On Fri, 25 Apr 2003, Justin wrote:
Don't forget zero tolerance. If caught, they'll be suspended or expelled or transferred.
Digital media have an advantage over drugs. They don't smell, can't be sniffed, a piss test won't reveal you played a "wrong" game, and you can store an ISO image in your iPod. Makes things more difficult to enforce. Another advantage is that the digital media could replace the drugs as "forbidden fruit", which is more healthy. Also, crackdowns on game-swappers could be perceived by public in much different way - while the Society is conditioned for decades that Drugs Are Bad, this is about "just silly games". With good management, this could be used to find public support for "zero tolerance to zero tolerance". A guerrila tactics, of maneuvering kids of local officials into stings, could make things interesting as well; kind of similar to planting books in the houses of firemen in Fahrenheit 451.
I've never understood the concept of expulsion from public school before age 16. "You must go to school" then "you must not go to school" seems rather silly to me.
Cultural question: I never understood the concept of expulsion. How it works, why it is used? We never had it here (.cz). Can't it be one of the factors our juvenile criminality is quite lower?
I guess it's better to have them running around neighborhoods in gangs with real guns than going to school and using chicken strips to shoot at teachers.
Suuuuuure. (We used the tubes from one kind of mechanical pencil as the guns and little paper balls as the ammo. Especially good if the target had dark hair and a certain kind of hairdo where they stuck.)
About the cd swapping, maybe their parents will go to jail, too.
By what twist of law? Nobody can supervise ther children 24/7, not when the corporations are squeezing more and more "productivity" (read: work hours) from them.
That's going to be really productive for shaping the child's or young teen's perception of society.
Will teach them to hide their activities from the eyes of the ones with power. Could be the most useful thing they learn at school...