Structural Roots of Student Violence

Bhabani Shankar Nayak

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 its 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 all forms of authoritarianism, both within and beyond the classrooms. In doing so, they generate new ideas and progressive ideals that contribute to the radical transformation of society.

The question then arises: why do students resort to violence, bring guns into classrooms, and adopt violent methods to express themselves? It is time to think 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 is a daily tragedy in the United States, where an estimated twelve children are killed and thirty-two students are shot and injured 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 the Johns Hopkins University reveals that firearms are now the leading cause of death among children and teenagers between the ages of one and seventeen. The same study found that, on average, seven young people die each day in the US 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 American schools and in society at large. Unfortunately, the epidemic of gun violence among students in the United States–and the broader crisis of student violence, including suicide amongst students, across the world–is unlikely to decline. On the contrary, it is likely to intensify as the marketisation, commercialisation, and privatisation of education for profit 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, qualifications, certificates, and limited employability skills. This functionalist approach has eroded the critical culture of learning–one that once encouraged self-discovery, exploration of the world, and the development of a global consciousness that promotes mutual understanding of human desires, needs, and uniqueness. The objectified digitalisation of education in the post-pandemic era has further diminished organic interactions between students and teachers. Learning is increasingly 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. As a result, the traditions of democratic knowledge that sustain democracy and universal human rights across the globe are being weakened.

A democratic classroom enables students to learn, understand, and develop the skills necessary to interact and innovate–both as individuals and as members of a critical community of learning masses committed to knowledge traditions that address human needs and the desire for emancipation from all forms of marginalisation, inequality, and exploitation. Such educational traditions have transformed university campuses and academic institutions into centers 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 throughout history of the past and present.

The commercialisation and commodification of education–often justified in the name of modularisation for essentialist skills, employability, and efficiency of delivery within fixed timescales to maximise profit–has undermined the emancipatory foundations of education. It has entrenched a culture of compliance concomitant with the requirements of capitalism and its narrow educational framework of employability. The marketisation of education has also fuelled the empire of student loans, turning access to education into a source of lifelong debt trap that stripes away the dignity of students and their creative abilities.

This framework has deepened crises not only within the educational 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 foundation of education, knowledge production, and knowledge dissemination, and reduced teaching and learning to isolated, individualised experiences. The net outcome of this model is widespread alienation across educational communities–including students, teachers, and non-teaching staff members within educational institutions all over the world.

The capitalist framework of education, along with its alienating conditions, is deeply embedded in different forms of violence. Capitalism, feudalism, and patriarchal structures of control continuously produce and 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 to express themselves.

The criminalisation of students and the deployment of armed policing cannot resolve issues of student violence, as these are not merely law-and-order problems. Nor can they be adequately addressed by reducing them to mental health issues. The roots of student violence run far deeper than surface-level explanations suggest. Casual analyses that link student violence solely to mental health or criminality represent a grave injustice, perpetuated by narrow and essentialist legal frameworks.

Therefore, creating free, fair, and accessible education, along with a creative and democratic learning environment, is central to addressing various forms of violence. The struggle against the alienating conditions of capitalist education is inherently a struggle against capitalism and its structures shaped by profit, patriarchy, and power. Peace within the student community cannot be separated from peace in society at large. Consequently, the struggle for peace is inseparable from the fight against the commercialisation and marketisation of education and the alienation and violence these conditions produce. Peaceful and fair society produces peaceful campus that enables students to think and express freely to achieve their creative abilities without any forms of barriers.

Back to Home Page

Frontier
Vol 58, No. 13, Sep 21 - 27, 2025