1984: Thread

[grarpamp]

The Dangers Of Going Back To School After A Year Of COVID-19 Lockdowns

https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/the_dangers_of_going_back_to_school_after_a_year_of_covid_19_lockdowns

    “Every day in communities across the United States, children and
adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that
have increasingly come to resemble places of detention more than
places of learning.”

    - Investigative journalist Annette Fuentes

Once upon a time in America, parents breathed a sigh of relief when
their kids went back to school after a summer’s hiatus, content in the
knowledge that for a good portion of the day their kids would be
gainfully occupied, out of harm’s way and out of trouble.

Those were the good old days, before the COVID-19 pandemic introduced
a whole new level of Nanny State authoritarianism to our daily lives,
locking down communities, forcing kids out of the schoolroom and into
virtual classrooms, leaving vast swaths of the work force dependent on
government welfare, while pushing other segments into a work-from-home
model, and generally subjecting us to an increasingly obnoxious level
of intrusion by the government into our private lives.

Now, after almost 18 months away from a physical classroom, students
are heading back to school.

Here’s what they can expect.

>From the moment a child enters one of the nation’s 98,000 public
schools to the moment he or she graduates, they will be exposed to a
steady diet of:

        draconian zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior,

        overreaching anti-bullying statutes that criminalize speech,

        school resource officers (police) tasked with disciplining
and/or arresting so-called “disorderly” students,

        standardized testing that emphasizes rote answers over
critical thinking,

        politically correct mindsets that teach young people to censor
themselves and those around them,

        and extensive biometric and surveillance systems that, coupled
with the rest, acclimate young people to a world in which they have no
freedom of thought, speech or movement.

Young people in America are now first in line to be searched,
surveilled, spied on, threatened, tied up, locked down, treated like
criminals for non-criminal behavior, tasered and in some cases shot.

Nowadays, students are not only punished for minor transgressions such
as playing cops and robbers on the playground, bringing LEGOs to
school, or having a food fight, but the punishments have become far
more severe, shifting from detention and visits to the principal’s
office into misdemeanor tickets, juvenile court, handcuffs, tasers and
even prison terms.

Students have been suspended under school zero tolerance policies for
bringing to school “look alike substances” such as oregano, breath
mints, birth control pills and powdered sugar.

Look-alike weapons (toy guns—even Lego-sized ones, hand-drawn pictures
of guns, pencils twirled in a “threatening” manner, imaginary bows and
arrows, fingers positioned like guns) can also land a student in hot
water, in some cases getting them expelled from school or charged with
a crime.

Not even good deeds go unpunished.

One 13-year-old was given detention for exposing the school to
“liability” by sharing his lunch with a hungry friend. A third grader
was suspended for shaving her head in sympathy for a friend who had
lost her hair to chemotherapy. And then there was the high school
senior who was suspended for saying “bless you” after a fellow
classmate sneezed.

In South Carolina, where it’s against the law to “disturb” a school,
more than a thousand students a year—some as young as 7 years
old—“face criminal charges for not following directions, loitering,
cursing, or the vague allegation of acting ‘obnoxiously.’ If charged
as adults, they can be held in jail for up to 90 days.”

These outrageous incidents are exactly what you’ll see more of now
that in-person school is back in session, especially once you add
COVID-19 mandates to the mix.

Having police in the schools only adds to the danger.

Thanks to a combination of media hype, political pandering and
financial incentives, the use of armed police officers (a.k.a. school
resource officers) to patrol school hallways has risen dramatically in
the years since the Columbine school shooting.

Indeed, the growing presence of police in the nation’s schools is
resulting in greater police “involvement in routine discipline matters
that principals and parents used to address without involvement from
law enforcement officers.”

Funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, these school resource
officers (SRO) have become de facto wardens in elementary, middle and
high schools, doling out their own brand of justice to the so-called
“criminals” in their midst with the help of tasers, pepper spray,
batons and brute force.

In the absence of school-appropriate guidelines, police are more and
more “stepping in to deal with minor rulebreaking: sagging pants,
disrespectful comments, brief physical skirmishes. What previously
might have resulted in a detention or a visit to the principal’s
office was replaced with excruciating pain and temporary blindness,
often followed by a trip to the courthouse.”

The horror stories are legion.

One SRO was accused of punching a 13-year-old student in the face for
cutting the cafeteria line.

That same cop put another student in a chokehold a week later,
allegedly knocking the student unconscious and causing a brain injury.

In Pennsylvania, a student was tasered after ignoring an order to put
his cell phone away.

When 13-year-old Kevens Jean Baptiste failed to follow a school bus
driver’s direction to keep the bus windows closed (Kevens, who suffers
from asthma, opened the window after a fellow student sprayed perfume,
causing him to cough and wheeze), he was handcuffed by police, removed
from the bus, and while still handcuffed, had his legs swept out from
under him by an officer, causing him to crash to the ground.

Young Alex Stone didn’t even make it past the first week of school
before he became a victim of the police state. Directed by his teacher
to do a creative writing assignment involving a series of fictional
Facebook statuses, Stone wrote, “I killed my neighbor's pet dinosaur.
I bought the gun to take care of the business.” Despite the fact that
dinosaurs are extinct, the status fabricated, and the South Carolina
student was merely following orders, his teacher reported him to
school administrators, who in turn called the police.

What followed is par for the course in schools today: students were
locked down in their classrooms while armed police searched the
16-year-old’s locker and bookbag, handcuffed him, charged him with
disorderly conduct disturbing the school, arrested him, detained him,
and then he was suspended from school.

Not even the younger, elementary school-aged kids are being spared
these “hardening” tactics.

On any given day when school is in session, kids who “act up” in class
are pinned facedown on the floor, locked in dark closets, tied up with
straps, bungee cords and duct tape, handcuffed, leg shackled, tasered
or otherwise restrained, immobilized or placed in solitary confinement
in order to bring them under “control.”

In almost every case, these undeniably harsh methods are used to
punish kids—some as young as 4 and 5 years old—for simply failing to
follow directions or throwing tantrums.

Very rarely do the kids pose any credible danger to themselves or others.

Unbelievably, these tactics are all legal, at least when employed by
school officials or school resource officers in the nation’s public
schools.

This is what happens when you introduce police and police tactics into
the schools.

Paradoxically, by the time you add in the lockdowns and active shooter
drills, instead of making the schools safer, school officials have
succeeded in creating an environment in which children are so
traumatized that they suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder,
nightmares, anxiety, mistrust of adults in authority, as well as
feelings of anger, depression, humiliation, despair and delusion.

For example, a middle school in Washington State went on lockdown
after a student brought a toy gun to class. A Boston high school went
into lockdown for four hours after a bullet was discovered in a
classroom. A North Carolina elementary school locked down and called
in police after a fifth grader reported seeing an unfamiliar man in
the school (it turned out to be a parent).

Police officers at a Florida middle school carried out an active
shooter drill in an effort to educate students about how to respond in
the event of an actual shooting crisis. Two armed officers, guns
loaded and drawn, burst into classrooms, terrorizing the students and
placing the school into lockdown mode.

These police state tactics have not made the schools any safer.

The fallout has been what you’d expect, with the nation’s young people
treated like hardened criminals: handcuffed, arrested, tasered,
tackled and taught the painful lesson that the Constitution
(especially the Fourth Amendment) doesn’t mean much in the American
police state.

Unfortunately, advocates for such harsh police tactics and weaponry
like to trot out the line that school safety should be our first
priority lest we find ourselves with another school shooting. What
they will not tell you is that such shootings are rare.

As one congressional report found, the schools are, generally
speaking, safe places for children.

There can be no avoiding the hands-on lessons being taught in the
schools about the role of police in our lives, ranging from active
shooter drills and school-wide lockdowns to incidents in which
children engaging in typically childlike behavior are suspended (for
shooting an imaginary “arrow” at a fellow classmate), handcuffed (for
being disruptive at school), arrested (for throwing water balloons as
part of a school prank), and even tasered (for not obeying
instructions).

Instead of raising up a generation of freedom fighters—which one would
hope would be the objective of the schools—government officials seem
determined to churn out newly minted citizens of the American police
state who are being taught the hard way what it means to comply, fear
and march in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

So what’s the answer, not only for the here-and-now—the children
growing up in these quasi-prisons—but for the future of this country?

How do you convince a child who has been routinely handcuffed,
shackled, tied down, locked up, and immobilized by government
officials—all before he reaches the age of adulthood—that he has any
rights at all, let alone the right to challenge wrongdoing, resist
oppression and defend himself against injustice?

Most of all, how do you persuade a fellow American that the government
works for him when, for most of his young life, he has been
incarcerated in an institution that teaches young people to be
obedient and compliant citizens who don’t talk back, don’t question
and don’t challenge authority?

As we’ve seen with other issues, any significant reforms will have to
start locally and trickle upwards.

For starters, parents need to be vocal, visible and organized and
demand that school officials 1) adopt a policy of positive
reinforcement in dealing with behavior issues; 2) minimize the
presence in the schools of police officers and cease involving them in
student discipline; and 3) insist that all behavioral issues be
addressed first and foremost with a child’s parents, before any other
disciplinary tactics are attempted.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the
American People, if you want a nation of criminals, treat the
citizenry like criminals.

If you want young people who grow up seeing themselves as prisoners,
run the schools like prisons.

If, on the other hand, you want to raise up a generation of freedom
fighters, who will actually operate with justice, fairness,
accountability and equality towards each other and their government,
then run the schools like freedom forums.

Remove the metal detectors and surveillance cameras, re-assign the
cops elsewhere, and start treating our nation’s young people like
citizens of a republic and not inmates in a police state penitentiary.


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