An eighth grader in Arizona has been suspended--for drawing a picture of a gun.
No bullets, no bodies... just a gun (the boy said it was supposed to be a laser gun). And the teacher (mistake number one) sent him to the principal, who (mistake number two) suspended the poor kid for five days (she later reduced it to three). She then called his parents to go get him. When he got there and tried to reason with her, she referenced Columbine and zero-tolerance policies.
Unlike Cara, I don't particularly want to home school. (I admire her to death, I just don't think I could pull it off. If I live near Cara when our kids are school-age and we can double-team them... perhaps I'll reconsider.) I enjoyed school, with the memorable exception of fourth grade (and math, from second grade on). But then, I went to military schools for all of elementary school (again, with the memorable exception of fourth grade), and this NEVER would have happened in a military school. At least not in the military schools I grew up in. I dearly hope they haven't been wussified as well.
I am tempted to insert a diatribe on the state of society in general here. But I read a lot of the comments on the story that I linked to, and you know what? It's not society that's the main problem in this story. It's the school's administration, and the school board... You know, folks, school boards are elected officials.
Anyway. My kids are (hopefully) private school bound. I worked in a public school. And I loved my job, and cried when I left it. But public schools are way too prone to things like this-- hyper political correctness, thought-policing, and demasculinization (seriously, all you education-administration types: there are some games that everyone can't win. Really. Nor is playing with toy guns a step on the way to using them on someone else for the VAST majority of human beings. But that's another post.).
Anyway. Don't send your kids to public school unless you have already changed the system. And if you have... spread the mojo.
2 comments:
Wow.
To make you feel better, I'm not sure if I want to homeschool, we just feel that it is the best choice there is and that we choose the best choice available when it comes to our children, even if it requires sacrifice (and might suck really, really bad). :) Did I ever lend you the second Thomas Jefferson Education book? It makes you so excited about homeschooling, I need to read it more.
See, all the more reason to strive to be our next door neighbors for life. Or if we live away from each other, we can budget visits as "educational expenses."
The public school system...has its heart in the right place, but its hands are tied and keep getting cinched tighter by stupid new laws and administration. Which really just turns out ineffectual students who are expected to somehow get it together and run the country, despite the lack of logical thinking skills they were denied throughout their schooling career in order to keep them more easily compliant to school codes.
As one more example of public school idiocy:
Back when they built my high school, a study had just come out saying that darker colors had a soothing effect on teenagers, or something to that effect. So the people who were designing the interior of the school picked dark blue and gray (with inexplicably orange lockers). Apparently these people failed to take into account the fact that the school was in ALASKA, where we get only three hours of daylight in the winter, and that's during school hours. We weren't soothed, we were zombies during the winter.
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