Friday, August 24, 2007

Our schools have gone crazy

By Libby

This is what happens when we allow fear to dictate our lives. A junior high school kid is kicked out of school for drawing a gun. No, I don't mean pulling a gun out of his bookbag, I mean literally drawing a gun.

Officials at an Arizona school suspended a 13-year-old boy for sketching what looked like a gun, saying the action posed a threat to his classmates. The boy's parents said the drawing was a harmless doodle and school officials overreacted.

Chandler district spokesman Terry Locke said the crude sketch was "absolutely considered a threat," and that threatening words or pictures are punishable.

I don't know about you, but as long as I've been alive, boys have been drawing pictures of guns and dead bleeding bodies and car crashes and other horrible scenes of monsters and mayhem without going on killing sprees in their later life. This kid just drew a gun, and it wasn't even a particularly good sketch. One might have thought it was some kind of spaceship if you didn't know what it was ahead of time.

This is part of a disturbing trend in schools where kids are being regularly punished for "thought crimes" that in past generations would have considered a rite of passage. Small wonder kids have no respect for authority when their school officials make such a mockery of the phrase that used to define this country -- land of the free and home of the brave.

[cross-posted to The Reaction]

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5 Comments:

Blogger Capt. Fogg said...

I was going to blog about that one, but you did it better. Our schools are becoming the vanguard of the Big Brother State. Kids are being bullied and propagandized and I can only hope they will eventually stop being unquestioning sheep and rebel.

11:18:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

If my youngest was still in school, I guess he'd being doing life by now. He has inherited the artistic gene that shows up in certain members of our family. Back in his junior high days he was in a zombie/demon/death and destruction phase. Now he works for a living, has a girlfriend, leads a pretty normal, below the radar kind of life. Go figure...

3:45:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Its a tough subject. While being punished for drawing a picture is ridiculous, the growing violence associated with schools is horrific. When my first was ready for high school and I visited the local one, there were metal detectors because of the weapons that had been found and used on the campus. And this in the heart of liberalism, the San Francisco Bay Area. Its just the result of a much larger problem, I know, and one that will certainly not be solved by expelling artists!

10:01:00 PM  
Blogger nolocontendere said...

He'll be much better off, except with somewhat less social interaction, being home schooled than in a thought control prison like that place.

3:28:00 AM  
Blogger Libby Spencer said...

Jeez, I thought I had already answered these comments. Sorry folks.

Fogg, they're indoctrining them into compliance earlier and earlier. It started with the drug sweeps and now it's branched out into thought control.

Rocky, I can't think of single artistically inclined boy who didn't draw gory pictures as a pre-teen.

Brian, the violence is scary and we do need to protect kids but I think overreactions like this just contribute to their anger and increase the potential for violence.

Nolo, good point, but not an option for everyone.

4:04:00 PM  

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