Get out your ice skates folks. I generally make it a rule to ignore the inaptly named American Thinker but the title hooked me into this post and I find myself in complete agreement with Charles J. Sykes on zero tolerance policies in public schools.
None of this, of course, is really about keeping children safe or even teaching them how to behave: it is about administrators protecting their backsides.
Instead of encouraging children to exercise sound judgment, "zero tolerance" shows adults at their most arbitrary and stupid, especially when it punishes students for doing the right thing.
This is ironic, since these are the folks who are supposed to teach our children "critical thinking skills."
I've read about six posts at this blog and they have all been, to put it kindly, astoundingly misguided, but this one is spot on. Zero tolerance policies do irreparable harm to our youth. They're little more than a back door indoctrination into accepting diminished civil rights as normal. They certainly do nothing to foster respect for authority. They foster fear of it instead.
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