Zero Tolerence=Zero Intelligence

...And while we're talking about skewed Industrial model education ideas that don't exist in the homeschooling environment, Zero Tolerence is for zeroes.  Kids being expelled for accidently having a pocketknife with them when they come to school.  Come on!

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My older brothers and my father were all able to carry pocketknives (a really useful tool) with them everywhere they went - even to school.  I didn't carry a pocketknife with me at school, but I don't think I would have gotten in trouble if I had.  One of the elders in my church has told me that he took a shotgun to school in his backpack for show-and-tell.  The membrane between the school environment and the rest of the world was extremely permeable, and did we have stabbings and shootings?  Nope.

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The first known school shooting in the U.S. (according to Wikipedia) was UT Austin in 1966, a terrible event with incredible casualty and mortality.  It took until 1999 and Columbine High for any U.S. school shooters to surpass the 1966 Austin masacre.  And while we're looking at the statistics, notice that the number of high-casualty school shootings in Europe (think rigorous gun control and liberal social policy) is nearly twice that of the US - and that is not even including the horrific Beslan Russia hostage crisis, in which government tanks and commandos killed 385+ people!  But that is sort of a tangent. 

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My point is, we didn't have these problems before the 1960's, and Zero Tolerance certainly was not the protective agent.  We have much tighter control of the interface between schools and society now, but much higher incidence rates of serious violence.  Zero Tolerence is not the solution.

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Zero Tolerence is just PC-speak for "We don't want to have to think about the circumstances and make a reasonable judgment on a case-by-case basis"  Does it seem like a good thing to model unthinking, unreasoned behavior in our school officials?

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Patrick Parker, is a Christian, husband, father, judo and aikido teacher, Program Director for a Cardiac Rehab, and a Ph.D. Contact: mokurendojo@gmail.com or phone 601.248.7282
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