Violence did not begin in that classroom

The school shooting in Tacloban last Monday cannot be reduced to one or two causes. Easy and emotional explanations are precisely what we should resist here.

It was not just GoreBox, the online video game. It was not just bad parenting. It was not just loose firearms. It was the convergence of many ugly things we should never have allowed to meet in the mind and hands of a child.

First, let’s take the online environment. We still do not fully understand what constant exposure to violent images, violent language, and violent games does to young minds. Before social media, children were mostly exposed to the people around them, their family, classmates, neighbors, teachers, and immediate community. Their world was easier to control because it was also more personal.

Today, a child can be exposed every day, even without adults knowing, to online influencers, trolls, anonymous cruelty, and disinformation channels designed to inflame hearts and manipulate minds.

Second, there was the gun. Online fantasy becomes deadly when it finds a weapon in the hands of a child who has not yet understood consequences. When those firearms fell into the hands of minors last Monday, something had already failed long before they pulled the trigger.

Third, there is the violence we have allowed into the national mind because we thought it was a convenient way to solve our problems. For years, many accepted the gospel of one man and his most fanatical supporters --that killings are acceptable so long as they are explained as necessary, deserved, or justified. That man is now detained in The Hague, facing charges for crimes against humanity.

Do not be surprised, then, when the young absorb that gospel’s logic without the discipline, context, or moral restraint we adults claim to possess. A society that cheers the death of those it has been taught to hate will eventually destroy even its children, and with them, its future.

And finally, there is the school system. We ask teachers to teach, discipline, counsel, monitor, detect trauma, stop bullying, handle parents, prepare reports, adjust to technology, and still produce learning outcomes. Obviously, they run out of breath, just as you probably did while reading that sentence.

Many are overworked. Schools lack enough guidance counselors. ACT Teachers partylist Rep. Antonio Tinio said the country needs around 150,000 more public school teachers just to bring class sizes down to 35 students, and has only about 2,000 guidance counselors for 28 million students when about 50,000 are needed. You simply cannot blame the schools for missing the warning signs.

So the question should not be: Which one primarily caused the tragedy? The question should be: Why did all these things converge around children?

I teach senior high school students media literacy. And I have just spent the semester reading dozens of their reflections on growing up online. One student wrote a line that has stayed with me – that their generation is connected to everyone “but not the world they live in.” Another described how a feed full of outrage and argument left him absorbing, without noticing, the same anger he had only meant to scroll past. They wrote about nights swallowed by one more video or Tiktok reel, about a screen that seemed to know them better than they knew themselves, about watching a fleeting interest quietly harden into an identity.

But notice what my students also wrote, nearly every one of them, in the closing paragraphs of their final essays. Once they were taught how social media and AI work, once someone sat them down and showed them the algorithm, the bait, and the manufactured urgency, they began to see it. And in seeing it, they were no longer at its mercy.

Yes, ban GoreBox and other similar websites or apps that promote violence. It costs nothing, but it also changes nothing. The same is true of renewed proposals to lower the age of criminal responsibility. They merely play to the same crowd that mistakes cruelty for toughness.

Meanwhile, the unglamorous, expensive work of holding gun owners criminally accountable when their guns kill, providing a counselor in every school, keeping student-teacher ratios rational, and mainstreaming media literacy into the curriculum, not treating it as a throwaway elective --is the only work that reaches a child before the worst day of his life instead of after it.