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It wouldn't be a week in America without another slew of
children being punished for childish behavior under the regime of
zero tolerance which plagues our nation's schools. Here are some of
the latest incidents.
In Pennsylvania, a ten-year-old boy was suspended for shooting an imaginary "arrow" at a
fellow classmate, using nothing more than his hands and his
imagination. Johnny Jones, a fifth grader at South Eastern Middle
School, was suspended for a day and threatened with expulsion under
the school's weapons policy after playfully using his hands to draw
the bowstrings on a pretend "bow" and "shoot" an arrow at a
classmate who had held his folder like an imaginary gun and "shot"
at Johnny. Principal John Horton characterized Johnny's
transgression as "making a threat" to another student using a
"replica or representation of a firearm" through the use of an
imaginary bow and arrow.
In Utah, a seven-year-old boy was arrested and berated by police because he ran away
from school. The boy showed up at his mother's house late in
the afternoon, at which point he explained that he had left the
school of his own accord. The mother called the school and
explained what happened, at which point the principal decided to
call the police, despite knowing the boy was in the protection of
his mother. An officer arrived at the house, told the boy to
"straighten up," took him outside, handcuffed him, and yelled at
him saying, "Is this the life you want?"
In Colorado, a six-year-old boy was suspended and accused of sexual harassment for
kissing the hand of a girl in his class whom he had a crush on.
Child psychologist Sandy Wurtele commented on the case noting that
for first graders like Hunter Yelton things like kissing are a
normal part of development, and that the school's reaction sends
mixed messages to developing minds. After a good deal of negative
publicity, Canon City Schools Superintendent Robin Gooldy decided to alter the offense from "sexual
harassment" to "misconduct."
In New York, three students were arrested while waiting for a bus to arrive and
take them to a basketball scrimmage. The three were part of a
group of a dozen basketball players who were waiting on a downtown
sidewalk as per their coach's instructions, when they were
approached by a police officer who demanded they disperse. They
explained that they were waiting for a bus, but the officer decided
to arrest them anyway. Even when the coach arrived and explained to
the officer that the boys were simply waiting for a bus so they
could get to their scrimmage, the officer would not relent. He
actually threatened to arrest the coach as well.
While any normal society would condemn all these acts as
absurd and harmful to young people, we live in a world in which
parents, teachers, and students have all been conditioned to fear
the slightest bending of the rules, even when it's obvious that no
harm has been done and that no crime has been committed. We are
living in the age of fear and paranoia, an age which threatens the
very core concepts of childhood development, and even the basic
facets of our democratic society.
Add to the execution of zero tolerance policies the phenomenon
of "lockdowns" of public schools, which are sometimes prompted by
legitimate threats, but more often by nearby domestic disturbances
and false alarms, in which students are corralled into closets and
hallways, met with police officers armed to the hilt, searched by
drug-sniffing dogs, and generally made to feel as if they are
living in a war zone. This trend of acclimating children to a
mindset in which they should always be fearful, on edge, and
deferential to authority is compounded by so-called "drills" in
which police officers pretend they are spree shooters. Dahlia
Lithwick, writing for Slate, notes that these
bizarre attempts to prepare kids for an active shooter situation do
not really prepare students for emergency situations, but rather
simply frighten them.
In fact, their true purpose, as I document in my book
A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American
Police State, seems to be simply to acclimate children to
the mindset of paranoia and absolute deference to authority which
has taken hold of the American populace at large. Children, who are
naturally suspect of illegitimate authority, are being conditioned
to accept any and all orders from on high, even those which they
inherently know are wrong.
In the face of this madness, some schools have begun scaling
back the zero tolerance regime. For example, schools in Broward
County, Florida, which saw over 1,000 student arrests in 2011, have
begun a policy that de-emphasizes arrests, expulsions, and
suspensions in favor of counseling and keeping kids that run
into trouble in school.
As Broward County Schools superintendent Robert W. Runcie noted, "A
knee-jerk reaction for minor offenses, suspending and expelling
students, this is not the business we should be in. We are not
accepting that we need to have hundreds of students getting
arrested and getting records that impact their lifelong chances to
get a job, go into the military, get financial aid."
Since implementing the new policies,
"school-based arrests have dropped by 41 percent, and suspensions,
which in 2011 added up to 87,000 out of 258,000 students, are down
66 percent from the same period in 2012." Still, most school
districts across the country maintain a strict adherence to zero
tolerance policy.
Alongside the zero tolerance mess is the general censorship of
student viewpoints when discussing topics which are not approved by
school administrators. For example, when a Pennsylvania student
newspaper decided to run an editorial explaining why they found the
term "Redskin," the nickname of the school's athletic teams,
insensitive, and why they would no longer use the name in the
school newspaper, the school administration reprimanded the
students and demanded they continue to use the term. In another
case, a student journalist in Virginia was reprimanded for writing a column on
sexuality-based bullying, also known as "slut-shaming," because
the article contained words and phrases such as "sexual" and
"breast-feeding."
Considering students in high school are on the cusp of
adulthood, legally and otherwise, the attempts to censor them when
they engage in debates that are occurring on a daily basis on
television and in the newspapers isn't simply obnoxious, but
threatens the integrity of society as well. If students are being
taught to self-censor, they will be ineffective citizens. They will
internalize ideas contrary to basic American principles, namely
that all people should be allowed to speak their minds as they see
fit.
In fact, according to the Knight Foundation, students who are
taught on the value of the First Amendment are more likely to agree
with statements such as "people should be allowed to express
unpopular opinions" or "newspapers should be allowed to publish
freely without government approval." However, for those who've not
received such instruction, they seem more doubtful of the value of free
speech.
Thus, one can easily see how the zero tolerance/censorship
regime which dominates American public education can easily
translate into a disaster for civil society at large in the coming
years. We've chosen to terminate natural childhood
development in favor of strict adherence to authority and muting
unique, interesting, and valid viewpoints in favor of maintaining
the status quo. Worse than this, however, is the fact that we're
setting ourselves up for the complete destruction of our democratic
society and our democratic institutions in favor of an
authoritarian bureaucratic apparatus which manages a population of
automatons, unable to think for themselves.
Call it the end of childhood, call it the end of innocence,
call it the end of imagination. What it will eventually amount to
is the termination of freedom in the United States.
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