Do we need to get rid of the place of a tragedy?

I have thought about this one for a while and it is hard for me to answer this question. One has to take into account that the Amish have a very different culture than the one we are used to, and thus may very likely respond totally different and even "weird" in our eyes to any given situation.

To them it may not be an exaggeration, but a logical response, a standard idea on what should happen with a place of trauma. They have shown by their capability to forgive the person who did it how they move on. Maybe this tearing down of the school and building new one is their way of letting go.

I think therefore that it is not our place to even judge whether or not it is an overreaction, especially not since it doesn't influence the lives of anyone else BUT the Amish. The close-knit community wouldn't likely allow a non-Amish to attend the school. If it did, then I might have responded differently, but I am fairly sure of this.

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One has to take into account that the Amish have a very different culture than the one we are used to

My main question was about your thoughts, not about culture relativism, I am not interested in judging the reaction as good or bad. Basically I want to take the Amish out of the discussion, it's just a question about reaction in front of tragedy: do we go and destroy places where bad things happened? What about Twin Towers or New Orleans do we rebuild them... or a house where a crime has committed... So, my question is not about Amish and their principles this is only the opportunity to ask a general question.

Ahh then I mistook the meaning/intent of the question. I'll need to re-ponder

i know that it isn't good to make assumptions, but i couldn't help myself.
i had assumed that the school was torn down mostly for the children; i couldn't imagine children (especially very young ones) learning well while having to return to the scene of a trauma on a daily basis.

Well, many people believe bad juju sticks to a place, attracting a generic kind of ill-luck to new dwellers, and that the safest measure to avoid that and to "exorcise" or "clean" the space is to tear it down. Drastic, and I don´t quite grok how removing some brick walls would give peace to supposedly haunting spirits or remove the figurative black spot from a place, but it seems to have some placebo quieting effect on the living people who are left behind which have to continue using the place, so maybe that´s the whole point - to make them feel better about what happened. Cathartic cleaning stuff.

That´s why they tore down the Cielo Av. house where the Tate ritual killings happened (they gave it a lick of paint and then renovated the house, but they couldn´t find anyone willing to buy or rent it).

That´s also what happened to (in)famous dwellings connected to violent deaths, like the châteaux of Tiffauges and Mâchecoul of Gilles de Rais (the comrade of arms of Jeanne of Arc, and Marshall of France indicted for horrific killings of hundreds of children), and one of the castles of Elizabeth Báthory where the corpses of murdered young women were found - and so on and so forth.

Guess it´s a universal phenomenon, not just Amish, based on a curious mix of superstition, post-traumatic psychological therapy and plain common sense (would you want to send your kid back to the same place where something that horrible happened? Force him/her to relive that trauma daily?)

I guess if you don't see everyday an object that reminds you of something (crime, bad relationship, tragedy) you'll tend to not think about that and maybe even forget easier -- so it totally makes sense from this point of view (In some cases however, 9/11 comes to my mind, the lack of something reminds about the tragedy, so it probably would be a good thing to build something in place)

So I guess it's a matter of not having something stuck in your face everyday that reminds you about the tragedy -- people want to forget or at least want to think and remember the tragedy at the time of their choice.

On the other hand having something that reminds you of a tragedy around is good in the sense that at some point you'll cease to consider it a sign of the tragedy and just look at it as an object -- then you'll figure out that some healing took place.

They didn't tear down Columbine High-school, it would have been too expensive, but I think at some point kids will look at the building as just a high-school building and the problem associated with that (doing homework, boring classes, etc) and less as a place of murder. Places like that have even the chance of becoming a symbol of resilience of life -- children playing football, cheering, singing and life in general going on is the best (virtual) slap in the face of people who wanted to kill that.