School has changed a lot over the last few decades. Once a place of learning, run by teachers and principals, where children were free to play outside during recess and walk home unescorted, public schools now increasingly resemble little prisons. Metal detectors guard the entrances, supervision never relaxes, and armed policemen are a regular presence. In many cases, these intimidating figures are taking the place of the disciplinary roles traditionally fulfilled by parents and teachers.
Reason Magazine reports the now common practice of using police to enforce standards of behavior in schools. Instead of verbal chiding, being made to sit in a corner, or other forms of discipline, children are now more likely to be subject to expulsion or even arrest for petty offenses that would have once merited no more than a stern talking to.
The article includes stories of police handcuffing a student for grabbing his milk allotment out of turn and charging a 17-year-old involved in a consensual relationship with a classmate with sexual assault and child pornography charges that could land him in prison for 40 years. While these cases are no doubt outliers, they indicate a larger institutional problem of inappropriate police intervention in schools.
There are several reasons for this. Part of the problem is the restrictive state laws that govern what teachers can and cannot do or say to students. Fear of litigious parents means that many teachers will do anything they can to avoid actual disciplinary measures, and the police provide a convenient form of outsourcing.
Another issue is the fact that children are crammed together in an increasingly high-pressure education environment based on zip code, with few options for those who are unable to keep up with the lessons or who simply feel out of place among classmates who are not really their peers. A lack of choice, of feeling trapped, leads to acting out and bad behavior, which teachers feel unable to control. Part of the problem is certainly also the parents who wish to use school as a substitute for actually raising their kids and teaching them how to behave.
But perhaps the biggest reason why police have invaded schools is fear. Today, schools are regarded as mass shootings waiting to happen. Numerous high profile incidents of school violence have instilled terror into the population, so much so that they are willing to take any measures, including criminalizing much harmless behavior, to feel a little bit safer. But what no one seems to have realized is that, if schools are so dangerous to begin with, it’s madness to force children to spend so much of their young lives confined within their walls.
Compulsory education laws, combined with a lack of school choice, make children prisoners in a place where, we are told, they are about as likely to take a bullet in the head as learn algebra. Why would we inflict that on people? Surely it violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
If schools are violent, let’s get kids out of them, instead of surrounding them with law enforcement authorities trained to arrest and imprison, rather than aid and educate. This is not to mention the fact that police resources could be much better spent elsewhere, rather than having highly trained officers waste time persecuting children over cafeteria line etiquette or arresting teenagers in love.
Why should parents be forced to subject their children to such treatment? Why should kids whose only purpose at that stage of life is to learn and have fun be intimidated and threatened with criminal charges? Anyone should be able to opt out of such a system, or at the very least, transfer to school with less draconian methods of enforcement.
Anyone who has spent time around children can observe their wonder at life, the joy they feel at learning about the world around them, the hope and promise of life stretching out before them. It’s heartbreaking to me to see all that enthusiasm snuffed out as they are told, “Watch your step, or you’ll end up in a cold, grey cell.” There will be time to be beaten down by the power of the state later in life. Can’t we permit them just a few years of exploration and enjoyment before placing a boot on their small necks?
If schools are going to be nothing more than little prisons, complete with armed guards, I say, set the children free. (For more from the author of “What You’re Not Hearing about the Mini Police States in Public Schools” please click HERE)
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