Public school zero tolerance policies.

I don't believe anyone is arguing with that view, boomerang.

Such is bureaucracy, I guess , but I wasn't faulting anyone specifically, and teachers would probably be the last ones on my list if I were to do so.

Still, I think that whatever the reasons (even if it's ascribable to such politics) the approach taken is not ideal and that a human stepping up to the plate and making a judgement call can be what is needed.

Remember the movie The Terminal? This is what it reminds me of. In the movie the queen of his routine wanted to refuse to allow someone to leave the US with medicine as he lacked the right export documents.

I'm sure such laws have perfectly good reasons, but sometimes you need to have judgement and heart. It can't all be cold rules, so when Victor got the man through by claiming it's medicine for his goat, not his father, it is an emotional triumph in the movie over heartless and thoughtless bureaucracy.

And what I am criticizing is the fundamental mistake the bureaucracy makes here, which is to deliberately make inflexible rules in order to show that they are being tough about something. It's security theater but it doesn't actually help.

So I object to inflexible response announcements in just about any such situation. A completely different example is California's three-strikes laws where you are supposed to go to jail for life on your third felony conviction. It makes for great security theater but in practice it meant that people were going to jail for life for really stupid little third offenses. You can make the case that this is nobody's fault but theirs but it wasn't in anyone's interest to send someone to jail for life for shoplifting, even if it was their third time.

In practice, nobody probably wanted habitual shoplifters sent to prison for life, but if the laws make sentences mandatory and fail to properly qualify the situations in the codification (such as in other states where the requirement was for all three offenses to be violent, not just a technical felony) then this is the predictable consequence of an inflexible, and poorly codified, rule.



Yes, but that isn't actually my qualm. Thomas seems to want to criminalize the behavior more than the object but that isn't my qualm. My qualm would be if in trying to get rid of all knives we make rules that have mandatory reactions that are inflexible and that don't allow for any common-sense interpretation of what it applies to.

So, if the knife in question were a 1 centimeter knife from a Barbie kitchen set then I think it would be absurd to treat it like an actual knife. At the same time, there are "toy" knives that can easily be used to threaten people. A lot of people in Brazil use toy guns and knives to rob people, and to the victims there's not much difference, you are still being robbed by someone who may be able to kill you easily. So I actually support even banning toy weapons, but they have to be plausibly menacing to fit that bill for me.

But if we just step back for a minute, and consider the case of a 1 centimeter Barbie knife, I think it is obvious that this isn't within the scope of the problem we are trying to address, and what I personally am arguing against are rules that are codified in a way to preclude us from making this common sense judgement.



I have no problem with a zero-tolerance policy against knives that can actually hurt people or that even just look like they could (again, if it looks menacing it can be used to menace).

But if the "knife" can't hurt someone, and doesn't even look like it could then it just isn't part of the problem. So if it were a "toy" knife that looks like it could be real then fine, I agree with the ban. But if it's an action figure's knife I don't think it is.

See, this case is more like the toy's toy being banned. If the gun were a toy gun at human scale it wouldn't bother me as much. But it's a tiny thing meant for something like a Barbie doll to carry and I don't think that should fall under weapons interpretations. And while I don't mind if they want to take it away from him and ask his parents not to let him bring even such toys to the school (I grew up not allowed to make a gun with my fingers, and I get an angle of not wanting any gun culture even in symbols even if I don't agree with that position) but punishing him as severely as you would a kid who punched another in the nose (I've gotten just detentions for actual physical fights and real violence) just lacks a sense of proper perspective.

Basically, I just want some common sense in how they are applies, I don't mind if schools want no weapons, let's just agree that a Barbie-scale toy does not fit the bill is all I am saying, and in the US "zero tolerance" seems to mean precisely that they are going to make this kind of overreaction.

I agree. I think there are a lot of reasons, ranging from schools that are too big (less personalized judgement calls) to a litigious society but no matter what the case, the inflexible responses aren't ideal.

It's just "crack-down theater", aimed at deflecting responsibility more than actually fixing stuff and while the litigious nature of society might explain why they do it it doesn't make it ideal, just more understandable.

Then we are probably on the same page, and are talking past each other msolga, so you can ignore my last post in that case.

In the US, "zero tolerance" usually means that the rules are about to get mandatory consequences and over-broad application. It doesn't actually mean "zero tolerance" of what you are trying to stop, it means zero tolerance for anything that remotely resembles what you are trying to stop and it means mandatory sentencing that precludes flexible responses.

I think you may be arguing for the zero tolerance as it purports to mean literally, not how it ends up in practice in the US.

I missed this, boomerang. I would have responded earlier if I'd seen it.

Totally agree with you (my, we're agreeing with each other a lot today! )

I believe young people are most secure when treated respectfully by adults, whether teachers or whomever, as is appropriate for their age. Little kids want to believe that the adults they're coexisting with are in control of the show. As opposed to being control freaks or fascists, of course! It makes them feel safe.

I believe a lot of misunderstanding (from non-educators, especially) arises about teachers' work when there's a perception that students haven't been "treated as adults" .. as if this is a terrible thing.

In fact, I believe, it is more unsettling to little kids to be treated as if they are adults, especially when they are given far more responsibility than they can actually comfortably handle at a young age. They should be allowed to be little kids & do their questioning, including some experimental bucking of the system in their own way, when they need to .. But secure in the knowledge that they will still be understood as little kids. This is how they learn, after all.

By the same token, adult decisions (like in the case of the suspension for the "pretend weapon") ought to make some sort of sense to kids. Not seem totally unfair. If such a decision makes absolutely no sense, or is completely bamboozling, then it was most likely not a very good decision at all. In cases like this, I suspect the perception would be that adults (teachers) are using their power in some sort of bewildering, arbitrary way. Which would have the exact opposite effect to feeling secure in the school environment.

AH!!!!

Thank you, Robert!

Yes, that is precisely what I was arguing. I was wondering, why the flack?

Cultural differences. Again.

[rant]Yeah, the best way to describe it in practice is "zero tolerance" = "zero leeway for interpretation". It means we are going to take strict all the way to volume 11 to show how serious we are about the problem!

It's just like the "war on X" meaninglessism America is also very fond of, it's theater and America is the land of overreaction and polar extremes. It wouldn't be America if it weren't overboard after all and the reason we just can't have nice things is because of how rare a happy medium is in America. It's got to be sexually obsessed or puritanical, can't just be a well regulated medium and everything about America depends on these polar opposites (and in typical reductionism it's invariably "opposites", lacking the nuance for anything other than diametric opposition), fighting each other for some kind of balance.[/rant]

Sorry to any Americans who I may have offended, America is a great country with great people but nuance just isn't a strong point in American culture.

Well you may have actually found genuine disagreement with Thomas, whose angle is more similar to the gun control debate than it is the zero tolerance policy debate. But I personally disagree with him and I want the inanimate objects (i.e. weapons) regulated more strongly than he seems to even though I agree that the criminalization of the objects is often near-sighted. I just don't see school as a setting where we need that kind of freedom and frankly think that American schools would be much better off with a lot less. It's a land that spends more money per student than pretty much anywhere on earth, but whose students are largely so damn disinterested in actually learning that the whole individualism is annoying in school. I remember looking forward to college because I dreamed of being in a place where people wanted to learn and not spend all day exhibiting their individualism. I think this is the single biggest problem in American school, that they fail to get their students to conform to the degree necessary to make a conducive learning environment.

Requiring a school uniform is a much deeper infringement on personal liberty than prohibiting knives and I'm in favor of erring on the side of caution with them rather than on the side of personal freedoms as long as someone else is legally on the hook for all of their actions. Schools in the US even ban gadgets just so that they don't have to worry about theft on their watch, and I have no problem with them banning knives. Hell, I am sounding like an old man here to me, but I think American schools have gotten to the point where the inmates run the asylum and it reminds me the hell out of jail movies with them being the guards and wardens and students being the inmates.

I have long wondered what the hell the difference was between the American (and other Western cultures to different degrees) and other countries where kids learn more for a lot less cost and what I've come to blame myself are two things:

1) in many countries there is no requirement to go to school. In Brazil parents camp outside schools the night before to guarantee their kids spots, in the US the parents have the cops come to your door if your kid isn't in school. The difference is that in many other countries you don't have a bunch of kids there because they are being forced to by the law, they see it as a privilege and not a punishment.

2) in other countries that don't have such a huge emphasis on individuality and popularity. They have smaller schools and they don't spend millions of dollars on making high school celebrities in sports, politics and beauty. They may even actively discourage individualism, and I noticed that among comparable economies the least individualistic cultures have the best performing schools. They take it to levels I can't really support, being largely Western in my own mix of culture, like how in Japan they aren't even allowed to wear strong perfume sometimes, or have distinct haircuts, but they soundly outperform American schools and I think the big reason is that they require them to conform to a higher degree and don't actively promote rampant individualism.

I am very individualistic, but in American schools I felt like my education was being hampered by an incessant parade of it. It has its place and work and school are better suited by conformity than individualism in my opinion so the notion that students should be armed (or even not actively disarmed) seems uniquely American to me and in typical disjointed fashion they want them to drive at 16 and taste beer at 21.

I'm ranting like mad again, but America has a bizarre school culture and these issues just highlight it for me. Kinda like my pet peeve after being starved for education all my life and seeing the most extravagant education budgets on earth used that way. They will let the kids do sugar like crack cocaine from vending machines they put everywhere, and make big central schools so that you need buses so the kids don't have to walk while spending millions on a gym for fitness and millions more for school sports teams. They pack them together like a little city and tell them to work out the social hierarchy while trying to get an education and instead it's just a big struggle for the kids to fight out their social class and becomes more about that very struggle of finding out who you are than actual education.

Just make smaller schools America! That is the easiest way to fix this education system. And you'll see less violence as well, one of the things the gun folk have right is that the biggest correlation with violence is population density, not presence of weapons.

Sorry to latch onto your post for my rant, msolga, I'd initially wanted to ask you about Australian schools (I don't remember much from my time living there) as I hope Australian schools aren't too similar. Do they do the 2,000 student multi-million dollar school thing there too? Do they do the sports hero-worship, homecoming and all the popularity shtick there too?

Not at all, Robert.
Very interesting rant.
I'm all through ranting anyway.

Just what I mean. I don't think they realize what they are doing to kids, even the ones who knowingly bring a zero tolerance item.

Well, frankly, I don't see that schools (generally speaking, not just the US) are equipped to handle such a challenge, be it guns or knives. I really don't think it's reasonable that they should be required or expected to do that. Heck, we are supposed to be working constructively with children in a safe environment!

I said nothing about guns. I have no problem banning guns, be they real or good-enough imitations to pass for real.

So what have you to say about knives, which are becoming very much a problem in Oz (though perhaps not in the US, I don't know) both in the community & within schools?
Personally, I don't see much difference when it comes to safety issues in schools. We've had "episodes" within schools & one death already. (And may I stress that the death occurred in a private school, given that some people associate such unfortunate happenings exclusively the public school system.)

What the hell is wrong with saying that carrying a knife in a school is not an essential thing, or an important "right"? What do you say about schools where knives are known to be a problem?

Who wants to go "monitoring" the situation, case by case? I certainly don't. Apart from the other concerns, I think I, as a teacher, am entitled to work in a safe environment, as well as the children are entitled to the same. Also, consider how much time this takes away from what teachers are actually supposed to be doing!

First off, I don't think one death = a problem.

I will help my child find ways around all of these rules (and there are many) so that he'll be able to protect himself from bullies if need be. If I find that he is a bully himself, I will take the appropriate action.

Actions are the the problem, not the tools.

I already answered that in this post and this one. Perhaps you missed them? You didn't reply to either.

So do you support unregulated access to nuclear weapons? If not, why? Why not just regulate the nuclear madmen instead of the tools?

For governments, yes. I don't agree with the hypocrisy of our country regarding our NW and the need to keep other countries from getting them. Good enough for us, good enough for them.

That's probably too much power for an individual to manage. I don't feel that guns or knives fall into that category.

Ok, so that shows that the whole don't regulate the tool thing isn't a valid absolutism, so maybe people just think that guns and knives are too much power for kids in school to manage as well (I happen to agree, I think kids don't fully appreciate and value life and would much rather see an adult pointing a gun at me than a kid).

I would agree with guns, until you reach 18 years of age. I think college students should be allowed to carry, if they choose.

I don't think I agree with knives.

Unlike some, I can't concede that all knives are equal either in size or design. Still, when a small and obvious toy rifle escalates to nuclear weapons, it just isn't my discussion.