Students are among the most idealistic members of society. Their youthful pursuit of ideals, fuelled by passion, innocence, and creativity, represents limitless potential that society can harness for progressive transformation. Throughout history, students have not only participated in but also shaped progressive movements. What defines them is their selfless sacrifice for the greater good of society.
Through their everyday experiences, students learn, reflect, and analyse, offering alternatives that challenge dominant knowledge traditions while resisting authoritarianism within and beyond the classroom. In doing so, they generate new ideas and progressive ideals that contribute to the radical transformation of society.
Why then do students resort to violence, bring guns into classrooms, and adopt violent methods of expression? It is time to move beyond an essentialist culture of causality that merely blames and criminalises students.
In a rare incident of gun violence in India, a ninth-grade boy shot his Physics teacher. In stark contrast, gun violence in schools has become a daily tragedy in the United States, where an estimated twelve children are killed and thirty-two injured by firearms every day. A study titled Gun Violence in the United States – 2022: Examining the Burden Among Children and Teens by the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at Johns Hopkins University reveals that firearms are now the leading cause of death among children and teenagers between one and seventeen years of age. On average, seven young people die each day in the U.S. due to gun violence. According to the Washington Post school shooting database, more than 390,000 students have been exposed to gun violence in schools between the Columbine High School massacre in 1999 and 2024.
Student violence is not confined to the United States, but the country experiences the highest levels, largely because students face intense forms of capitalist alienation both in schools and in society. The epidemic of gun violence among American students—and the broader crisis of student violence, including suicides across the world—is unlikely to decline. On the contrary, it is bound to intensify as the marketisation, commercialisation, and privatisation of education deepen under capitalism. This process fosters widespread alienation, affecting students in particular and society at large. Student violence is not a starting point; it is a response to a violent capitalist system.
The commercialisation of education has transformed teaching and learning into a marketplace of essentialist interactions aimed primarily at securing grades, degrees, certificates, and narrow employability skills. This functionalist approach has eroded the critical culture of learning that once encouraged self-discovery, exploration of the world, and the development of a global consciousness that promotes mutual understanding of human needs and uniqueness. The objectified digitalisation of education in the post-pandemic era has further diminished organic interactions between students and teachers. Learning has been reduced to a means of securing employment, while its broader purpose—to cultivate critical, scientific, humanitarian, and secular consciousness capable of challenging and transforming society—has been undermined. The democratic traditions of knowledge that sustain democracy and universal human rights across the globe are being weakened.
A democratic classroom enables students to learn, interact, and innovate as individuals and as members of a community of learners committed to knowledge traditions that address human needs and the desire for emancipation from marginalisation, inequality, and exploitation. Such traditions have turned universities and academic institutions into centres of resistance against power, authoritarianism, and reactionary ruling classes. From anti-colonial struggles to movements against apartheid, imperialist wars, capitalism, feudal oppression, and caste-, class-, race-, gender-, and sex-based exploitation, students have consistently stood at the frontlines of radical and progressive struggles.
The commodification of education—often justified in the name of modularisation for skills, employability, and efficiency of delivery within fixed timescales to maximise profit—has undermined its emancipatory foundations. It has entrenched a culture of compliance shaped by the requirements of capitalism and its narrow educational framework. The marketisation of education has also fuelled the empire of student loans, turning access to learning into a lifelong debt trap that strips students of their dignity and creativity.
This framework has deepened crises not only within the education sector but also among students, eroding their potential to think critically as a community of learners. The combined forces of marketisation and digitalisation have dismantled the collective foundations of education, reducing teaching and learning to isolated, individualised experiences. The result is widespread alienation across educational communities, including students, teachers, and non-teaching staff.
The capitalist framework of education, along with its alienating conditions, is deeply embedded in violence. Capitalism, feudalism, and patriarchal structures of control continuously reproduce the conditions that sustain such violence. Student violence emerges as an outcome of these systemic injustices, a manifestation of a criminalising environment that forces students to adopt violent means of expression.
The criminalisation of students and the deployment of armed policing cannot resolve the issue, as student violence is not merely a law-and-order problem. Nor can it be reduced to questions of mental health alone. The roots of student violence run far deeper than surface-level explanations suggest. Analyses that reduce the crisis to mental health or criminality represent a grave injustice, perpetuated by narrow and essentialist legal frameworks.
The way forward lies in creating free, fair, and accessible education within a creative and democratic learning environment. Addressing student violence requires confronting the alienating conditions of capitalist education, which are inseparable from the broader struggle against capitalism itself and its structures of profit, patriarchy, and power. Peace within the student community cannot be separated from peace in society at large. The struggle for peace is inseparable from the fight against the commercialisation and marketisation of education, and against the alienation and violence these conditions produce. A peaceful and fair society enables a peaceful campus, where students can think, learn, and express themselves freely while realising their creative potential without barriers.
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