Thursday, December 30, 2004

I love stories like this XV

From ZeroIntelligence.net comes this story of terrorism in our government-funded public schools. A school suspension administered to a 10-year-old girl, Kelli Ilyankoff, for drawing silly pictures. The ultimate giggle from this story is this paragraph:
The [zero tolerance] policy defines terrorism as "a threat to commit violence communicated with the intent to terrorize another". In order to arrive at their conclusion that Kelli terrorized her friend you would have to define laughing together as communicating an intent to terrorize.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

We are the real morons here -- we pay these people to be this stupid and then when do nothing when they act. The people of that community should be picketing that school until the people responsible are removed from their positions -- not promoted, not segwayed into some other position -- but gone. They have no business interacting with children or deciding policies that affect our children. They are TOO STUPID. Unforunately, we are more stupid for allowing it.

Steve Erbach said...

As to us being the stupid ones, I can hardly disagree with you. We're the ones that elect the school board members. Do you remember what Mark Twain said about schools boards? "God created an idiot for practice, then he made a school board." But those idiots are us. As far as picketing the school, I do believe that lots of the parents of kids attending that school are in favor of the zero tolerance policy. Sure, they can see that it goes overboard a time or two; but in the main it's right on target. Keep a tight grip on the reins of those kids. Make 'em behave! Again, those parents are us. We've bought into the public school mantra time and time again, and consider ourselves unqualified to teach our own children. Until we get over our inferiority and our slavish devotion to having the authorities take care of things for us, all of this will continue.

Steve Erbach