With the shootings at Northern Illinois University, we are sure to hear again from mainstream news personalities the old question: Why is school violence on the rise?

The answer, as always, is that school violence isn’t on the rise. Statistics show that very clearly.

There has been school violence for as long as there have been schools. Consider Hercules.

Hercules was considered a hero, but he had certain character flaws… such as having flown into a blind rage, killing his wife and three sons.

There were warning signs, early on, that Hercules was capable of such things. For example, there was the time that Hercules killed his teacher because he was having a bad time at his studies, and just couldn’t take the stress any more. The following passage about Hercules comes from the book Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes by Edith Hamilton.

Great care was taken with his education, but teaching him what he did not wish to learn was a dangerous business. He seems not to have liked music, which was a most important part of a Greek boy’s training, or else he disliked his music master. He flew into a rage with him and brained him with his lute. THis was the first time he dealt a fatal blow without intending it. He did not mean to kill the poor musician; he just struck out on the impulse of the moment without thinking, hardly aware of his own strength. He was sorry, very sorry, but that did not keep him from doing the same thing again and again.

Youths have a lot of anxiety and uncertainty about themselves, are under heavy pressure to make important, life-changing decisions, and don’t know how to control their impulses very well. It’s not really a mystery that school violence is as ancient as education itself. The real mystery is why it doesn’t happen more often.