Pessimistic Politics: Kids Today

No, I worry about today’s youth because of schools. Not school teachers, because, let’s face it, they have enough to worry about. I’m talking about the school administrators that make important decisions without consulting anyone and are especially cautious not to let anyone with a shred of common sense, say a golden retriever, know about their plans until it’s too late to change anything.

Just like most decision-makers who operate in this fashion, school administrators really don’t have any idea what they’re doing, not that they would admit it. I imagine a typical closed-door meeting involves administrators sitting around in the board room, trying to avoid eye contact, agreeing with whatever person says something first. Then they go home and crawl into bed, staring up at the ceiling, wondering why the hell they agreed to be a school administrator.

I say this in light of two news articles dealing with administrative decisions regarding the safety of students, neither of which I’m making up. The first is an Associated Press article regarding a new safety regulation at Willet Elementary school in Attleboro, Massachusetts. Officials there have banned students from playing unsupervised games of tag or touch football out of fear that they might hurt themselves and hold the school liable. They also proudly removed dodge ball a few years back because it was considered (really) “exclusionary and dangerous.” Several other schools have also banned such activities.

You’ve got to love how we, as a nation, have decided that anything that inconveniences us, including a mild cold, is grounds to haul off and sue someone. If this mentality was in place back when I went to school, I could have used the resulting lawsuit winnings to purchase a large mansion with servants. In elementary school alone, I could have sued the school for allowing me to experience emotional abuse, assault, wrongful imprisonment, accidents due to negligence, sexual harassment (since being put in the same lines as girls was a fate worse than death back then) and discrimination. The school would have done better to let us stay home and just mail us homework, but then they would probably get sued for any resulting paper cuts and mental anguish.

However, this doesn’t top the other article from ABC News, which talks about a policy adopted by school officials in Burleson, Texas, in response to recent school shootings, to train students to attack gunman should they enter the classrooms. Seriously. It would have to be Texas.

The idea is to teach students that if a gunman bursts into the classroom and tries to take everyone hostage, to assault him by throwing books, backpacks, chairs, dissected frogs, light-weight classmates, or anything else that they can get their hands on to disorient and subdue the gunman. Because we all know nothing is a better remedy for a gunman seeking to hurt students than a classroom of students charging at him.

It doesn’t take a genius, or even a reasonably bright cabbage to figure out that this plan might put students at risk, based on the simple equation:

Gun + Crazed Man = Crazed Gunman Crazed Gunman = Bad

The idea is that if someone barges into a classroom with a gun, that person is very likely planning on using it, and doesn’t have it on him in case he needs to turn off a TV and lost the remote. Training course designer Robin Browne admitted that rushing a person carrying a gun might be dangerous (duh), and that the first student to attack will probably end up as worm food, but points out that the sacrifice may pay off because (I’m not making this statement up) “[the gunman] won’t be able to shoot the fourth, fifth, eighth, twentieth or thirtieth student.” I should point out that Browne is a major in the British Army, which is located in Britain, and he doesn’t make mention of the fact that he’s using the training course back home.

Personally, if a gunman burst into the room, the last thing I would be thinking about is sacrificing my life for the other students, because a good portion of them were so mentally inept that they would probably die in an embarrassing kitchen appliance accident a few years later anyway. Instead, I would grab the nearest moron, push him at the gunman, and run out the door, alive and secure in the knowledge that once things settled down, there would be one less idiot to deal with.

Okay, maybe I’m being a little harsh, but I think we can agree that the student bullet shield plan isn’t all that well thought out. I can’t imagine how you would explain to a child that there might come a time when they have to charge at a gun-wielding madman, in blatant violation of what they tell you in the “real world” and common sense, armed with nothing but safety scissors that can barely cut through air, full with the knowledge that they might get shot. “Don’t forget your lunch, your jacket, and that you may have to attack a person carrying a gun with your notebook!”

So on one end, we have the “officials” telling us that tag and dodge ball are life-threatening activities that should never be played by anyone. On the other end, we have “officials” telling kids to defend themselves from potential school shooters with books and pencils, an action that might upset an individual who, you could probably assume, is a little peeved already, what with them bringing a gun into a classroom and all. I know these “officials” are from two different areas of the country, but I don’t think we need this fact to stop us from firmly believing that these “officials” have no idea what the hell they’re talking about.

I know what you’re thinking: “Chris, these two policies are in effect in backwater states where some people still believe the Pony Express is in full operation. This kind of thing would never happen in MY town.”

Think again. My hometown of Oregon, Ohio is one of those places that’s about as dangerous as a box of kittens, but that didn’t stop school administrators from taking precautions. Since the Columbine school shootings, my high school went through some drastic changes, including standardized locks for lockers and security cameras. The best, and most recent, happened at my elementary school, Starr, which installed security cameras several months ago.

I’m sure that there are more, but the cameras that are in plain view are located by the playground, watching children and making them feel completely and utterly fearful. There are only two reasons I can see that would prompt securities cameras, and neither are good. The message is either “We don’t trust you.” or “Bad men might try and get you.” Granted, it’s not a completely bad idea to have them, but come on. Elementary schools with surveillance systems? What’s next? Daycare centers with employees armed with assault rifles?

I think a better solution is to use the security system they had when I went to Starr: the employees. We should extract the DNA from key staff members at Starr (some of whom are probably only 214 years old by now), clone them, and send them off to other schools. Besides the added benefit of the clones being so frightening that Charles Manson would think twice able coming around, you wouldn’t need to pay the clones anything, as they would work for the sheer perverse pleasure of punishing students and could subsist on cafeteria food and sleep in coffins in the school basement. This system would ensure that we would constantly produce high-quality children from our schools, the kind that grow up to run opinion websites without pay.

So here’s my idea: let’s just forget about both of these ideas and go back to the time when playing tag wasn’t considered to be on the same level, fatality-wise, as wrestling polar bears and the lone safety concern was not getting into cars with strangers. Just to make sure these kids have some sense about them, they aren’t allowed to watch any cartoon made before 1994 and their sole forms of entertainment will involve the Nintendo Entertainment System or the Gameboy (the original dot matrix one; no fancy colors for these kids!). Only then can we hope that today’s children will grow up to write articles about how screwed up kids in their day are becoming.

Seriously, though, I think both sides are so far from hitting the happy medium they can’t even see the road. Most of us can probably agree that essentially unarmed children shouldn’t be fighting demented people with guns, but restricting children from playing games that might hurt them physically or emotionally is really going to hurt them in the long run. In this nation, we have this unhealthy urge to protect children from the things we find dangerous, offensive, or inappropriate, yet at the same time, we expect them to grow up knowing what to do in the “real world” once they get there. I would venture to say that the most well-meaning parents are the most dangerous, because once those kids get out on their own, they’re going to be expected to deal with getting physically or mentally hurt, and their parents, with no irony whatsoever, are going to insist they should deal with their own problems.

We live in a nation that is, compared to other parts of the world, a relatively safe place to live. Of course, there’s always that chance that we’ll cross paths with someone who’ll threaten our lives for whatever reason, and we need to be aware that it could happen and what we need to do. Hammering the fear into our heads, however, is unnecessary and destructive. There’s absolutely no reason to make a child in the United States of America think they could die at school.

These incidences reflect how generally clueless we are about how life works. Each individual's first priority is to themselves, but to what extent varies from person to person. Since a lot of us aren’t worried about starving to death or dying of exposure, I think we can afford to have a little grace, courtesy, and compassion towards others, but not everyone is going to see it that way. We have to teach our children that there will come a time when they might get hurt and no one is going to be there to take care of them, or someone might not want to work with them because they don’t like them or don’t believe they’re good enough, or a guy might point a gun at them and want to kill them for no reason. Hiding these realities aren’t going to do kids any good, but making them live in fear isn’t going to do them much better.

So here are my naïve suggestions on the matter. Parents, you have to talk to your children honestly about the dangers of the world, but don’t make them think that everyday is going to be their last. Teachers, keep an eye on your charges and look for signs of possible trouble, but don’t treat students like criminals. And school administrators, look for other jobs, maybe something in creative writing, because the thinking you’ve demonstrated would make a hilarious farce.