Zero Tolerance is increasingly turning out to mean zero common sense. The way some schools now implement the idea of zero tolerance it is tantamount to believing that a person is actually sick when the individual utters “I am sick of this mess”. For the moment, no one responds to the utterance “I am sick of this mess” by exclaiming “Oh my goodness, let me call a doctor”. So we know that commonsense still has some purchase upon reality.
Alas, when it comes to the assessment of things in schools it is manifestly clear that common sense has taken a leave of absence.
Case 1: A fourth grader is sent to the principal’s office and nearly suspended for having a 2-inch toy gun in his possession. Like anyone, I hold that there is much to be said for students not having objects that can be easily mistaken for a weapon. But that precept surely rules out the worry that a 2-inch toy gun is indeed a real gun.
I know extremely little about guns. But it is inconceivable to me that I would mistake a 2-inch gun for an actual gun. So one has to ask: What the hell was the teacher thinking in sending the fourth greater to the principal’s office? Likewise, one asks: What on earth was the principal thinking?
Case 2: A 12-year old girl is hauled out of school in handcuffs for doodling on her desk. “What did she doodle on the desk?,” you ask. The answer: her name. Not profanity or some racial slur. Not a nasty and vicious comment about some classmate. None of these things. No, she doodled her name.
Like any reasonable person, I concur with the judgment that students should not doodle on desks. But taking the student out of the school in handcuffs for doodling? That response is so ludicrous that there is nothing that can proffered as an explanation that would make sense of such a drastic measure.
Once upon a time, the idea was that adults were models for maturity of judgment and measured behavior—especially teachers. The very idea was that children growing up learnt how to behave not simply by what they were told to do but also by the kind of behavior that they witnessed on the part of adults. Adults were the standard-bearer of reasonable behavior. And certainly there was the idea that teachers were.
Clearly things have changed. And this change does not bode well for the future of our society.
With the case of either the boy or the girl, I am hardly suggesting that a reprimand of some sort was not in order. But clearly the reprimand should be proportional to the offense. If a handcuffing a child is seen as the appropriate response to the child’s doodling her name, then what on earth would be appropriate if the child doodled some vicious remark about a classmate? Handcuffs and a noose? Or merely handcuffs and ankle-cuffs?
Similarly if a teacher and principle reacts to a 2-inch toy gun as if it were a real gun, then it becomes rather difficult to imagine what would be the appropriate reaction in the face of what is in fact an actual gun.
The question that most obviously presents itself is the following: How is it possible that the idea of zero-tolerance came to be construed in such an inane and absurd manner? The answer, I believe, has to do with the quite mistaken that such behavior is required by fairness and complete fairness precludes any exercise of discretion. This, in turn, is no doubt thought to have the advantage of precluding any discrepancies in treatment owing to cross-cultural differences.
Alas, the problem is that such blanket uniformity turns out to be a form of injustice in and of itself has been moribund and there can be no justice when justice is shorn of reasonableness.
Suppose we have a student from France whose command of English is still crude. So the student from France tries to express friendly feelings and says to a student “I kiss you,” which is the literal translation of “je t’embrasse,” a very common expression between good friends in France, be they female-male, female-female, or male-male. Now a policy of zero-tolerance with respect to expressions of intimacy would entail that the student from France trying to express himself in English should be punished, which of course is absurd.
My example is born of a real experience when a good male from France was visiting the United States and we got together. As we were parting ways, he said to me “I kiss you”. I knew immediately that he was not making a sexual advance, but that he was offering a literal interpretation of a very warm expression in French commonly used between good friends. In reacting to my friend’s utterance I used what goes by the name of commonsense.
It is the very use of commonsense that zero-tolerance precludes and therein lies the fundamental problem with zero-tolerance. Let us allow that the policy that no one should have any sort of gun on school premises applies to all guns whether they are real or not. This move obviously precludes the possibility of someone bringing toy gun to school that could easily enough be mistaken for a real gun by just about anyone. Well, once one allows this point, then surely what follows is that it is silly to treat a 2-inch toy gun as if it might be mistaken for a real gun. So it is even if the student is informed that he is not allowed to have that gun on school premises.
Doodling on a desk counts as defacing school property. Still, precisely what we know is that children do precisely that sort of thing when they get bored. To ignore the very character of what it is like to be a child is, in fact, to act contrary to common sense.
In a word, then, children are growing up experiencing their teachers, who are adults, acting in ways that are manifestly contrary to common sense. This is a social configuration that is entirely inimical to the proper development of children.
We wonder why our children are dysfunction. Alas, part of the explanation may very well be consequence of the implementation of the absurd policy of zero-tolerance. For that policy is none other than a way of teaching, by way of adult modeling, that common sense does not matter.