spaces
悲劇から立ち直るのには時間がかかります。でも教育は進めなければいけません。どういう形で学校を再開するのか関係者の悩みは尽きません。本日のNYTから。
spaceをわれわれは通常uncountableで「空間」という意味で使います。しかし記事ではspacesとなっていることに注目しましょう。これはどうしてなのでしょうか。クリスマスプレゼント買いで忙しいMinnesotaくん，どうぞ。（UG）
Varied Paths Toward Healing for Sites of Terrorized Schools
At Columbine High School, a glass atrium glistens in the sunlight.
A one-room schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pa., was demolished just over a week after the 2006 shooting of 10 girls inside.
Inside Virginia Tech’s Norris Hall, pastel walls enclose a peace center.
At Dunblane Primary School in Scotland, a flower garden welcomes students.
These spaces were once other things: the second-floor library where two killers completed a rampage that left 12 fellow high school students and a teacher dead; the classrooms where 30 college students and faculty members were gunned down by another student; and the gymnasium where 16 5- and 6-year-old children and their teacher were fatally shot by an intruder.
School officials in Newtown, Conn., said this week that they had not yet begun to discuss the future of Sandy Hook Elementary School, where 20 first graders and 6 staff members were killed inside. But in the indelible tragedies that came before, school officials and parents were often so haunted by the violence that they sought to dismantle whole sections of buildings, ripping out blood-soaked floors and every last chunk of cinder block from the rooms where the killings took place. And when the spaces were put back together, if they were not razed completely, they often had new layouts and amenities that rendered them nearly unrecognizable — which is more or less the point.
These new spaces were typically culminations of long and painful healing processes for devastated families and communities. School officials and parents say their wounds are still there, though their scars grow a little thicker with each passing year, as the survivors graduate and new students too young to remember what happened take their places.
“A school should not be a memorial,” said Cindy Stevenson, superintendent in Jefferson County, Colo., where school officials and parents rejected the idea of closing Columbine High School after the shooting. “We don’t ever want to forget those children, but you also need to say a school is a living, growing, vibrant place.”
For now, Sandy Hook Elementary remains a crime scene, a bullet-ravaged shell that has become a worldwide symbol of anguish. The school’s more than 400 students will resume classes in January in a former school nearby that is being painstakingly remade to resemble the one they left behind, down to the exact color of the classroom walls. Even their old desks and chairs are being moved over from Sandy Hook.
“All of our efforts have been focused on healing our children and families and restarting school,” William Hart, a Newtown school board member, wrote in an e-mail, saying, “we have been unable to put any energy into planning for the future of that building.”
He added, “I suspect it may be some time before we can do so.”
