In the wake of the shooting at Sandy Hook, schools nationwide are cracking down on the real culprits: grade school children.
Yes, you read that correctly.
Take Josh Welch, a Baltimore-area 7-year-old. After chewing a Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun, his school suspended him for two days. This week, the school denied Welch’s parents’ request to have the suspension removed from his permanent record, as The Baltimore Sun reported.
The news has featured a lot of overreactions like this lately, but it’s hardly a recent development. I experienced something similar in grade school.
In 2005, when I was a sixth grader, one of my teachers assigned a PowerPoint presentation — then a new task to me. Somehow, another classmate and I came up with the idea to put pictures of guns on our slides. Why we did, I don’t remember, but I’ll never forget what happened next.
Since we saved everything onto schoolwide servers, the school administration quickly found out what we had done. Aside from me and my friend, other students had acted similarly. Our principal summoned us all into the office and upbraided us for both wasting school technology and violating our school’s gun-reference policy. Though we dodged complete suspension, the principal banned us from using any technology in school for a month.
A punishment like that would likely shock sixth graders today, whose curricula features technology more than mine ever did. Still, though not terrible, the sentence did inconvenience me.
For example, I had to do all the work for an assigned science class PowerPoint at home. But we didn’t have PowerPoint on my home computer, so I had to use my neighbor’s computer. I saved the presentation on a floppy disk. On presentation day, I inserted the disk into the computer at school, but the PowerPoint I had finished was incomplete. I’d either failed to save properly or exceeded the disk’s memory. Regardless, access to technology at school would have prevented that problem.
But my comparative technological illiteracy was not the main lesson I learned from this punishment. In fact, I’m not sure what exactly I did learn.
If the point was to demonstrate the privilege of technology at school, then the time I would waste or had already wasted on school computers — and technology everywhere since — spoiled that. But I suppose if the point was to prevent my becoming a homicidal maniac — well, kudos to my grade school, as I don’t have a single murder to my name.
Looking back on this experience, then, I think I can say I have learned this: Schools have not changed their reflexive policy against anything related to guns. They continue to overreact and continue to punish students disproportionately to their ‘crimes’ — when it comes to guns, at least. The in-school restrictions against guns and violence do make sense, but the mindset that treats even the faintest allusion to them as utterly unforgivable certainly does not.
