The Dangers of Public School, Part Two: Abuse

Last week I brought up the physical dangers inherent in the school system. The only one I mentioned by name, however, was the possibility of an armed gunman entering your child's school and firing.

But there are others. Many others.

In fact, there are corrupt teachers. Teachers who should be training and looking after your children for you during the day have harmed their charges instead. I know. I knew one of those teachers.

To be fair, it wasn't a public school teacher. But this teacher was an artist when it came to luring young girls to him and abusing them. He would flatter them, tell them what they wanted to hear, and in general make a girl with low self-esteem feel important.

And that was the danger. They liked him. They grew to trust him. Just about every young girl he taught developed a crush on him, because he knew exactly what the feminine mind loves to hear. And he would say it, over and over.

He drew them in, and then used them how he wanted.

There are other examples of this, of course. I just happened to have been involved in this one to some extent. Not because I was physically a victim, but because I was dating the teacher in question. The emotional scars alone can be incapacitating to an adult, let alone a child. I was able to grow past it and heal. But I don't know what that has done to those poor girls.

The girls involved...every single one of them was one I'd pegged as a girl with low self-esteem. I'd wanted to help them. Because, you see, I was a teacher too. I wanted to build them up, because I could see that all of them felt badly about themselves. Some of them even told me that they thought they were fat, or ugly, and this horrified me.

How someone, anyone, could use such weaknesses to harm was beyond me. But people do it. And they do it to children.

Listen to your sons. Listen to your daughters. Watch. Don't be paranoid, please, but be wary. In a way, it's even more heartbreaking than a school shooting.