The inmates have taken control of the asylum. Has anyone been paying attention to what's going on in our schools with regards to "zero tolerance" rules. What "zero tolerance" means in the context of rules and regulations in government schools is that no thinking will be allowed by anyone in authority when certain events occur. There will be no consideration of circumstance, the level of violation, or common sense. We can't let intelligence get in the way of enforcement.

I was drawn to this subject by a story of a young woman in Estero, Florida, named Lindsay Brown. A National Merit Scholar, Lindsay has an academic scholarship and was scheduled to graduate with her class this month. Over the weekend, she used her car to help her parents move stuff to her new apartment. Apparently a kitchen knife fell out of a box and became lodged under the front seat of her car. It wasn't missed and the Browns failed to make a thorough search of the car prior to her return to school. Well a school security guard, doing his morning rounds peering into cars, saw the knife. The school officials lost their alleged minds and Lindsay was taken to jail where she was kept for 9 hours.

The school, having a "zero tolerance" for both intelligence and weapons, promptly took away her opportunity to attend the Senior Breakfast, go to the Yearbook party or to walk with her class in the Graduation Ceremony. While this may not seem like such a big deal in the larger scheme of things, it is devastating for a young lady whose "crime" consisted of carelessly packing kitchen utensils for transport. This is not an isolated incident. Zero tolerance policies have swept the nation's schools. There have been suspensions for kids drawing pictures of soldiers, for kids having fingernail files, for kids with Tweety Bird key chains, for kids with toy gun shaped pieces of plastic under an inch long.

Zero tolerance isn't restricted to possession of weapon shaped objects. The schools in my community have zero tolerance for fighting. Now that seems like a pretty good idea. But it punishes the aggressor and the target of the aggression with the same vigor. Self-defense is no longer a valid response to violence. I have told my children that they have my permission to violate this aspect of zero tolerance. As a matter of fact, I have been insistent in conveying to my children that they are never to allow someone to hit them more than once, even if it means hitting back. I explained to my son that "zero tolerance" was a stupid idea developed by unimaginative people.

So what are we to glean from all this? I think that zero tolerance is a way for school administrators and officials to abrogate their responsibility to think. If there are no exceptions to the rules, no consideration of circumstances, no defense of an action based on reality, then the school official is freed from the unpleasant task of coming to a thoughtful remedy that fits an individual situation. It amounts to hysteria. A knee jerk reaction to a situation. A reaction that can have far reaching negative impact on our children and lesson it teaches is that the authority figures they have to deal with are arbitrary, autocratic and not terribly bright. The fact that these are educators must leave a particularly severe taste of cynicism in the mouths of the innocent victims of these kinds of incidents. After all, what can a child learn from someone so clueless?