NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Expel and Arrest the Best Students: The USA's Road to Ruin
Expel and Arrest the Best Students: The USA's Road to Ruin
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001024.html
By now you've probably heard the story of 16-year-old Kiera Wilmot in
(you almost could guess this) the once great but now poster child for
government mediocrity state of Florida.
When she mixed a couple of chemicals together as an experiment on
school grounds, she created a micro-explosion -- really just a loud
poof -- that didn't hurt anybody or damage anything. The same sort of
experiment that thousands of creative youngsters have performed for
generations, back in the days when chemistry sets still had actual
chemicals in them, and creativity itself wasn't considered to be a
crime.
Should she have been doing this without explicit permission and
supervision? Probably not. A reasonable punishment might have been a
safety lecture, or at the far end a couple of days of after school
detention.
But this is Florida. Her high school called out the goon squad, had
her arrested, hauled away in handcuffs, and charged with a felony (to
be tried as an adult) -- possession/discharge of a weapon on school
grounds and discharging a destructive device. In other words, the
lunatic State of Florida is hell bent on destroying her life.
Did I mention that Kiera is also black? Good ol' Florida. If there's
one thing you can depend on from the "Sunshine State," it's that when
it comes to health care, the justice system, education, and pretty
much everything else, they'll do everything in the most punitive,
unthinking, unethical, and morally corrupt manner possible.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying that everyone in Florida fits these
deplorable categories. But the people of Florida get the kind of
government they vote for, and can't complain if they're judged by the
results, just like everywhere else.
And I'll even cut Florida a break. They're not alone in their
idiotic, asinine behavior when it comes to education and dealing with
kids.
Across the country, we've been treated to a late night horror movie
sequence of young children -- some barely able to walk by
themselves -- being tasered, handcuffed, arrested, interrogated, expelled,
and worse for all manner of harmless behaviors -- with school district
officials usually hiding like cowards behind so-called "zero
tolerance" rules that help to make the USA educational system a
laughingstock of the world.
When we have little children being accosted by authorities for biting
their cookies into the shape of a gun, you know the lunatics are
running the asylum.
I haven't heard reports of American children being waterboarded by
school officials yet, but given the actions of officials to date --
most of whom probably shouldn't be let anywhere near children at
all -- we'd be unwise to totally discount the possibility of such
behavior. (You think I'm exaggerating? You've heard the one about
the strip searches of kids to try find a few missing dollars? When
you have that kind of perverted antisocial mentality running schools,
I'd submit that pretty much anything could happen.)
Now admittedly, there are some things that the American educational
system is good at. For example, there's increasing evidence that
we're just stellar at driving children to the edge of mental and
physical illness (and increasingly, beyond the edge) with standardized
tests that often cover material that was never taught, and that put
such pressures on the system that kids are vomiting and teachers are
rigging results to try get by. Great work, if your goal is making
sure that our country's competitive decline in the global community
becomes the most permanent and prominent aspect of our history going
forward.
But everything is relative, and we can pull the camera back even
farther, and see how the failings of our schools represent the broader
failings of a corrupt and toxic political process, with many prominent
politicians sounding like they themselves never made it past third
grade. But ask them to quote the bible, and they'll bend your ear
with their explanations of what God wants for us all.
Small wonder then that we see increasing political attacks on science
research and funding, and attempts to replace peer review with bible
thumping.
Sometimes it's not easy to see the forest for the trees.
But when it comes to the utter insanity that has increasingly become
part and parcel of our educational and political systems, the "connect
the dots" cause and effect is staring us in the face, directly from
the mirror.
This is our fault. It is perhaps the ultimate realization of Pogo's
"We have met the enemy and he is us."
We have permitted this nonsense, this anti-intellectual horror to
metastasize throughout our society, even as we push into the Internet
age where science, reason, and education will be critical, crucial,
indispensable to our personal and collective futures.
It is unacceptable for the small and perverse minds who would declare
an inquisitive teenager a felon, or a cookie-wielding child a menace,
to be anointed with such power to literally destroy our
civilization -- piece by piece, child by child.
For it is in education and our children that the entirety of our
legacy ultimately rests. It is not at all an exaggeration to suggest
that if we don't change course from toxic stupidity, we are ultimately
and deservedly doomed.
Changing the course of a gigantic ship headed toward a waterfall of
destruction cannot be accomplished instantly.
But we can at the very least begin by introducing a modicum of common
sense back into school policies that currently seem to have been based
on prison procedures, and to stop using handcuffs, jail cells, and
electric prods as our most visible and powerful educational tools.
The choices, as always, remain very much our own.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com): http://www.vortex.com/lauren
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org/pfir-info
Founder:
- Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org
- PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
- Data Wisdom Explorers League: http://www.dwel.org
- Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance: http://www.gctip.org
Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Google+: http://vortex.com/g+lauren / Twitter: http://vortex.com/t-lauren
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com
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