Kids at an elementary school pass around a home-made candy powder, consisting of Kool-Aid, cinnamon, sugar and other similar insidious substances. The school district solution: treat it the same as if they were passing around heroin.
While some parents have said the powder’s ingredients were widely known, Parrish said it was passed off as hidden contraband.
“If it looks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a duck,” she said.
I’ve also heard it said that war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.
I realize that it is perhaps beyond the abilities of school districts to (a) consider motivation when students do things, and (b) maintain some sort of grip on reality. But let’s consider, for a moment, what this is teaching kids.
How about it’s teaching them, “It doesn’t matter whether you are innocent or guilty, just whether you appear to be innocent or guilty.” Or, “It doesn’t matter whether what you are doing is illegal, just whether some authority thinks that it is illegal.”
I suspect they don’t teach civics classes any more, either.
Is this another case of a bureaucracy’s primary purpose, i.e., self-preservation, over riding its perceived mandate? It seems to me the school district is ducking their real responsibility, the teaching of children in the arts of creative as well as critical thinking, in favor of maintaining an image of political correctness.
“If it looks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a duck,”
smacks of guilty until proven innocent mentality. Maybe the district administrators should be sent to civics class, along with the “real” students.
Geez, and I thought the system in the 1960’s/70’s portrayed my future life as useless and without hope.
Back then, it was weed, LSD tattoos, and going into the school’s basement ‘bomb shelter’ – as if, even in third grade, I didn’t know how toasted we were all going to be, should that fatal bomb fall, hands protectively over our heads or not….
Now we are teaching the kids worse things… ‘everyone is guilty, and there is no escaping our notice of how guilty you are…’
Hmmm… reminds me, somehow, of some old ratty paperbacks I have around here somewhere….
We need Zero Tolerance for Idiot School Administrators.