Have we lost all common sense?

Charles Martin tackles the story of the Colorado student who faced suspension because she had wooden "parade rifles" in the back of her car when she parked at school.

The story started like this: Marie Morrow, a junior in Cherokee Trails High School in Aurora, Colorado, is a cadet staff sergeant in the Young Marines and the commander of her local drill team. She made a mistake: she parked on the school’s parking lot with several wooden “parade rifles” in her car.

The problem? A Colorado state law that requires “zero tolerance” of any student in possession of any dangerous weapon — or anything that an uneducated person might take as a facsimile of a dangerous weapon. Someone who saw the parade rifles reported them to the school and the Colorado law, with its mandatory provisions, came into effect. The car was identified by its parking sticker, the school notified Cadet SSGT Morrow and her family, and she was suspended.

I thought the story was rather astonishing: I was in the ROTC and Civil Air Patrol drill teams in high school, and hell, we used real M-14s for drill, not parade mock-ups. And parade rifles might be mistaken for a real rifle by someone who had never seen either except from a distance, but they resemble a real rifle about as much as what a handy sixth grader would carve out of a two-by-six. She was suspended and came under threat of expulsion for possession of lumber.

We have so lost faith in the ability of school administrators to use their own common sense to determine whether a student presented an actual threat to other students that we have these absurd zero tolerance laws. We have gotten to the point that laws have been crafted to protect against any sort of lawsuit that we have lost all faith that the people supposedly responsible enough to teach our children can distinguish between a rifle facsimile carved out of wood and an actual gun.

Philip K. Howard, author of Life Without Lawyers and The Death of Common Sense, has been conducting a crusade for decades about the stupid laws that we now have used to hem in our schools so as to protect them from lawsuits. We have now gotten to the point that we have these absurd laws forbidding teachers from ever touching students because there is the fear of being sued from sexual harassment.

For as long as there have been schools, teachers have had to deal with unreasonable five-year-olds. Calling the cops isn’t the time-tested solution. Let’s rewind the tape and handle this sensibly. Problem: temper tantrum in kindergarten classroom. Solution: Ask the girl to stop. When she refuses, hold her by the arm, preventing more destruction. If necessary, take her to another room until she calms down. Doing what’s right here isn’t rocket science.

But teachers in America can’t do this. Taking hold of a child’s arm is verboten—touching is taboo, except to prevent harm to others. So a five-year-old ends up in handcuffs.

The rule against touching a student is now pretty much universal in America. One of my daughter’s college roommates, teaching beginning swimmers in East Harlem, was strictly forbidden to hold her students up in the water (to prevent drowning) until she had asked and received explicit permission from each child. She had to ask not once, but each and every time she did it. “May I put my hand on your stomach?” over and over again. The youngsters realized this made no sense. “Why do you keep asking me if you can put your hand on my stomach?” But she had been instructed never to make contact without asking the question.

Physical contact is one of those subjects thats a little touchy. We can all agree that anyone who has a tendency to act inappropriately around children should be shown the door, or put in the slammer. There are some people, as we learned with the Catholic priest scandal, who have this problem. But a blanket rule against physical contact is itself weird, almost as disturbing as contact that’s a little too friendly. Young children need physical reassurance. Sometimes older children need physical restraint, or least the fear of physical restraint. Otherwise some students will flout the teacher’s powerlessness.

OK, let’s change the rule about physical contact. That’s our instinct whenever we hear stories like this. But what would the rule say? “Appropriate conduct is acceptable”? That should be implicit in a free society. Nor do we need a rule to say that physical abuse of students is forbidden. We know that already as well. The problem is in implementation: How does law sort out what’s appropriate in this or that situation?

The rule against physical contact isn’t really there to protect children. The ban on touching is meant to protect teachers and schools. You bet there’s a rule against any touching—doing that could get you sued. Teachers have had their lives ruined by grabbing hold of a misbehaving child. Josh Kaplowitz, a young college grad in the Teach for America corps, put his hand on the back of a misbehaving seventh grader to make him leave the classroom and was sued for $20 million. The parents even got him criminally indicted. After two years of hell, the criminal case was finally dropped. The lawsuit was settled with the school paying $90,000. Other teachers have had their careers ruined by an accusation not of any sexual misconduct but just of holding on to the child, or, in one case of a music teacher, of positioning a child’s fingers on a flute.

We have allowed lawyers and the fear of lawsuits to totally distort all common sense in how teachers can interact with children. Common sense has truly disappeared.