Somehow I donât think weâre getting the full story here.
Maybe things are different here in Canuckistan, but I find this article hard to believe.
This is why you donât tell school officials anything. Take the blade, toss it, keep your mouth shut, enjoy your new somewhat emotionally unbalanced friend.
And if they turn on you, you never saw them cutting and donât know about any blade.
Besides if your friend needs help the last place they are going to get it is from anyone associated with a school (or the police).
I donât think this quite teaches the life lesson the school was hoping for here.
Personal story. I once âgot in a fightâ in High School, but instead of fighting back, I just dodged the 2 or 3 punches and an attempt to grapple.
I received the same punishment as the guy who took a swing.
The principal asked me if I learned my lesson. I told him absolutely, next time Iâll just kick the shit out of the kid and take the lumps Iâm going to get anyway. I was honestly surprised he was so astonished at my line of reasoning.
Right they should go to⌠whatever you do for a living, right? I know I, as a programmer, have never failed to fix the problems of any child who came to me for help at work. I assume all other programmers are similar, which is why you never hear of us failing to deal correctly with the issues of children at work.
Or maybe an airplane engine mechanic. Never hear about them failing children in the shop.
No its always teachers, and police, social workers and judges. Pediatricians, clergy, etc.
Never investment bankers.
Never those people who put things in boxes for amazon.
Or bloggers.
Itâs hard to imagine what sort of story would fit the schoolâs response. Especially given that the student said, âI took the razor blade, and then I threw it away immediately ⌠I didnât carry it around the school ⌠I didnât use it against anyone ⌠I threw it away," and the schoolâs responding to that admission with a suspension and a recommendation for expulsion.
Peers, dude. Pretty much every category of professional in the United States whose job involves dealing with children, also has job guidelines for washing his hands clean of responsibility for the childrenâs well being. Not the teachersâ fault. Itâs the lawyers who write school policies who are to blame. But it is still the truth:
Never confess anything to a teacher.
Never grass a fellow student to a teacher.
When school officials are bound by absurd âzero toleranceâ policies that prevent them from applying their own knowledge and exercising their own judgement, then yes, just about anyone else is a functionally better choice, even if they lack knowledge and have poor judgement.
Different order of magnitude, but hereâs my (early 80s) anecdote.
My primary school had (has?) a raised playground, a couple of feet higher than the level of the surrounding rooms. Thereâs a concrete slope down from the playground to the path around the classrooms.
Running down said slope was verboten (and punishable by being made to stand against the wall for the remainder of playtime).
One day I got pushed down that slope right in front of the monitor (i.e. dinnerlady). Got the same punishment as the kid that pushed me down the slope. I still broke the rule about going down the slope, even if it was involuntary.
Jokes on him, though. He ended up in prison (escaped once, too - then got caught when he hid in a hotel next to a police station).
âmmmm, nght hrg wrbbl nrk mmrghh, mrrgggâ (help me i am child stuck in this amazon box)
Things are different in Canuckistan. Administrators at Usian schools lost their shit in 1999. From what I hear, things are still pretty sane in the provinces.
I hope you wrote this sarcastically, because a sane executive should realize that you broke no rule at all.
Oh indeed. My opinion of my âguiltâ differed.
We only got a partial account of one side the story here. The other student may be claiming that she took the Razor Blade to school and used it to cut them before throwing it away. This whole thing smells like yellow journalism.
God forbid she get the weird idea that we should care about and feel responsible for our fellow human beings⌠that sure as hell wonât fly in neo-liberal AmericaâŚ
Yup, thatâs my hometown there. Somehow Iâm not terribly surprised by this.
Funny, how the school says no such thing, considering it would make them look a LOT less foolish.
Sarcastic or not, similar events are fairly common and not at all unbelievable.
Ah, I see where you went wrong. The executives are possibly sane, but do not share âeducate children to become good citizensâ as an overarching primary goal, and as a result systematically excluded realization and sanity from their systems of discipline.
At some point schools, ironically, seemed to decide students were incapable of thinking, and began treating them accordingly. Itâs not good for your sanity to be smart as a kid, it just means youâre that much more bothered by the idiocy youâre powerless to change. Reminds me of a fictional instance that makes a good limiting case, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Chapter 18: Dominance Hierarchies
My personal experience with human beings is that theyâre usually pretty sane and intelligent (even if theyâre irrational or wrong), once you try to understand things from their point of view. There are always remarkable exceptions, and having to allow for these imposes a high transaction cost in interacting with strangers, but Iâve found this rule much more useful than jumping to the conclusion that people are stupid on first evidence.
Systems, on the other hand, are stupid much more often.
I think youâre right in saying we are not getting enough information here; the facts donât correspond to how people usually behave. Either there are more details, or somewhere a system has broken down.
