or can we call it actual stupidity. To wit:
From the Denver Post
LOVELAND — A 7-year-old Mary Blair Elementary School student says he’s confused about getting in trouble for trying to save the world from evil, though Thompson School District officials contend that the boy broke one of the school’s “absolutes.”
Parent Mandie Watkins said Mary Blair principal Valerie Lara-Black called her Friday afternoon to inform her that her second-grade son, Alex, had been suspended for throwing an imaginary grenade during recess on the playground.
Alex did not have anything in his hand at the time and made no threats toward other people, Watkins reportedly was told.
Watkins said Alex’s story matched up with the principal’s account: He threw the pretend grenade at an imaginary box that had something evil inside.
He was going to save the earth this way, and when he threw the grenade he pretended that the box exploded, in apparent success.
“He is very confused,” Watkins told the Reporter-Herald on Tuesday. “I’m confused as well, so it makes it hard for me to enforce these rules when I don’t even understand them.”
The rules are laid out by Mary Blair Elementary School in a list of “absolutes” that are posted on the school’s website and are aimed at making Mary Blair a safe environment.
Included in those absolutes are no physical abuse or fighting – real or play – and the no-weapons absolute also covers real or play weapons.
Absolutes = zero tolerance = zero common sense.
I don’t know how representative a sample all the boys I or my siblings grew up with was, but I know of of no one who who has turned out to be a serial killer, or violent criminal of any type. I also recall that nearly everyone played cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians (how politically incorrect is that nowadays?!), and fantasy fights in, well, pick your war. Most of us also had toy cap pistols, of varying quality and elaboration — that we often took to school, though seldom played with them there. Few ever wanted to play the bad guy. Most, like Alex, had a fantasy of ridding the world of evil. My how things apparently have changed — except that they haven’t.
Read the whole story of Alex’s plight here:
http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_22524862/second-grade-loveland-student-reportedly-suspended-imaginary-weapon
