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Home / Teaching kids about big brother
More and more, schools are adopting zero-tolerance policies. High schools are now filled with armed police, metal detectors, and drug-sniffing dogs. Is that the environment in which children can properly grow and learn? Are we doing more harm by frightening students? There doesn't appear to be any evidence that these policies are helping provide a better education, nor that they are providing a safer environment. Is this a case of the cure being worse than the disease? Could it be that there's something more insidious going on here?
FTA: "Last fall, a Delaware student was suspended from school after bringing a knife into his classroom. Because of his school's zero-tolerance weapons policy, he was suspended for 45 days and forced to attend an alternative school. Swift justice? Perhaps -- except that the student, Zachary Christie, was a first grader at the time and the "weapon" was his Cub Scout-issued fork-spoon-knife tool. When his case received national attention, his punishment and the school's policy were swiftly revised -- part of the growing groundswell of opposition to zero tolerance...
We're teaching kids what it means to be a citizen in our country. And what I fear we're doing is teaching them that what it means to be an American is that you accept authority without question and that you have absolutely no rights to question punishment. It's very Big Brother-ish in a way. Kids are being taught that you should expect to be drug tested if you want to participate in an organization, that walking past a police officer every day and being constantly under the gaze of a security camera is normal. And my concern is that these children are going to grow up and be less critical and thoughtful of these sorts of mechanisms. And so the types of political discussions we have now, like for example, whether or not wiretapping is OK, these might not happen in 10 years."
DISCUSS!
Original posting by Braincrave Second Life staff on Sep 12, 2010 at http://www.braincrave.com/viewblog.php?id=322
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