By John & Nisha Whitehead
The following is what it means to go back-to-school in the United States today.
Instead of making the schools safer, government officials are making them more authoritarian.
Instead of raising up a generation of civic-minded citizens with critical thinking skills, government officials are churning out compliant drones who know little to nothing about their history or their freedoms.
Instead of being taught the three Rs of education (reading, writing, and arithmetic), young people are being drilled in the three Is of life in the U.S. police state: Indoctrination, intimidation, and intolerance.
From the moment a child enters one of the Nation’s 98,000 public schools to the moment he or she graduates, the exposure will be a steady diet:
• Draconian zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior;
• Overreaching anti-bullying statutes that criminalize speech;
• School resource officers (police) given the task to discipline and/or arresting so-called disorderly students;
• Standardized testing that emphasizes rote answers over critical thinking;
• Politically correct mindsets that teach young people to censor themselves and those around them;
• Extensive biometric and surveillance systems that, coupled with the rest, acclimate young people to a world in which they have no freedom of thought, speech, or movement.
Roped into the government’s profit-driven campaign to keep the Nation safe from drugs, disease, and weapons, the schools have transformed themselves into quasi-prisons, complete with surveillance cameras, metal detectors, police patrols, zero tolerance policies, lock downs, drug-sniffing dogs, strip searches, and active shooter drills.
Young people in the U.S. are first in line to be searched, surveilled, spied on, threatened, tied up, locked down, treated as criminals for non-criminal behavior, tasered, and in some cases, shot.
Students are not only punished for minor transgressions such as playing cops and robbers on the playground, bringing LEGOs to school, or having a food fight, but the punishments have become far more severe, shift from detention and visits to the principal’s office into misdemeanor tickets, juvenile court, handcuffs, tasers, and even prison terms.
Students have been suspended under school zero tolerance policies for bringing to school look alike substances such as oregano, breath mints, birth control pills, and powdered sugar.
Look-alike weapons, such as toy guns, even Lego-sized, hand-drawn pictures of guns, pencils twirled in a threatening manner, imaginary bows and arrows, fingers positioned same as guns, can land a student in hot water, in some cases getting them expelled from school, or, charged with a crime. Having police in the schools only adds to the danger.
Thanks to a combination of media hype, political pandering, and financial incentives, the use of armed police officers, such as school resource officers, to patrol school hallways has risen dramatically in the years since the Columbine school shooting in 1999.
Indeed, the growing presence of police in the Nation’s schools is resulting in greater police involvement in routine discipline matters that principals and parents used to address without involvement from law enforcement officers.
Funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, these school resource officers have become de facto wardens in elementary, middle, and high schools, doling out their own brand of justice to the so-called criminals in their midst with the help of tasers, pepper spray, batons and brute force.
In the absence of school-appropriate guidelines, police are more and more stepping in to deal with minor rule-breaking: sagging pants, disrespectful comments, brief physical skirmishes. What previously might have resulted in a detention or a visit to the principal’s office was replaced with excruciating pain and temporary blindness, often followed by a trip to the courthouse.
Not even the younger, elementary school-aged kids are being spared these hardening tactics.
On any given day when school is in session, kids who act up in class are pinned facedown on the floor, locked in dark closets, tied up with straps, bungee cords, and duct tape, handcuffed, leg-shackled, tasered, or otherwise restrained, immobilized or placed in solitary confinement in order to bring them under control.
In almost every case, these undeniably harsh methods are used to punish kids, some as young as four and five years old, for simply failing to follow directions, or for throwing tantrums.
Very rarely do the kids pose any credible danger to themselves or others.
It is what happens when you introduce police and police tactics into the schools.
Paradoxically, by the time you add in the lock downs and active shooter drills, instead of making the schools safer, school officials have succeeded in creating an environment in which children are so traumatized that they suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, nightmares, anxiety, mistrust of adults in authority, as well as feelings of anger, depression, humiliation, despair, and delusion.
These police state tactics have not made the schools any safer.
The fallout has been what you’d expect, with the Nation’s young people treated as hardened criminals: Handcuffed, arrested, tasered, tackled, and taught the painful lesson that the U.S. Constitution, especially the Fourth Amendment, doesn’t mean much in the American police state.
So what’s the answer, not only for the here-and-now, the children growing up in these quasi-prisons, but for the future of this country? Just as we’ve seen with other issues, any significant reforms will have to start locally, and trickle upwards.
For starters, parents need to be vocal, visible and organized and demand that school officials: Adopt a policy of positive reinforcement in dealing with behavior issues; minimize the presence in the schools of police officers and cease involving them in student discipline; and, insist that all behavioral issues be addressed first and foremost with a child’s parents, before any other disciplinary tactics are attempted.
I make clear in my book, Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart, The Erik Blair Diaries, if we want to raise a generation of freedom fighters who will actually operate with justice, fairness, accountability, and equality towards each other and their government, we must start by running the schools as freedom forums.
—The Rutherford Institute