World News: Graz School Shooting Reflect Broader Cultural Shifts

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Category: World News - Europe

Published on Wednesday, 11 June 2025 09:50

Written by Olivier Longhi

From Nogent to Graz, the violence that is expressed today in or outside school premises highlights the need to revive the debate on the responsibility of parents as well as the need to rehabilitate the authority due to institutions and their representatives.

Between the murder of an educational assistant in Nogent and the massacre that bloodied the Austrian city of Graz, one reality is clear: schools have become targets that some would describe as easy because, in essence, a place of knowledge and learning is not intended to be armored and overprotected.

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And yet, the discourse that tended to refuse this option may have to change and evolve. Secondly, after the legitimate emotion, stupor and anger that animate the families of the victims and beyond, the question also arises of the reasons that push certain individuals to commit these acts.

The avalanche of comments on the free circulation of bladed weapons, on the weight and influence of social networks, which call for the prohibition or control of one or the other, are demagoguery, an indignation of circumstances that could easily be judged as vulgar and inappropriate. That the two elements mentioned above played a role seems undeniable, but they are not the only ones.

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Limits and Roots

It is not wrong to assert that a part of adolescents, on a global scale, has lost a large part of the reference points that tended to establish the limits of what is socially acceptable. Nor is it wrong to say that schools are no longer able, due to a loss of meaning in the teaching provided, to develop an altruistic and civic discourse.

This physical violence, which has its roots in social violence, variously encouraged by resigning parents, who are also in chronic rupture with the educational institution seen as castrating, the explosion of family units, the trivialization of power relations between students and teachers, the constant challenge to sovereign authority, institutional or parental, also works to develop an unstable climate.  anxiety-provoking and conducive to violence.

It now remains to establish solutions to try to curb this same violence that affects some of the most sacred places in our democracies, namely schools. The challenge is immense because it is global in scope, calling for a leap of exemplarity and an awareness of the responsibilities of each person, starting with that of parents, who are too often led to delegate their authority to the school which, as a reminder, teaches when parents educate.

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Postulate and Identification

This distribution of roles obliges all actors to assume what is rightfully theirs, of course, but above all out of duty. Violence in or outside the school is not an intrinsic problem of the institution, it is a collective responsibility based on the postulate that the school is also the faithful reproduction but reduced and circumscribed within the walls of the establishments, of our societies.

The causal link may appear shortened, but it is no less relevant insofar as the pupils, some of them in any case, reproduce or repeat the violence they witness by means of an identification syndrome, seeing in it a form of affirmation or social existence. The problem is therefore deep and substantially serious because it concerns the generations that are supposed to ensure the sustainability of our societies. However, to accept violence as an intrinsic element of the latter would quickly prove to be a deadly error.

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Bio: Olivier Longhi has extensive experience in European history. A seasoned journalist with fifteen years of experience, he is currently a professor of history and geography in the Toulouse region of France. He has held a variety of publishing positions, including Head of Agency and Chief of Publishing. A journalist and recognized blogger, editor, and editorial project manager, he has trained and managed editorial teams, worked as a journalist for various local radio stations, was a press and publishing consultant, and was a communications consultant.