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Last month the San Francisco Chronicle reported that six-year-old Zachary Christie had been suspended for 45 days for bringing a camping utensil that contained a knife to school. Because he was excited about Boy Scouts.
It seems the school board did come to its senses and reduce his sentence, but the knee-jerk application of a zero-tolerance policy enacted to protect students in the wake of school violence for basically packing a spork is troubling. Where do you draw the line?
Garrett Lukas of Woods Monkey takes issue with the school for not seeing the difference between a camping utensil and a dangerous weapon. He writes:
We have become a nation of hem-hawers too afraid to speak our minds, too lazy to take responsibility, and too dependent on others to make sure that our basic needs are met. If you want my honest opinion, I think we have too many safety nets in our society.
I think the problem is that society is so litigious administrators are terrified to let anything slip. For every kid they let slide through with a camping utensil they risk exposing children to a kid with a shank. Or do they?
Maybe this six-year-old is a model student and Boy Scout who would never use a camping fork as a weapon. Maybe he's a punk who has every intention of getting back at some kid who picked on him over kickball last week. School administrators may not know the kids individually well enough to tell. But going straight to suspension seems severe for a first-time offender. We let adult criminals off easier than that.
BS Report offers this suggestion:
How about handling it this way: “Zachary, it’s against school rules for you to bring that camping tool to school. You can pick it up from me at the end of the day but you must not ever bring it to school again. Do you understand?”
On the other hand, what if little Zachary had brought the camping utensil to school to cause harm? People can and do turn almost anything into a weapon, and school is the one place we as a society insist our kids be kept safe. They have to be there. They're defenseless. It's the administrators' and teachers' jobs to be on the look-out for any suspicious activity these days, when their jobs used to be just teaching.
I'm not a fan of any teacher having to do double-duty as a prison guard. I can't understand how we got to a place in history when kids couldn't carry pocket knives for fear of using them on each other. The boys in my class growing up used to carry six-inch hunting knives, but they never used them on anyone. I myself carried a Swiss army knife on my keyring until it got taken away in an airport in the late '90s. It never occurred to me it was a weapon -- I used it to open packages. I think the problem is not so much with kids having knives -- it's kids thinking at all about using knives as weapons instead of tools.
What's different? Is it violence on television? Is it violent video games? Is it music? No. I don't think so. I think it's lack of judgment on the part of the kids and their parents. We shouldn't have to babysit everyone so. Every kid should have the common sense to know you don't take a gun to school and blow up people who piss you off. Every parent should know if their kid has violent tendencies and seek help if they see warning signs. I've known violent kids with rock-star parents. It's not their fault their kid is hard-wired with less compassion than the average bear, but I think it is their fault if they pretend everything is fine and let that child go on to hurt someone else after displaying violent tendancies in their presence. Figuring out if a kid is violent isn't the job of teachers and administrators. They're going to react unilaterally, because they don't want to be the one who let a disaster sneak in on their watch. Every parent needs to keep an eye on their kids and watch for antisocial behavior before the kid walks into school with a M-80.
Even if kids aren't predisposed to violence, they can learn it. Kids are affected by the media, but nothing affects them more than what their parents deem acceptable. Violence isn't acceptable behavior, not when it's directed toward other people, adults
