At least Springfield understands…
All sane and compassionate adults, tax-payer, responsible citizens and elected officials should adopt this “no-tolerance policy”:
“School officials and teachers who engage in child abuse, hysterical over-reactions and otherwise indefensible punitive measures against children who talk about guns, show pictures of guns, wear T-shirts with guns, use their fingers as guns, form objects that vaguely look like guns, or display obvious toys of any size and material that nobody who has ever watched TV or a movie or traveled among the living could conceivably think was dangerous or a real gun, will not be tolerated, not even once. They will be fired, shunned, and forbidden to engage in any occupation that will give them power or authority over children, anywhere, forever. And school board members, administrators, elected officials or parents supporting such fools will also not be tolerated. Their indefensible opinions will go on their permanent record, creating a prima facie case for any future employer that they are, in fact, too silly to be trusted.”
Is that too harsh? I don’t think so. After all, I just removed the provision that says that any school housing such teachers or officials should be closed down and converted into a shooting range. I can’t stand any more of these stories. Anyone who can read them and blithely send their kids to be “educated’ by such utter dolts and hysterics should be investigated for child cruelty themselves. Who knows what other irresponsible things such parents might be doing?
“A kindergartner who brought a cowboy-style cap gun onto his Calvert County school bus was suspended for 10 days after showing a friend the orange-tipped toy, which he had tucked inside his backpack on his way to school, according to his family and a lawyer. The child was questioned for more than two hours before his mother was called, she said, adding that he uncharacteristically wet his pants during the episode.”
I would include more of the story, but just that much gave me a headache.
Why, you may ask, does this story, involving a cap gun, but at least a gun and not a pastry, make me angrier than the pizza-gun, or the pop tart-gun, or the finger gun, or the LEGO gun? Part of the reason is cumulative: why haven’t the townspeople yet lit torches and pitchforks and stormed the castle over this madness? Why are these stories buried on ethics blogs and “News of the Weird”? This is child abuse. This is proof positive that our children’s education is in the hands of untrustworthy, unprofessional, really, really dumb people. This is attempted indoctrination by government agents—making the association with guns so unpleasant that the next generation is bound to be phobic about guns, ready to repeal the Second Amendment, and quick to pledge fealty to whatever foreign invader first claims out shores—anything to avoid using those scary guns. Why is this still happening?
The rest of my outrage is that the cap gun had an orange tip, as the law requires. It had a virtual sign on it, therefore, that said, “This isn’t real. This is a toy.” Yet these bullies and cretins in Calvert County still interrogated a five-year old as if he had just planted a bomb at the Boston Marathon until he wet himself out of fear and stress! Why doesn’t that get them arrested? Why aren’t the citizens of the County marching on that school right now?
The story says that the abused child’s parent is supportive of the school. She’s a fool too. This is herding behavior. If this kind of abuse doesn’t convince her that the public schools in her county need to be cleared of every breathing administrator, then she is responsible for whatever the next set of horrors her children will endure at the hands of such incompetents from here on.
I know, I know. This is turning into a rant. But I have tried reason with this issue, this persistent misconduct, and nothing changes. I want to know how bad child abuse, indoctrination, cruelty and hysteria in the schools has to get before responsible citizens stop being “tolerant.”
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Facts: Washington Post
Ethics Alarms 
Maybe they should apply the bullying prohibitions they doubtless have on their books against the faculty and administration. They didn’t let the poor kid go to the bathroom while they were inserting bamboo shoots under his fingernails? And what was he supposed to “give up” anyway? (Being serious but amazed by the silliness and irony of the situation and the general idiocy of school workers, some of which silliness, as usual, has seeped into my comment.)
No, I wonder too. What could they possibly have been grilling him about?
Jack, not to take issue with the content of your rant; I agree 100 percent. I just want to say that some of us (dare I say at the very least a couple million of us) are as hysterical about “that nightmare of a company” Monsanto as you are about your pet peeve here. (I call it a pet peeve, but a very valid one, I assure you.) The difference in the harm done, not only to our children but to all humans and the very planet we depend on, is incredibly large.
Sorry if my comment appears off topic, but I had to get this off my chest.
Finally, as far as I know you have been (so far) silent regarding the Monsanto protests. I, and perhaps your other readers, would be interested in hearing from you regarding this topic.
Pax.
P.S. I was in the best little used bookstore in the southwest yesterday, COAS Books) when I heard a bunch of first graders suddenly squealing with delight. (Their teachers had taken them there on a little field trip.) GUNS! LOOK, I FOUND GUNS! Their cries rang throughout the bookstore followed by little boys rushing to the gun section. So, all is not lost.
Jeff, you could help me get educated on this issue by pointing me to a source that does not deteriorate rapidly into a general jeremiad against agribusiness, genetically engineered food and conspiracies. My mind glazes over. Why is “rogue wheat” a menace? The fact that the same company that made Agent Orange is also patenting grain and herbicide doesn’t immediately start bells ringing for me, and none of the articles I can find that aren’t hysterical bother to collect the dots. As a child of the 60’s, I’m afraid this taps into the Dow Chemical file that cost me about 6 months of my education, and I’ve been behind ever since.
Send me some links—you have the e-mail—and I promise I’ll get literate. To a great extent, the benefit of the toy gun is that it’s simple. Your issue is obviously much, much more complicated.
Thanks, Jack. I’ll get back via email.
I got “Brave New World” vibes reading this entry, Jack. This is brutal indoctrination of the type that should concern all Americans, parents or not. As for why this incident doesn’t have parents in that district up in arms…I can only assume their ability to understand this issue has been reduced to less than 140 characters or that which can fit on an obnoxious photoshopped e-card on Facebook.
Beware of over-generalizations. “This is proof positive that our children’s education is in the hands of untrustworthy, unprofessional, really, really dumb people.”
I boldly claim that as frequent as these stories seem to be, they are not in fact fairly representative of the majority of educators. Part of the problem is that schools feel they need to take a strong stance to show the public that they are doing something to prevent incidents like Sandy Hook. By adopting and enforcing ridiculous zero-tolerance policies they can defend themselves by saying that if they did anything more nuanced they would not be covering the possibility that the child in question had potentially violent tendencies. It’s a variant of the slippery-slope fallacy: “How do we know that a child who makes a gun out of a pop tart today won’t escalate to an assault rifle tomorrow? If that happened and we hadn’t responded to the pop tart incident, we would be responsible for the assault rifle incident. Best to err on the side of caution.”
The problem, of course, is that a reasonable fear is being amplified into an unreasonable one, and then driving unreasonable policies.
“I boldly claim that as frequent as these stories seem to be, they are not in fact fairly representative of the majority of educators.” I once believed that. I no longer do, or at least, I believe that an unacceptable percentage of the profession is untrustworthy, which makes the profession as a whole impossible to trust. I don’t believe, nor did I say, that ALL of those in education are dumb, but very dumb people are in power, and the professional,as far as I can see, has done nothing to address the problem. That is itself dumb and incompetent.
“Part of the problem is that schools feel they need to take a strong stance to show the public that they are doing something to prevent incidents like Sandy Hook.” No, the problem is that really incompetent fools thing abusing children and trying to indoctrinate them qualifies as “doing something.”
“It’s a variant of the slippery-slope fallacy: “How do we know that a child who makes a gun out of a pop tart today won’t escalate to an assault rifle tomorrow? If that happened and we hadn’t responded to the pop tart incident, we would be responsible for the assault rifle incident. Best to err on the side of caution.” And “teachers” who employ this quality of reasoning are qualified to teach—or even be responsible for watching— my children…how?
“The problem, of course, is that a reasonable fear is being amplified into an unreasonable one, and then driving unreasonable policies.”
I think unreasonable people should not be teaching reasoning to children. Call me crazy…
“How do we know that a child who makes a gun out of a pop tart today won’t escalate to an assault rifle tomorrow? If that happened and we hadn’t responded to the pop tart incident, we would be responsible for the assault rifle incident. Best to err on the side of caution.”
This is indicative of the indoctrination issue. There is nothing wrong with playing with a pop tart shaped like a gun. There is nothing wrong with playing with cap guns. There is nothing wrong with children learning how to use firearms. Trying to make this wrong is indoctrination and exceeds their purpose. While they are doing this, they’re also working on their new Common Core standards and the approach is to teach less about…well…less. Educators today can’t teach what they used to teach because they are more interested in making sure all the students think the right way, they don’t really care about educating them.
And do you have any idea how HUGE a pop tart would have to be to chew it into a credible assault rifle???
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