I was actually expelled from school, threatened with arrest, and wound up getting two degrees and starting a business. The argument that kids misbehaving in school means they’ll turn out rotten is, in my view, bogus.
What a lot of kids are doing when they misbehave is resisting, in their immature and often annoying ways, what they feel is an unjust, authoritarian structure that they don’t feel has their best interests at heart. There are other reasons, too, like being hurt like this young girl and possibly not having the space to sort it out and heal. We shouldn’t romanticize the kids, but the main point is that, from a certain worldview, a certain political framework, a lot of school environments are wrong for the kids, teaching the wrong lessons in the wrong ways.
I had teachers who were Zionists, advocated for taking away the right to vote from non-homeowners, had sex with children, embezzled, etc. And this was considered a “normal” environment. When you put people with these kinds of problems into positions that invest them with power, you wind up with serious, structural flaws and abuses that are inherent to the system, as your own above critique of police violence argues.
Maybe, given certain material conditions and experiences, you can see why one can fundamentally be at odds with authority as such–being a “troublemaker”–and not necessarily become the kind of horrible person that you are trying to depict as a natural and inevitable consequence of the events on display in this classroom.
What you are doing is character assassination of the victim, one who is established to be in foster care, and one has been subjected to an incredible ordeal that completely exceeds the scale of her own actions. I think that your comments here–that one should obey authority always, or else, that the only kinds of children who defy authority grow up to be a “drain” on the rest of us, that we in other words clearly have a moral imperative to submit to authority in spite of its horrendous mis-application–outline a political framework that, in no uncertain terms, is incapable of producing an analysis of this situation that is not already fraught with exactly the kind of prejudice that produces the weaknesses of such an analysis, namely that you are ignoring the possibility that one might have a total disregard for authority, for its frequently employed capacity to apply violence in order to impose its will, and still be a good person. We are talking, after all, about a context in which the officer has a history of behaving this way, and children know him as Officer Slam. Perhaps the girl was wrong, but it seems quite probable that children in the school have good reason for having little or no respect for the faculty’s or the police’s authority, since they are quite clearly abusing their power at the expense of the students.
None of which even begins to situate this event in the wider context and history of white supremacy and race relations in the US, which I am sure has considerable bearing.
