Description
Book SynopsisIn A Is for Arson, Campbell F. Scribner sifts through two centuries of debris to uncover the conditions that have prompted school vandalism and to explain why attempts at prevention have inevitably failed. Vandalism costs taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars every year, as students, parents, and even teachers wreak havoc on school buildings. Why do they do it? Can anything stop them? Who should pay for the damage? Underlying these questions are long-standing tensions between freedom and authority, and between wantonness and reason.
Property destruction is not simply a moral failing, to be addressed with harsher punishments, nor can the problem be solved through more restrictive architecture or policing. Scribner argues that education itself is a source of intractable struggle, and that vandalism is often the result of an unruly humanity. To understand schooling in the United States, one must first confront the all-too-human emotions that have
Table of Contents
Introduction: A Few Words on Senseless Destruction
Essay: Vandalism as Political Resistance
1. Populism and Property Destruction, 1790–1890
2. Modern Education and Its Discontents, 1890–1930
3. Diagnosing Delinquency, 1930–60
4. Vandalism and the Security State, 1960–2000
Essay: Vandalism as Self-Fashioning
5. Books and Boredom
6. Desks and Nostalgia
7. Walls and the Taboo
8. Windows and Euphoria
Essay: Vandalism and the Historical Sublime
9. Shards
Epilogue: Reflections on Unruliness and Education
