Depressing but inevitable, and presumably now being said by governments and by education departments the world over, more or less loudly:
WASHINGTON (AP) - The U.S. Department of Education has alerted school leaders nationwide to watch for people spying on their buildings as a possible sign of a higher terrorist threat.The warning is based on an analysis by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security of the school siege that killed nearly 340 people, many of them students, in Beslan, Russia, last month.
The review was done to protect schools and not sent because of "any specific information indicating that there is a terrorist threat to any schools or universities in the United States," Deputy Secretary of Education Eugene Hickok said in a letter to school leaders.
The conventional Western view of war is that there are warriors, and there are innocent bystanding civilians - fighting men on the one hand, and the, old, the unfit, and women and children on the other. (Although during the great bombing campaigns of the Second World War that distinction was stretched way past its breaking point.)
War now is different. The stated ultimate aim of the Islamo-fascists is not to fight against the non-Muslim world and extract concessions from. It is to destroy the non-Muslim world, to wipe it out. And destroying the non-Muslim world absolutely includes destroying the non-Muslim world's children. Especially its children. There's no point in getting into a moral flap about this. Killing children is perfectly logical, given that their aim is to destroy the ability of non-Muslim societies to perpetuate themselves.
This means that all kinds of defensive measures for large assemblages of school-age children will now have to be thought about, just as the US Department of Education says.
And – a thought which has only just now occurred to me as I was typing in the above couple of paragraphs – what if the idea that schools are too big catches on, not just because big schools are (maybe, I think, others think) bad educationally, but also because large clumps of children all in one place are a nice juicey terrorist target. Disperse and defend. It's a thought.
The point is – just to make it clear in case it isn't – not that a small school is easier to defend, but that a big school gets the terrorists more bang for their bucks and their bodies, and is hence more enticing as a target and is hence more likely to be targetted.
Will the Pentagon and the FBI and the CIA and the rest of them start agitating for smaller schools, on the grounds that that way the casualties of terrorist attacks on schools are likely to be fewer? After all, one of the reasons why so many children were killed in that Beslan school is that so many children were at that Beslan school.
As I say, it's a thought and only a very slightly baked one at that. I wonder if others will join in with the baking of this notion.
While I'm on the subject of cumulative fractional baking, my thanks to the Instapundit of Education Bloggers for this posting, about this speculation here, and to her (on that posting) few but fascinating commenters there. Not such a "golden generation" after all, it seems.
UPDATE: Joanne Jacobs also posts today about school security against terrorist attack. Originally I put that this was schools in Iraq, that although the information came from Iraq the schools they're worrying about are in the USA. So I guess this might be the same story as the one I'm linking to.
I have always understood, but can't now find the reference, that urban policy in the US in the 1950s was driven by a desire to disperse the population against nuclear attack. Does anyone know more about this?
(your anti-spam software is still playing up - attempt #2)
Heaven knows I don't often say this about Islamofascists, but I think your assessment of what they want paints too black a picture. However warped, however apocalyptic their view of the world, they can't think they can kill a measurable fraction of the non-Muslim world, let alone all of it.
What they want to do is make clear that there is no-one in the world who is safe from them. Neither geographical distance nor state forces nor non-combatatant status is to offer definite protection. They believe that this blow to the confidence of the Western world will measurably bring forward its conversion to Islam.
I have no quarrel with your argument about the value of dispersion. And I had heard what Ian said, too. Of course the internet had its origins in the desire for a computer system proof against nuclear attack by reason of dispersion.
Islamic fundamentalist's goal is to have their ideology in the forefront in the Muslim world. The reason they are targeting the US and Western World nations is because they represent all that is bad from their point of view. They are not determined to exterminate and conquer the whole world. They just want us to get out of the way and spred their sort of faith to the more moderate Islamic countries. In another words, they want to be in charge of Islam itself. A good example is Afganistan. The Islamic fighters were waging a war to get the Soviet Union out of Afganistan.
About dispursing schools: I agree that this country needs more schools but that would mean more taxes. Unfortunately most citizens are more into tax cuts than raising taxes just for improvements in education.
How many dead children would be required to justify an attack on a school?
There is no school in a major Western country that contains even 1% of the school-age population, so "statistically significant" attacks aren't possible, unless the red team can mount multiple attacks. I don't think they have this capability. As Steven Den Beste used to say, they come from a culture which doesn't reward comptence, so they lack the ability to mount that kind of operation.
That doesn't mean that an attack or series of attacks on places like Andover in the US or Eton and Westminster in the UK wouldn't have an major impact on morale, especially among government and business leaders. However, I imagine such targets are already hardened, probably to the point that they are beyond the ability of the islamists to attack.
So the "statistically significant" attacks can be ruled out. An alternative strategy would be placement of bombs in or near schools with the intent of maximising casualties. This would cause major disruption. If a campaign could be maintained, a percentage of kids wouldn't go to school and might never return. (Observer South Africa's problems with the generation from the Soweto school strikes to appreciate what the could mean.)
In this scenario, smaller schools would actually be worse...the number of sites requiring protection would increase, spreading the defensive line somewhat thinner.
