August 19, 2001
I recently represented a young man caught in school with blank M-16 rifle cartridges in his knapsack. If his parents had not withdrawn him from your school system, he would certainly have been expelled from school under your zero-tolerance policy
The young man acquired the blanks during the previous summer through the normal and customary swapping in which boys engage and had then apparently forgotten all about them. He was turned in by another student with a grudge. Called to the principal's office, he was ordered to open his knapsack and when the shells were revealed, he was immediately suspended and scheduled to appear before the board. The rules require expulsion under these circumstances. There are no exceptions, and it was represented to me that the board never made exceptions as a matter of policy.
I believe that time will show your well-meaning policy to be misguided. Indeed, history teaches clearly that the rigid and mindless enforcement of broad, ill thought-out and overly punitive rules almost invariably leads either to an increase in the behavior sought to be suppressed or to other unacceptable and often even more virulent anti-social behavior. Your policy reveals the mistaken belief that you can assure safe and wholesome schools by almost a mechanical process of applying rules to situations.
Wisdom is needed, not rigid adherence to a set of rules, no matter how carefully crafted. In criminal courts, judges have a wide range of discretion in deciding on an appropriate sentence. They may show mercy towards a defendant when it is appropriate. Even our Lord conditioned God's mercy to us upon our own showing of mercy towards our fellow human beings. Adolescents, with their well-known lack of mature judgment, are particularly in need of understanding and even clemency in these important formative years.
The shells posed no danger to anyone. Absent extraordinary efforts, ordnance shells explode only inside the firing chamber of the firearm for which they are made. Without the appropriate firearm, shells are hazardous only when they are heated in a fire. Further, the student in question had never demonstrated a propensity for violent or anti-social behavior that would prompt a reasonable person to be concerned that the young man would attempt to do anything whatever with blank cartridges.
I am a lawyer; a peaceable soul; a moral, churchgoing citizen who has never been convicted of a crime beyond a traffic ticket. I like to think of myself as a "good" person--an asset to the community. As a youth, however, I would have been expelled under your rules. Under your misguided policy, I would have been labelled incorrigible, even though I was rather tame, either with my nose in a book or my hands on an electronic gadget. Surely, most of the members of this board would have been suspended or expelled from school under the rules and policies you are now imposing upon your students, and I would think the less of you if the case were otherwise.
True, schools need peace, order and the cooperation of the students; but so does a prison, and I can recall from my own youth when school seemed like a prison. Adolescents must, in order to become responsible citizens, test the limits of acceptable behavior. There is simply no substitute for trial and error. Behavior cannot be learned only from books and sermons and it is patently unreasonable to expect young people to never step over the line. A young person who always avoids that line is either a patsy or a prig, whom we rightly regard with contempt, even in young children. Surely this school board does not see itself in the business of raising patsies or prigs, but that is precisely the message conveyed by your policies, your rules and your enforcement of them.
Further, it goes without saying that the most valuable members of our society, and of any society, are invariably limit-testers and line-crossers -- every single one of them must run roughshod over taboos and restrictions established by "good people." To believe that leaders and creative people can forever walk a narrow line is ludicrous. They are what they are because they have the courage to cross lines and challenge the accepted authority. Rather than regarding those children as diamonds in the rough, your policy would label them at best as troublemakers--and at worst as criminals--and ruthlessly exclude them from a regular education.
Your policies exemplify the allopathic-industrial approach: do this and the desired result will happen. Prescribe a pill and the pill will cure the patient. Push a button and the factory will produce widgets. Turn a knob and music flows from a box. Enact policies and rules and enforce them mechanically and students will behave. Use a rigorous quality control system to test the "outputs" and discard the ones that fail. Above all, make no allowance for the heights and depths of the human spirit.
Your policy does not treat your students as genuine persons, either in its letter or in its enforcement. It assumes that, like a machine, you can get the output you want through a mechanical process, based upon a view of humanity (especially youthful humanity) that is less than human. The Russian novelist Dostoevsky once wrote that if it were possible to reduce a person to an entirely predictable formula--if you really figure him out scientifically, in other words--he will immediately go insane to prove you wrong and to preserve his personhood. Likewise, any policy that bases itself upon a similar view of students will inevitably result in rebellion or mental illness in the form of depression or sociopathic behavior.
You are sowing bitter seeds and when the harvest time comes--and rest assured it will come--you will reap, in Churchill's words, a bitter harvest without mercy. The Greek god Kronos, afraid that one of his offspring would depose him, swallowed his children as they were born. Ultimately, Zeus escaped, defeated his father and forced him to disgorge his children. We do not have to literally swallow our children to invoke the archetype; in an effort to produce obedient, and conforming members of the industrial/consuming hive; we only have to crush their spirit, and, in the process, bring forth murderous monsters like Harris, Kleibold and all the other recent school killers.
The proper goal of education is a mature, autonomous human being, capable, first, of fulfilling his responsibility as a citizen, and second, of making his way in the world. Most of modern education is at war with the first objective, as are most of our contemporary public and private institutions, virtually all of which are devoted to the cultivation of conformity in thought and behavior. The object is to produce obedient employees and consumers, not citizens. Because that object ignores the real nature of the human spirit, we will get neither citizens nor obedient employees and consumers. Because your board's policies are based upon the same assumptions and share the same goals, they are likewise destined to fail.