ANTI-VIOLENCE STARTS AT HOME

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, February 14, 1993                   TAG: 9302150284
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: D-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short
ANTI-VIOLENCE STARTS AT HOME
A PARENT-TEACHER conference was called by my child's instructor because of discipline problems in her classroom. Total class size, 24 students; total parents in attendance, three.
It seems that four students are behaving anti-socially in the classroom by fighting and throwing furniture about. Language of the sort one usually associates with "gutter talk" is involved, too! As the instructor stated, these children are copycatting this behavior either from home, television or wherever. If it is not corrected before they reach high school, they will take their anti-social behavior out with guns. As she said this, I wondered where were the parents of these four. After all, we are dealing with 4-year-olds in a Head Start program.
The answers to the violence so common today do not start with laws that the criminal element ignores - witness the car bombings that occur in England that has some of the most restrictive firearms' laws in the world. Start in the home where children should be taught some of the moral values that you see only sometimes in Sunday school.
My dad was murdered some six years ago. The weapon, which was never found, was a "blunt instrument." The perpetrator is currently doing 25 years to life. Is the answer for me to grandstand and call for outlawing blunt instruments? I think not. I believe more values should be taught in the home and school. BOB MEYERS BEDFORD

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB