The latest entry in the OFFS files comes from Edgewood Middle School in Ohio. A student clicked the “like” button on an Instagram photo of an Airsoft pellet gun posted by another student. Both students were suspended by the school, because “we act on any potential threat to student safety swiftly and with the utmost importance.”
Suspended. For “liking” a picture of a pellet gun. Not a real gun, not a BB gun, a toy gun that fires plastic pellets.
Why?
Because, “The Board has a “zero tolerance of violent, disruptive, harassing, intimidating, bullying, or any other inappropriate behavior by its students.”
Indulge me as I explain the real meaning of “zero tolerance.” As I discussed way back in 2013, “zero tolerance” is, at its core, an abdication of responsibility. It permits those practicing it to avoid having to employ common sense, use judgment, or evaluate risk. It’s about ass-covering and a demonstration of “having done something” in the highly, HIGHLY unlikely event a student, at some point in the future, goes non-linear and does harm to others.
It’s gutless and chickenshit. It unjustifiably punishes students for wholly innocent actions, and has the potential for doing real harm to those students psyches and academic prospects. It’s the exact opposite of what educators are supposed to be doing. And we should be merciless and relentless in castigating these “zero-tolerance” assholes when they do stuff like this.
They’ll defend themselves with arguments that, in these troubled times, an overabundance of caution is warranted.
Bullshit.
People in positions of authority are paid to make decisions. They’re paid for their judgment, their expertise, their insight, and their foresight as it applies to the decisions they are expected to make. There is risk in making decisions, of course, but that’s integral to those jobs.
“But, what if something goes wrong?” some might retort. Suck it up, buttercup. It’s your job to judge those placed in your care, and look for actual warning signs (if there are any), not punish every student who crosses an imaginary and ever-moving line, just to play it safe. This “play it safe” isn’t without consequence. It hurts kids, it punishes them unjustly, and it instills terrible lessons in them and their peers.
“Zero tolerance” is about not making decisions, about not doing what they’re being paid to do, about punishing students in order to protect themselves and cover their asses, and it’s cold, callous and utterly at odds with what educators should be about. The suspended kids may very well have to explain these suspensions when it comes time to apply to college, and they certainly have been shown that the people who are supposed to nurture them are cold, callous, unfair, and utterly without regard for their future.
Worse, in the case of purportedly gun-related zero-tolerance, it’s driven by an anti-gun political agenda as much as or more than by actual concerns about safety. How else can we rationalize this, or even more absurdly, the suspension of a student for wielding a gun-shaped Pop Tart?
Playwright/auteur David Mamet observed that socialism is the abdication of responsibility. The infiltration of leftist/socialist ideas in our education systems, an infiltration that gave rise to this zero-tolerance garbage, is further validation (as if you needed any) that Mamet was right.
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Zero tolerance is state sanctioned indoctrination of America’s youth. Leftists would prefer the gun culture, as they like to term it, die in America. Thus the constant bashing of strong male attributes and the continuing efforts at the feminization of boys. Zero tolerance policies are a sort of aversion therapy for guns.