Zero Tolerance for Six-Year-Old's Kiss

by Joel McNally

October 18, 1996

Suddenly, school authorities just couldn't take it any more. They began calling every kid in America down to the office and suspending them for the most ridiculous reasons they could find.

A 6-year-old in North Carolina gives a classmate a kiss on the cheek -- No ice cream party for you, you disgusting little pedophile! Within days, a 7-year-old pervert in New York City is busted for a copy-cat cheekal assault. A junior high girl in Ohio offers a friend a Midol and is banished from school as a drug queenpin. A Brookfield, Wis., girl brings a plastic squirt dinosaur to school. Administrators hit the deck, then -- thinking fast, but not well -- disarm and suspend the 6-year-old terrorist.

Media pundits, of course, had an immediate explanation for this seemingly simultaneous breakdown in logic, perspective and simple common sense on the part of presumably well-educated educators.

It's a sign of the times, they chorused. It's political correctness run wild. It's the supersensitive '90s when every innocent gesture of appreciation for the opposite sex can unleash hysterical cries of sexual harassment. It's only to be expected in today's overly litigious society.

As usual, shallow analysis based on widely accepted conventional wisdom is exactly wrong. As the American Civil Liberties Union is well aware, excessive concern for political or personal rights has never been a problem in our schools.

And as anyone who has attended school in this country knows, the mentality of school authorities through the centuries has been as impermeable as that massive, gray Silurian reef that was such a thrilling highlight of our museum field trips.

Rather than shifting with the winds of the latest thinking, schools maintain control the same way they have for millions of years ever since the incorporation of the first Stone Age school district, Og Central. That is through the administration of inflexible, arbitrary rules. Our piddling pleas for reason or justice were as miniature marshmallows tossed against the window pane of the universe.

To this day, even those former students who most nearly achieved perfection -- yes, even the kids who got to take the milk money down to the office -- still wake up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, with the terrifying disciplinary words of an assistant principal ringing in their ears: "You should have thought about that before." Or even worse: "I suppose if everybody else were jumping off a cliff, you'd do it too."

The basic method of bureaucratic control is simplicity itself: Rules shall henceforth be a substitute for all thinking.

To permit any appeal to reason would be a sign of weakness. Therefore, a policy of zero tolerance for weapons in our schools makes no distinction among automatic assault rifles, switchblades and water-loaded Barneys. Ditto for rules against sexual assault. Committing unwanted affection upon a classmate is just as wrong for a happy 6-year-old as it is for a tortured 16-year-old wearing a ski mask. As for drugs, just don't do it whether "it" is crack, pot or fast relief for menstrual cramping.

There is a direct line from the hard-headed disciplinarian to so-called tough political responses to crime such as "three strikes and you're out" laws. Could a 6-year-old get sent away for life for getting high on Midol and kissing a girl on the cheek while armed with a plastic squirt dinosaur?

Thick-headed school disciplinary policies may be laughable. But tough political talk on crime is deadly serious. The paradox is that every time a posturing politician passes another mandatory prison sentence, someone else has to be let out. We can't possibly build enough detention halls. And dangerously overcrowded prisons that have given up on rehabilitation often turn out people worse than they went in.

The politicians should have thought about that before. I suppose if everybody else were jumping off a cliff, they'd do it too.