With progressive education’s long march to undo America’s consensus on Judeo-Christian values nearly complete, kids trapped in public schools are routinely exposed to only two forms of moral exhortation: being scolded over global warming and subjected to a torrent of anti-bullying messages. Concern for the environment and kindness to others aren’t necessarily bad messages for kids to hear, but when hitched to a narrow political agenda and taught outside a broader moral framework, these messages can become pernicious.
We saw a good example of this last week in New Jersey, where the Board of Education of the Township of Montgomery found a sixth-grader guilty of “harassment, intimidation, or bullying.” The sixth-grader’s crime was telling a vegetarian classmate that “it’s not good to not eat meat” and that “he should eat meat because he’d be smarter and have bigger brains.” He also told the classmate “vegetarians are idiots.”
The Scrapbook would find this child guilty of being a sixth-grader. An administrative judge, on the other hand, found the kid guilty of bullying. New Jersey law, as ridiculous as it is, is pretty clear on this point:
Of course, when the law codifies bullying as judging “any other distinguishing characteristic,” there’s no end to the absurdities that might result. Tellingly, the judge didn’t punish the kid for being mean. His decision found the kid guilty for pointing out his vegetarian classmate was different and disapproving of the classmate’s dietary choices. As noted by Washington Post legal blogger Eugene Volokh, “The decision didn’t single out the nonsubstantive insult—’vegetarians are idiots’—as being the punishable statement. Instead, the decision treated this statement as on par with polite factual and normative claims (whether accurate or not), such as ‘it’s not good to not eat meat’ and ‘[you] should eat meat because [you]’d be smarter and have bigger brains.’ ” The kid’s mistake, in the eyes of the law, was homing in on “a distinguishing characteristic.”
As miscarriages of justice go, the carnivore child will probably survive his sentence of five lunchtime detentions. But this is a pretty harrowing lesson in what public schools have become. Instead of being chided by a teacher or principal for a lapse in manners, the boy was dragged before a judge whose ruling will send all the wrong messages for a middle school student trying to decipher the right social norms. The ultimate lesson for the child is he has two options: Either he can remain cowed, or he can go ahead and disregard the admonition to politely disagree with someone because he’s not allowed to have an opinion anyway.
But there’s a lesson for the rest of us here, as well. If we want to know why our civic disputes have become so bitter, the answer is that for a long time now, our schools haven’t taught Americans how to be civil.
