School Size
There is another thing to think about when it comes to school shootings. This wouldn’t apply to mass shootings per se. That is that schools could be kept deliberately small. High schools could be kept large enough to have the opportunities available to students, such as shops that contain the sorts of machinery necessary to prepare kids for work and computers that have the latest software so that they are up to speed whether for college or the workplace. Size goes a long way toward being able to afford such things. School districts, though, can use the size of the district in order to gain some advantages, such as cheaper software prices. They don’t necessarily need to duplicate shops across every school. They could use advanced scheduling and pool shop resources. School size could be kept low.
The reason for keeping school size low is just to reduce the chance of social pressure which leads up to certain behavior. It’s a way of maintaining complexity, but preventing critical mass in any single, save for the most popular, groups. Smallness alone wouldn’t prevent bullying. It might make for a structure which AI software could manage well enough to spot it. Small enough to track what is going on and, since there would be less of a chance that extraneous factors are causing something (too large a size of a marginal group than expected randomly skewing social interactions, especially in overcrowded conditions?), keep that data and make statistical analyses of them. The purpose wouldn’t really be to stop school shootings. It’d just be a means to help educate students. The best thing it would do would be to help establish a way to track and analyze the amount of time an individual student has actually spent in a particular learning activity versus how well that activity has helped them learn. Social media could prove useful as part of such a system. It’s that when that kind of data is available it can probably be used to model for things like alienation of certain groups or individuals, or if a person is resistant to expected change.
I don’t know what small is either. I guess 500 students in a high school? The best way would be to experiment. That way we might find all sorts of correlations. The results might teach us things we don’t know.
growsomeart 