School boards cancelling and suspending international trips for fear of terrorism makes me morose. It's not that I don't empathize with their situation. I do. No parent wants to pull their kid from an international trip when their son or daughter's friends are still going. No school wants to put aside a year of fundraising and planning. So it falls to the school board to make a tough decision for all.
But is this the right decision? Certainly if something were to happen on a trip, all involved would be deeply tramautized and there could be law suits. Although not terror-related, we need only think of the STS avalanche and Lost Coast rogue wave to remember the way that mass casualty incidents effect school communities. Yet there is no way to know when and where a terrorist attack (or mass shooting in the states) will happen. They are, more or less, random events. In the case of terror attacks, isn't postponing our normal goings-on due to fear what 'The Terrorists' want?
This is truly an impossible situation and I don't personally like how fear and liability are driving what educational experiences are offered to our children. I also question the logic of suspending or cancelling trips for "this school year", which is the approach taken by two of Alberta's largest metro school boards. What metrics will determine that next year will be safer than this? Do we expect that terrorism will cease according to a school calendar and that we should put a moratorium on all international study until this point? If that's the case, our students may never study abroad again.
We live in the most secure era in human history yet we are driven to see the world only as inherently dangerous. That's a real shame.