Recently, a school in the once great state of Maryland offered counseling to students “troubled” by a classmate eating pastry into the shape of a gun. You might think his offense was kind of silly, but the school considered the seven year old students triggering action a “Level 3” violation of the following code:
“Any gun of any kind, loaded or unloaded, operable or inoperable, including any object other than a firearm which is a look-a-like of a gun. This shall include, but is not limited to, pellet gun, paintball gun, stun gun, taser, BB gun, flare gun, nail gun, and air soft gun.”
His two day suspension was followed up with a letter to every parent in the school:
Dear Parents and Guardians:
I am writing to let you know about an incident that occurred this morning in one of our classrooms and encourage you to discuss this matter with your child in a manner you deem most appropriate.
During breakfast this morning, one of our students used food to make inappropriate gestures that disrupted the class. While no physical threats were made and no one [was] harmed, the student had to be removed from the classroom.
* * *
As you are aware, the Code of Student Conduct and appropriate consequences related to violations of the code are clearly spelled out in the Student Handbook, which was sent home during the first week of school and can be found on our website, www.aacps.org.
If your children express that they are troubled by today’s incident, please talk with them and help them share their feelings. Our school counselor is available to meet with any students who have the need to do so next week. In general, please remind them of the importance of making good choices.
Yes, let us discuss the mental devastation of dastardly pastry weaponry with our children, shall we? Thankfully, the strawberry pop tart in question was destroyed before it could cause any further harm to the most vulnerable among us.
Now the child, to his credit, did take full blame for this ugly incident. He told FOX45, “All I was trying to do was turn it into a mountain but, it didn’t look like a mountain really and it turned out to be a gun kinda.” When his teacher saw the strawberry tart he knew he was in trouble, “She was pretty mad…and I think I was in big trouble.”
This, unfortunately, is not an isolated incident. It is instead just another example in a long list of examples of disturbing reactions to children simply being children currently unfolding all across the nation. Now as “scary” as pop tart guns, tiny action figure plastic weapons, pointy “finger guns,” and invisible pretend grenades may be to school administrators (who apparently don’t remember what it was like to be a child) their reactions to such child’s play makes them an amazing embarrassment to themselves as well as to society at large.
I would further offer that if you are a teacher or school administrator afraid of legos, fingers, paper, active imaginations, rubber bands, spit balls, and the like then you have absolutely no business attempting to shape and mold vulnerable young minds. These and related incidents are certainly a stinging indictment of the public school system. Understand the reality that these are the type of people teaching your children, guiding their education, and indoctrinating them on how to think and act while you are off trying to make a living and provide for your family. It is simply disgraceful. The public school system continues to morph into the liberal indoctrination system at an alarming speed with its usual baggage train of illogical thought and actions.
I think we can all agree that no lives are saved, no tragedy averted, and no additional aura of safety added to a school campus by such classroom clampdowns. In this hyper-sensitive, progressive, nanny-state world where we are afraid of shadows and the innocent actions of small children one can only wonder what ever happened to logic and common sense. It is not this poor child with a twinkle of an imagination that needs counseling or punishment, but the principle and a teacher who made this into more than a five second incident. A stern “Josh, sit down and eat your food” would probably have been sufficient but no, not in “let’s scare the public that all guns are bad” overreaction land. In this era of symbolism over substance sound thinking is really the only casualty in the classroom in this type of situation.
These same finger-wagging administrators should have seen my childhood toy gun collection, not to mention the full scale battles we waged at recess in elementary school. When I was a child playing full blown WAR at recess was normal and nobody gave it a second thought. We played Army, Star Wars, and staged epic reenactments of civil war battles during recess. We even had officers and ranks.
Often such playground clashes were elevated to class on class warfare. The fifth graders would wear their Boy Scout shirts on a certain day and be the Union, and the sixth graders would play the Confederates. If your position was “overran” you might get roughed up a bit but such play consisted mostly of the trading of volleys followed by Gettysburg like charges. It really was great fun. I think even pastry kid would have enjoyed it. Can you imagine the hysterics such a scene would cause today? “Little Billy Yank pretended to shoot a musket at little Johnny Reb at Barack Obama Elementary School today, full story at eleven.” How things have changed in such a short amount of time.
And while it is easy to write such paranoia off to nervous ninnies and worry-wart weenies, the other alternative is perhaps even more frightening. A comment by JCM suggested the following.
“This is not stupidity, laziness, on the part of school. This extreme intolerance of an everyday object has a purpose. Indoctrinate an entire generation that guns are bad, bad, bad, that talking about them, having pictures of the them, the thoughtcrime of them is evil itself.”
When this generation comes of age, disarming then enslaving the population becomes a breeze.
Now that is more frightening than any misshaped pastry could ever be.
Perhaps the school would just have been happy if little Josh had merely stated that he was transgendered and wanted to go change with his female classmates in the girl’s locker room. For that type of behavior is being strategically fast-tracked as normal and protected while at the same time playing with your government funded pop tart is not. Progressivism is indeed a confusing and detrimental disorder, and the proof is all around us.
Our enemies parade their children around in suicide vests and teach them to kill and hate all Westerners and Jews. We teach ours to be afraid of misshaped breakfast food and to tremble at the mere hint of something possibly representing a firearm. Even in obvious play. The educational system in the United States is beyond broken and is dominated and controlled by politically correct, busy-body Progressive administrators. What a shame.
In the end, Josh’s father said “I’ll just call it insanity, it’s a pastry.” I couldn’t agree more.
Crossposted from The Constitution Club
It really shows that it is a sad time that we live in where even kids are not safe from the scrutiny of political correctness. What sort of society are we degrading into?
This is real bad. I’d like to see the whole Student Code Book. It must be a tome. Are the teachers on some kind of drugs? Can’t they even think. I heard a comment from John Rappaport on this and he said something on the lines of, the parents should take all their children out of that school and form a school of their own, and I couldn’t agree more. If I had been the teacher, I’d would have given the student more pop tarts until he was satisfied with his creative process, and then when he was done, I’d have given him an A+ for art for the day. He seems like a creative kind of person and lord knows that we need more of these kind of people for the future, because we seem to be running a little short of that in the last couple of generations, probably because of the school systems.
Zero tolerance always boils down to zero common sense. Paper guns and pastry guns pose no genuine threat to anyone outside of the imaginary world liberals have built for themselves.
In today’s world, stupidity and ignorance reigns supreme just look at the federal house and senate and every state and house senate. 90% of the old garbage was replaces in the last election-brown in ohio is s shining example. Pure on the take, under the table money grabber.
In today’s world, stupidity and ignorance reigns supreme. school counselors are now psychiatrist. They grill your child than threaten them not to tell their parents-illegal? This elections replaced 90% of the old garbage. brown in ohio is a prime example of “brown nosing”. he has passed the rectal sphincter on most of his colleagues and now sits in their colon. true! The clincher is that he is really, really dumb. the governor of ohio is right behind him in the range of stupidity and dumbness.
I’d like to see the parents of these kids sue the school and the teachers and staff for causing psychological damage to their child. That seems to be the only thing these bozoids understand.
No, I’m not going to rant about intellectually lazy teachers and administrators here who substitute “zero tolerance” for actual rational thought.
Nope. Not in the mood.
In the days of the old west, there were 14 and 15 year old “children” who started ranches from ground level, ran them, bossed some very tough older cowboys, carried guns and fought rustlers and indians.
There were 15 year old doctors, midwifes, prostitutes, and criminals.
One town in Wyoming had a 14 year old sheriff.
Today’s kids are so weak that a gun-shaped pastry traumatizes them?
HELL NO!
Today’s children are just as tough, intelligent, and capable as the children back then. If they are allowed to be. Leftist policies are hurting our children by not allowing them to grow up to their abilities.
Leftists are, at their core, child abusers.
They remind me of the old joke:
A man watched a limousine pull up to the curb. The chauffeur got a wheelchair out of the trunk, then lifted a young boy out of the passenger seat and placed him gently into the wheelchair.
“How sad,” he said to the woman who got out next, “A boy that young who cannot walk.”
The woman gave him a snooty look and replied, “Of course he can walk.”
“Thank God we’re wealthy enough that he doesn’t have to!”
I have taught children as young as six to shoot. They are quite capable of understanding “adult” concepts if presented calmly and rationally.
One young girl that I remember loved to fire the big-bores that were so powerful that I had to limit her for fear of damage to her joints. She was a bit on the small side.
(People who post “funny” videos of new shooters on YouTube are idiots. Every new shooter who is injured or humiliated due to piss-poor instruction is another person who is lost to the sport.)
I would trust the judgement of a child over the judgement of those teachers and administrators. Children are much more sensible and logical, when not influenced by idiots.
Even today, “children” are quite capable of safely driving cars and trucks and operating heavy equipment. Don’t believe me? Check out any family farm.
Children are as responsible and mature as they are as expected to be. I have never been shown wrong in treating children as small adults.
“In general, please remind them of the importance of making good choices.”
Oh, I would indeed do so:
“Sarah, let’s choose your new private school.”