Public School as Kafkaesque Nightmare
January 10th, 2012Via: Guardian:
More and more US schools have police patrolling the corridors. Pupils are being arrested for throwing paper planes and failing to pick up crumbs from the canteen floor. Why is the state criminalising normal childhood behaviour?
The charge on the police docket was “disrupting class”. But that’s not how 12-year-old Sarah Bustamantes saw her arrest for spraying two bursts of perfume on her neck in class because other children were bullying her with taunts of “you smell”.
“I’m weird. Other kids don’t like me,” said Sarah, who has been diagnosed with attention-deficit and bipolar disorders and who is conscious of being overweight. “They were saying a lot of rude things to me. Just picking on me. So I sprayed myself with perfume. Then they said: ‘Put that away, that’s the most terrible smell I’ve ever smelled.’ Then the teacher called the police.”
The policeman didn’t have far to come. He patrols the corridors of Sarah’s school, Fulmore Middle in Austin, Texas. Like hundreds of schools in the state, and across large parts of the rest of the US, Fulmore Middle has its own police force with officers in uniform who carry guns to keep order in the canteens, playgrounds and lessons. Sarah was taken from class, charged with a criminal misdemeanour and ordered to appear in court.
Each day, hundreds of schoolchildren appear before courts in Texas charged with offences such as swearing, misbehaving on the school bus or getting in to a punch-up in the playground. Children have been arrested for possessing cigarettes, wearing “inappropriate” clothes and being late for school.
In 2010, the police gave close to 300,000 “Class C misdemeanour” tickets to children as young as six in Texas for offences in and out of school, which result in fines, community service and even prison time. What was once handled with a telling-off by the teacher or a call to parents can now result in arrest and a record that may cost a young person a place in college or a job years later.
Related: Texas: “In-School Suspension Program” Uses GPS Tracking Systems Attached to Students
Research Credit: RJF
The best way to separate the truly compliant from the “problematic” is to tag them early in the system, hence this next ratcheting-up of the social control mechanisms.
Reaching ever-further down into the roots of the Rockefeller/Carnegie educational gulag, in 2012 it has finally come to this. Arresting and ticketing kids for farting and fighting.
The better to screen you with, my pretties.
A few years behind schedule according to Orwell’s predictive novelization, but the trains still appear to be running on a timetable.
Funny coincidence there too, that the ever-so-famous anti-Fabian in sheep’s clothing George Orwell’s actual surname just happens to be BLAIR.
Know what’s even more scary? The incident took place in Texas, but I’m learning about it through a website from New Zealand, citing an article from a British newspaper, while at my computer in New York. We in the US really have no clue what the hell is going on in our own backyard.
Insanity. Here’s some more. My son brought home a permission slip for his class going ice skating during school hours. The text above the parent signature line included words to the effect that “I agree that our country is in a state of war and the trip may be cancelled if there is a terrorist attack.” Not the exact wording but are you kidding me? I could not in good conscience sign such a thing without first crossing out the line that said we are at war. The implication was that our territory is an active war zone. It’s not, if anything we have a certain type of crime problem. Wars are fought between governments.Last I checked we are occupying other countries which never declared war on us, the US military machine destroyed them and replaced their governments with ones they hope to control. The militarization of this society continues.
If I wanted to normalize a police state over a 10-20 year period, this is exactly how I’d do it.
This reminds me of something a friend said about 10 years ago: A major sign of the rising darkness will be attacks on children and opposition to the child-like nature.
It’s worse even than a lot of you know. I work for the local public school system (only because I can’t find other work right now) and some of the things I’ve seen just go beyond the pale. Kindergarteners walking down the hallways with their hands behind their heads in a “perp walk” (this is standard procedure for all kids in many schools), whole classes being denied food because someone thought it was funny to throw food at a teacher, and on and on and on.
Then there are the kids themselves, who in a lot of schools are wild and unruly and have no one looking out for them except for the teacher (who’s too burned out to care). The parents aren’t around and even if the teachers did care, they have 30 other students to deal with. They pull weapons off kids starting in 3rd grade in a lot of schools -and I mean knives, not toys.
A nearby city has made the national news lately for macing students of all ages. It’s turning into a total police state.