The Stupidity of "Zero-Tolerance": 6-Year-Old Suspended For Bringing Food Utensil to School

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The Stupidity of "Zero-Tolerance": 6-Year-Old Suspended For Bringing Food Utensil to School

The Stupidity of "Zero-Tolerance": 6-Year-Old Suspended For Bringing Food Utensil to School
What can this teach us about U.S. foreign policy? Quite a lot, actually.
by Allison Kilkenny
October 12, 2009

NEWARK, Del. -- Finding character witnesses when you are 6 years old is not easy. But there was Zachary Christie last week at a school disciplinary committee hearing with his karate instructor and his mother's fiancé by his side to vouch for him.
Zachary’s offense? Taking a Cub Scout utensil that can serve as a knife, fork and spoon to school. He was so excited about joining the Scouts that he wanted to use it at lunch. School officials concluded that he had violated their zero-tolerance policy on weapons, and Zachary now faces 45 days in the district's reform school.

"Zero-tolerance" policy arose from the string of shooting sprees in American high schools. As usual, schools did not thoughtfully analyze what kind of school environment (complete with hierarchical sects and rampant bullying) is inspiring such horrific shootings. Rather, schools followed steps 1 through 5, and opted for a hyper-totalitarian state within a state where children are all treated as suspects, including little Zachary Christie.

Really, Delaware? The six-year-old is going to shank someone with his Swiss Army knife? Such overzealous, reactionary policies distract from the very real problems in schools: low test scores, budget cuts, bullying, and so on.

In Going Postal, author Mark Ames looks at the phenomenon of school and workplace shootings in America, but rather than assigning blame to obvious (and incorrect) targets like Marilyn Manson, Ames digs deeper. He proposes that modern workplace and school violence emerged soon after Reaganomics began in the 1980s when the wealth divide widened, and Reagan did everything in his power to support his friends, the CEOs of corporations, while screwing the workers. The result is a corporate culture where Americans work harder for longer hours for less. They have no job security, are buried in debt, and occasionally one of them snaps and shoots their co-workers.

Ames argues -- quite convincingly -- that schoolyard and office massacres are modern-day slave rebellions. The overly oppressive and exploitive nature of hyper-Capitalism, the neutering of unions, and the overall degradation of employees, neighborhoods, communities, and society have resulted in a culture of fear and violence. While Bowling For Columbine blamed the guns, Ames blames the culture, which includes reactionary policies like "Zero tolerance" that end up hurting innocents like Zachary while the real causes of our sick society go untreated.

Please read the complete article at:

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/143213/the_stupidity_of_%22zero-tolerance%22%3A_6-year-old_suspended_for_bringing_food_utensil_to_school