Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Keeping the World Safe from Rampaging Cub Scouts

The good folks of Newark, Del. can sleep safely thanks to quick action by the Christiana school district’s board of education. The whole sordid affair was outlined in Monday’s New York Times.

It all started because six-year-old Zachary Christie was really excited about joining the Cub Scouts, and he was even more excited about the Cub Scout combination knife, fork and spoon he’d received as a gift. So he decided to take it to school and use it at lunchtime.

Whoa! Not so fast kid! Don’t you know that your school has a “zero tolerance” policy towards bringing not only weapons to school, but anything that could conceivably, possibly be used as a weapon as defined by the fetid brain of an educator.

“Zero tolerance” is a crutch used by anxious educators to reassure an anxious public. It’s a holdover from the nineteenth century belief that children are little savages who have to be tamed like wild animals. One factor feeding into its popularity with educators is that many of them boot out of the classroom as soon as they can because the children scare the shit out of them.

Zach’s enthusiasm got him busted. The imagination curdles when it thinks of the mayhem that could be caused by a rampaging six-year-old wielding a Cub Scout mess utensil.

The child was booted out of school and faces a hearing before the district’s disciplinary committee that could give him 45 days in the district’s reform school, something every six-year-old Cub Scout needs.

But, what the hell, a policy is a policy and the safest thing for an educator to do is to follow it to the letter. The greatest fear of any educator or bureaucrat is that they might be criticized for failing to follow policy.

A district spokesperson defended the decision by saying, “There’s no parent who wants to get a phone call where they hear that their child no longer has two good seeing eyes because there was a scuffle and someone pulled out a knife.”

Hello! You can put a kid’s eye out with a pencil!

But wait, I must correct myself. In Shakespeare’s King Lear, the Earl of Gloucester has his eyes gouged out with a spoon. So maybe the spoon was the culprit that worried the administration. Think of it—bloody eyeballs rolling around the lunchroom floor.

Is it possible that America is being dumbed down because some educators are among the dumbest fucks in the country?

If educators put as much effort into teaching children how to think as they do enforcing their zero tolerance policies, the country might not be in the shape it is.

Unfortunately, educators who can’t think cling to policy like a drowning man clings to a toothpick.

5 comments:

david M said...

Well kids should't be allowed to have pencils, pens, paperclips rubberbands and epecially paper because students can inflict serious paper cuts on fellow students. This reminds of the numerous times I've read or heard on the news about students taking mercury to school and the whole school being closed down for a day for decontamination. I'm not saying that children should be allowed to play with mercury but the knee jerk reaction to a child in possesion of some makes me wonder about the intelligence of both teacher local fire/law enforcement and parent. Hell I played with it many time when I was a kid to no ill affects. It seems everybody is paranoid about everything and I think its part of the atmosphere that been created by those on top.

Case Wagenvoord said...

It's an atmosphere that facilitates social control.

TAO Walker said...

None of this could come as even a surprise (much less a 'shock') to anyone who has ever 'worked' cattle. This is in-fact a critical time in the "global" penning-up of homo domesticus...for the final push through the feedlots and onto the killing floors. Any break-away critters now might start a stampede that won't stop until the whole damned operation is in a shambles....and there's no time to start over again.

So, "draconian" is the permanent watchword for every "individual" even remotely a part of the command-and-CONtrol apparatus....and "educators" are of course completely embedded in it. "Keep those dogies rollin', rawhide!"

What a revoltin' developement this is!

Hokahey!

Case Wagenvoord said...

It's called firing for effect. Bust an above average kid and the average and below-average will feel even more threatened.

TAO Walker said...

So maybe playing dumb is actually the only valid proof of intellignece, here in latter days of the rule of fear.

HokaHey!