Our children are not doing well. America needs anger-management training.

It was 1994 in my ancient history class. We were studying the Phoenicians, a race of master mariners and squinty-eyed businessmen famous for driving hard bargains. I guess it makes sense that the Phoenicians imagined their god Baal drove a hard bargain too. Baal wanted what the Phoenicians valued most; he wanted their babies. Sacrificial babies were placed in hollow iron replicas of their god … essentially blast furnaces for the sole purpose of incinerating children. The ancient Jews knew all about it and were horrified.

Almost instantly, Becca, a student in my class, raised her hand in protest.

“It can't be true,” she said. “If the Phoenicians valued their children most, they would have refused. They wouldn't have done it! There must have been something else that they wanted even more than their children. What was it that was so important to them that they were willing to sacrifice their own children to get it?”

That was a profound question, especially from a 14-year-old. If a society is willing to sacrifice its children, whether it's for war or any other reason, we need to know what we're willing to sacrifice them for.

By almost any measurement, our children are not doing well. Almost 40% of young people 11 to 26 suffer sufficient social anxiety to prefer self-checkout aisles rather than stand with strangers in supermarket lines. A recent survey of over 1,000 district leaders, principals and teachers reported that almost 10% of middle and high school teachers have been assaulted by students and twice as many principals have been.

In our own Barnstable High School, over half the kids can't depend on where their next meal is coming from.

The recent teachers’ strike in Newton wasn't just about salary; it was about getting enough social workers in schools to help staunch continually rising student anxiety and violence. The Newton teachers wanted a minimum of one social worker for every school in their district. Ask almost any teacher and you'll hear that their teaching environment has declined from manageable to difficult or impossible. We are losing experienced and dedicated teachers all across America.

Schools are posting signs in the front office reminding parents not to scream at or otherwise abuse administrators, teachers or staff. There is a national shortage of referees for high school games. They're simply tired of being threatened and assaulted by parents who didn't like the call.

Here's the challenge. Our children serve as canaries in the coal mine. When they stop singing, that's telling us there isn't sufficient oxygen for the rest of us. Clearly, we need to talk — but in a self-polarizing society, we compulsively weaponize each problem we see to hurl against neighbors with whom we disagree. If a fact is repurposed as ammunition, we are no longer able to learn from it.

What is it we care more about than the mental health and safety of our children? It's winning the next argument in the culture wars. That is the thing for which we are willing to sacrifice our children — and almost everything.

So the minute we point out that there's trouble in the schools, the left and the right immediately spin the argument into something ideologically useful. We need school uniforms. Teachers are too woke. We need to bring back school prayer …

But if you ask striking teachers across the country, they'll tell you class sizes need to be made smaller so kids can be paid proper attention to. Class sizes of up to 30 guarantee that teachers can't assign writing because there won't be enough hours in the night for them to read it all.

We need more trained mental health practitioners and social workers in our schools. We need places where public schools can send violent kids when their behavior endangers fellow students and staff and sidelines teaching and learning.

It seems odd to imagine schools as primarily therapeutic environments but by now it has become clear that children who are scared or depressed or hurt cannot learn well, if at all. And this applies equally to children in elementary schools: If no adult seems capable of recognizing or addressing the pain they’re in, the resulting anger can endanger everyone. By 2020, half of all school shootings were by students or former students from the schools affected.

The problem is societal, not academic. Assaults on airline workers increased by 3,000 in 2020. America has seen a spiraling increase in road rage fatalities in the last 10 years. An American was being shot and killed in a road rage incident every 16 hours. In 2021, over 43,000 police officers were assaulted on the job. In 2022 we saw almost 44,000 gun deaths in the United States.

America doesn’t need an election next fall; we need an intervention. Our children aren't stupid. They're being screwed environmentally, economically, politically and socially — and they know it. But, and this is my principal point to share with you today, we seem ready to sacrifice our own children, to hurl them into the ideological furnace of our national divisions. Long before the realization of this breaks our hearts, it will have already broken theirs.

Lawrence Brown is a columnist for the Cape Cod Times. Email him at column response@gmail.com.

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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Americans need anger management training - or an intervention