MIAMI | An American psychology professor lost his job following giving his students a special writing topic: “Today was the last day of your life, write your obituary”.
Jeffrey Keene, 63, explained on Facebook that he wanted to link his course to an exercise intended to prepare students for the risk of intrusion by an armed individual into their high school, near Orlando, Florida.
He asked his students to write down their “impressions” related to this simulation and to think regarding the causes of the repetition of the killings in the United States, their possible remedies and therefore, to imagine their post-mortem biography.
A small note specified “thank you for realizing (…) that it is absolutely not a question of disturbing you”.
On Tuesday he was fired. In a press release, reproduced by the American media, the school authorities accuse him of having given an “inappropriate duty” to his students.
He defended himself on local television channels. “It wasn’t to scare them or make them think they were going to die, but to help them understand what’s important in their lives,” he said on NBC.
His dismissal “stunned” him, he added on Fox 5: “I was talking to students regarding the world they live in, regarding guns, shooters…”
Firearms have become the leading cause of death for American minors in 2020, with 4,368 deaths, ahead of car accidents and overdoses, according to the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC).
Bloodbaths in schools represent only a tiny portion, but mark the spirits more.
The United States was particularly shaken by the carnage committed in 2012 in a school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut (20 children killed), and in May 2022 in Uvalde, Texas (19 children and two teachers).
Yet a majority of Americans remain very attached to the right to carry a weapon and do not want to hear regarding reforms, even minimal ones.
Two elected officials from Tennessee have just been expelled from the local parliament for having joined demonstrators who came to the hemicycle to demand better regulations on firearms, following a massacre in an elementary school in Nashville.
