics. Then it becomes personal — we rage, we clench our fists, and gnash our teeth.

Other countries have shown what works — for them — and what doesn’t. Sweden paired closer youth supervision with apprenticeships to steer at-risk teens away from gangs. In the United States, some initiatives have shown promise: behavioral threat assessment teams in Virginia schools boosted counseling and parental engagement while cutting suspensions.

Australia, after its 1996 massacre, implemented a full-scale gun buyback — more than 650,000 firearms surrendered, and mass shootings disappeared for a decade. These are different paths, but with one lesson: prevention must be systemic, not symbolic. In the meantime, Europe is starting to see US-style school massacres, with experts tracing them to copycat behavior amplified by social media.

Which begs the uncomfortable question: is the Philippines next? Are we waiting for our own Columbine moment — or many smaller ones — before we wake up? With urgency, we need mental health care in schools; social-emotional learning and anti-bullying programs with teeth, not just laws on paper.

True, these don’t make good clickbait. Nobody viralizes school counselors — but maybe we should, starting with those TikToking, dancing teachers. Otherwise, we’ll cry, we’ll scroll, we’ll hashtag, and then we’ll sink back into inertia — until the next classroom turns into a crime scene.

Because the kids are not okay, still.