http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/education/12discipline.html?no_interstitial
Okay. So this school wants to send a 6-year old to reform school for bringing the Swiss Army equivalent of a spork to school. They have a zero-tolerance policy, they say. Stupid, yes. And probably disastrous to a first grader who loved school and now will have a junior rap sheet.
But there’s another layer to this. A zero-tolerance policy sounds all tough and scholastically law & order. And everybody can hitch their pants up really high and strut around saying how tough they are on miscreants. Cool.
But what it’s really saying is that we don’t believe that the people that you are entrusting your little dumplings to for 8 hours a day to make sure that their tiny noggins are filled with knowledge are smart enough to tell dangerous from not dangerous. They just aren’t equipped to make that call. And that's who's making sure the kids are edumacated.
So in the end, the people who are smart enough to tell an eating utensil from a machete, and have to enforce an asinine rules frequently enough will get sick of being treated like idiots and leave. And the only people who stay are the ones that acknowledge, if only to themselves, that they aren’t brighter than the average bear, and need someone to give them no-thought-needed rules to follow in lockstep - pointy thing bad, suspend child. Suddenly, those kids are living in a Pink Floyd video, with somebody yell about not having pudding because you haven’t eaten your meat.
It comes down to who you want educating your kids. Smart people needed to be treated like they have a brain. And giving them the latitude to use the sense the good Lord gave them is one way to do it. Because if a good teacher isn’t going to be paid adequately (and we’ve pretty much proved we don’t want to do that), treating them like an adult is the least we can do for them. Otherwise, you're left are people who probably shouldn't be entrusted with the care of young minds in the first place. Not a place I'd want to be sentenced to for 8 hours a day. And it's no wonder kids don't either.
Oh, and by the way, maybe you shouldn’t let kids have sharp pencils either. Somebody might poke an eye out.
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4 comments:
I wonder if they still use those sharp metal protractor things. I hated using those because I was worried I'd stab myself - they had a super-sharp point. Far mor dangerous than a spork.
I'm so glad I went through school back in the 80s when we didn't worry about these things.
When I saw the protractor my niece was using, it was kind a 'safety scissors' version. All plastic and non-lethal. Probably didn't work for beans.
Ah, here's to the 80s. When only dorks wore bicycle helmets, Twinkies still had aluminum in them, and they'd sell Black Cat firecrackers to an 8-year old. Don't worry. Be happy.
They DO allow scissors though - go figure.
And I've actually hurt myself with scissors, where I've never done any damage with even a real Swiss Army knife. That's the problem when you give people strict rules instead of asking them to think. No rule will ever cover every possible contingency.
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