MARINA DEL REY, CALIF.--The shootings at Santana High School and at Bishop Neumann High School have one obvious but still shocking fact in common: they happened at school. But there is actually good reason for this--our schools have become factories turning more and more of our children into potential, amoral killers, said Ayn Rand Institute senior fellow Onkar Ghate.
       "The precipitous rise in school violence over the course of the last decade runs directly parallel with the rise of 'Progressive' theories of education," said Ghate. "Progressive education rejects traditional schooling, which emphasizes learning a body of pre-established information. Progressive education replaces that with a child-centered approach that emphasizes a child's 'self-expression' and spontaneous impulses. Progressivism holds that children do not learn by thinking but rather by feeling and doing. Teachers should not be 'authoritarian;' they should always praise children for their unique and inventive answers--regardless of whether those answers are right or wrong, moral or immoral. As long as students feel 'good' about themselves and are socially 'adjusted,' anything goes.
       "The fact of the matter is that most of our schools today are intellectual and moral wastelands. If Americans want to stop school violence, they should advocate the abandonment of the schools' deadly experiment in Progressive education and restore a curriculum that emphasizes reason over emotions, knowledge over feelings, moral judgment over moral agnosticism, and self-control over 'self-expression.'"

Ayn Rand Institute senior fellow Onkar Ghate is available for interviews.