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We need zero tolerance for "zero tolerance"

By Alan Caruba
web posted October 14, 2013


The ultimate icon was John Wayne and, for me, one of his finest films was his last, "The Shootist." In that film after he instructed a boy on how to shoot, he responded to a question of why he had become known for his skills, "I won't be wronged. I won't be insulted. I won't be laid a-hand on. I don't do these things to other people and I require the same from them." The fundamental morality of why he defended himself was self-explanatory.





Also in September, a seventh-grade student from Virginia Beach, Virginia, may be suspended for the rest of the school year for shooting an airsoft gun with a friend in the yard of his home while they waited for the bus to come. Khalid Carabello, 12, and his friend Aidan, were suspended for "possession, handling and use of a firearm." It was a toy. He was on the property of his own home.

I suggest this isn't just a matter of two schools using bad judgment and failing to apply the most minimal common sense. This is a national trend and it has to stop. There has to be zero tolerance for "zero tolerance."

Others agree and the first week of October was designated the National Week of Action Against School Pushout. There were campaigns from California to Florida, Minnesota to Massachusetts involving both youth and adult activists protesting "zero tolerance" policies and, as often as not, racial disparities in school discipline decisions. For example, the Minnesota Minority Education Project found that almost one in five black male students were suspended at least once in Minneapolis schools in 2012 as compared with one in 29 while male students. That's a trend too.

The latest data from 2009-2010 shows that three million children in grades K-12 lost instruction time in the classroom because they were suspended; so much for school as a learning experience. Now, in addition to an epidemic of absurd psychological syndromes used to justify drugging school children to keep them docile, just arbitrarily suspending students because of some "zero tolerance" policy is the way too many "educators" respond.


This is a nationwide phenomenon. Ramiyah Robinson, a youth leader in North Carolina, said it best. "We demand that youth stop being criminalized and be recognized as individuals with needs."

Kids grow up in a culture that reeks of violence in a world where violence fills the news of the day. If they want to play cowboy, to shoot airsoft guns, or in one case to own a "gun" that blows bubbles, they are acting out what surrounds them with no harm to anyone. That's what all children do. ESR






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