Do you believe if more kids attended school, there would be less crime? Studying the relationship between school attendance and crime goes back more than 200 years. Many people believe that better crime control measures should involve vigorous police work, or strict law enforcement.
For thousands of years and long before the mandatory school attendance, crime has prevailed. In fact, violence and even references to youth gangs are all recorded in the Bible.
American’s views about education and crime Karen Read were referenced in a January 10, 1931 Literary Digest, article entitled “What We Shall Be Like in 1950.”. The article mentioned prophecies made by the National Education Association adapted from a publication called Tomorrow’s Business, which said, “Crime will be virtually abolished by transferring to the preventive processes of the school and education the problems of conduct which police, courts, and prisons now remedy when it is too late.”
One student drops out every 26 seconds in America. Harvard conducted a study which found that black students fall behind by the time they are three years old. Three of the one million New York students are a minority, with 70 percent impoverished.
Many experts believe school causes crime more than it prevents it, and this is not necessarily a new belief. Henry Fielding said in his day, “Public schools are the nurseries of all vice and immorality.” Henry Fielding lived from 1707 to 1754.
Others wonder if crime is closely related to drug use. A study entitled, “The Monitoring the Future Study” asked high school seniors this question in 2006: “On how many occasions, if any, have you used drugs or alcohol during the last 12 months?”
