The making known of the motives of students who have used weapons in school. Elements to reflect on extreme school violence

Abstract

This paper starts with a historical account of school attacks by armed students, which are one form of the current international phenomenon of extreme school violence. Based on information from academic texts, news articles and electronic data bases, this account led to the location and construction of 65 cases that took place between August 1966 and March 2018. The paper then presents a significant statistic of the phenomenon based on data from the whole set of cases and analyzes what these cases have revealed about the motives, purposes and meanings of the attacks in order to find common features among them. Finally, based on this analysis about the knowledge of an act – an act whose violence and radical nature challenge the essential mission of the school as a creator and enabler of civilization and, at the same time, pose a threat to the society and the culture in which it took place – some links are established with the theoretical approaches of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Michel Foucault, which open a path to reflect on the issue at hand.