Education and Liberty

I find myself constantly amazed at the lack of ethics and logic, even just plain common sense, regarding our treatment of children in society. The startling lack of judgment on the part of the Lower Merion School District (The latest headlines read:

A suburban school district secretly captured at least 56,000 webcam photographs and screen shots from laptops issued to high school students, its lawyer acknowledged Monday. Full Article)

and the recent tasering of a ten year old boy in Martinsville, Indiana (Full Article) are all symptoms of the same problem: I will call it “Zero-Tolerance Thinking”

By “Zero-Tolerence Thinking” I mean the tendency of adults, members of large powerful institutions such as schools and police forces, to think of people, all people, in terms of groups. We all do some version of this. It acts as an economization of time and effort in using our judgment. And it can be a useful social tool: labels allow for us to categorize our social experience, and more quickly make decision. It becomes Zero-Tolerence Thinking when, instead of sound judgment, those in a position of power and force use it to exact punishment. It becomes dangerous when instead of seeing a ten-year old boy, throwing a tantrum, police officers see a violent offender whom they must violently subdue.

How about you? How often do you do this? How often do you choose put a situation into easily definable terms, instead of thinking critically about all that parts? As teachers, co-workers, friends, have you done this (albeit on a smaller scale)?

My larger question is about the outcome when we do this to children. When we see them as a group, instead of as individuals, how does that change their understanding of self? Zero-Tolerence policies at schools create situations in which the individual child is subsumed under the rule of gross group punishment. The implicit moral is “Do not think about your actions, your desires, the particulars of your situation. They do not count, will not be taken into account when considering the consequences. Follow the rules. All of them.” Who does this policy serve? Is there anyone who feels good about it? The administrators, who usually recognize the injustice? The parents who see their child in pain? The student, who is emotionally destroyed?

The most eloquent description I have found was unsurprisingly (or surprisingly, if you aren’t as familiar with her body of work) written by Maria Montessori :

The fact that the rights of the child have been forgotten and ignored, that the child has been mistreated, even destroyed, and that moreover hsi worth, power and nature have been misunderstood, should all give humanity serious food for thought.

Maria Montessori, 1938

Very serious food for thought. And a serious call to action.

P.S. I recently came across this fantastic account of a small town lawyer and his fight to make a school board use common sense. Enjoy!

Zero-Tolerance For Zero-Common-Sense

If you practice law in a small town–and especially if you practice criminal law in a small town–chances are pretty good you’ll eventually experience the joy & thrill of appearing before some school administrators at an expulsion hearing.

And you may be thinking to yourself, that doesn’t sound too bad. What harm could come from developing a niche practice in a small town, a practice in which you might be able to help confused students (and their parents) find their way back into school to pursue their future academic and extracurricular promise?

Well, Dear Reader, the problem is YOU WILL LOSE YOUR MIND.

Welcome to the Land of Zero-Tolerance, a place much like Alice’s Wonderland, where your client gets a mad tea party instead of a hearing with due process, conducted by a school administrator who could be easily confused with the Queen of Hearts. It doesn’t take long to find out that a “policy of zero-tolerance” can be the modern-equivalent of “Off with their heads!”

Now, some solace can be found in understanding this frustration is not new. One of my favorite sages, Mark Twain, once quipped:

“In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards.”

So, you can’t say you weren’t warned. But that doesn’t mean it hurts any less when you bang your head against the schoolhouse wall.

I once represented a young man, who had never been in any real trouble at school, for an expulsion under a zero-tolerance statute for the offense of “possessing a firearm facsimile.” His transgression? He had made the mistake of asking to see the object another student had brought to class. It turned out it was laser-pointer in the shape of a gun. A very small gun. Like a tiny toy gun. Which he could hold in the palm of his hand and then close his fist around without anybody else knowing what it was. Which is why he stupidly asked to see it in the first place because he didn’t know what the other kid had in his hand.

The school principal said he was compelled to expel my client for a year under the law and it didn’t matter what my client’s intent was. I appealed to the school board and pointed out that the language of the statute clearly required that the “weapon facsimile” be capable of being confused with a real gun. The school board was unimpressed with my logic. After all, as one school board member commented, it could have been just like one of those tiny guns that James Bond uses.

OK, then.

Luckily, a district court magistrate–employing a shocking amount of common sense–didn’t buy the James Bond approach and overturned my client’s silly expulsion. The school board, wounded by this judicial rejection of their power, appealed.

The appellate gurus can probably predict what happened next. I made arrangements to have the little gun-shaped laser-pointer brought to the oral arguments, where I showed the Court of Appeals just how small it was and how it could be held inside a fist without any sign it was there. And the Court of Appeals judges shook their heads in approval and asked really good questions that showed just how absurd they thought the school board’s decision was.

And then they issued an opinion upholding the expulsion–because it was the school board’s decision to make–not some pushy, common-sense wielding judge.

And, not for the first time, I went insane.

So imagine the state of my mental health when coming across this item in the New York Times:

“Finding character witnesses when you are 6 years old is not easy. But there was Zachary Christie last week at a school disciplinary committee hearing with his karate instructor and his mother’s fiancé by his side to vouch for him.

Zachary’s offense? Taking a camping utensil that can serve as a knife, fork and spoon to school. He was so excited about recently joining the Cub Scouts that he wanted to use it at lunch. School officials concluded that he had violated their zero-tolerance policy on weapons, and Zachary was suspended and now faces 45 days in the district’s reform school.”

Please be sure to click on the link to the NY Times story to view the picture of this scary transgressor Zachary. Nefarious, ain’t he?

The NY Times correctly reports that zero-tolerance policies concerning weapons started with the tragedy at Columbine High School, here in Colorado. But the reference to Virginia Tech and the claim that the “growing debate” over whether these policies have gone too far being a recent development are not accurate. The shooting at Columbine was over ten years ago, and most of these laws were passed soon after in the typical knee-jerk fashion so loved by state legislators. The shooting at Virginia Tech is only one such awful and sickening demonstration of the ineffectiveness and futility of these laws.

But zero-tolerance policies are very effective at one thing: demonstrating the definition of “absurd.” Thus, I could barely wait for the answer when the NY Times posed the question “on the minds of residents” where Zachary lives: “Why do school officials not have more discretion in such cases?”

The mind-bending, psychosis-inducing answer? School board officials don’t have more discretion because, essentially, they’re too stupid. (Score one for Mr. Twain, thankyouverymuch.)

It appears “some school administrators argue that it is difficult to distinguish innocent pranks and mistakes from more serious threats, and that the policies must be strict to protect students.” Protect the students from whom? From other students? Or from imbecile school administrators too dumb to distinguish a prank from a serious threat?

And the answer is??? Of course! It’s from imbecile school administrators:

Charles P. Ewing, a professor of law and psychology at the University at Buffalo Law School who has written about school safety issues, said he favored a strict zero-tolerance approach.

“There are still serious threats every day in schools,” Dr. Ewing said, adding that giving school officials discretion holds the potential for discrimination and requires the kind of threat assessments that only law enforcement is equipped to make.

There you have it. Zero-tolerance laws are designed to protect students from school officials who possess zero-common-sense and are unable to make unbiased decisions that an average cop, who presumably has less education, makes on a daily basis.

So, while school officials might be in charge of educating our children and inculcating values like fairness, equality, and respect for authority in this nation’s future generations, we can’t trust them to tell the difference between a Cub Scout utensil exuberantly and proudly displayed by a six-year-old and a deadly weapon intended to be used to hurt somebody.

No wonder some school officials have tried to ban Mark Twain.”

A lot is being said about torture recently—but not enough.

It is terrifying that so many are unconcerned about arrests without Habeas Corpus, military prisons, and torture. These activities don’t bring anyone more security.  In fact, they bring about a false sense of security while simultaneously making life more systematically dangerous for all.

Arrest without Habeas Corpus is arrest without charge, without reasonable evidence for being detained, without having a definite, reasonable time set for a trial, without being able to confront the witnesses and evidence held against you, and without the principle that we should be treated as innocent until we are proven guilty.  Without the principle of Habeas Corpus, innocent people can be detained indefinitely.  Anyone can be locked away forever, for any reason without anyone else ever knowing about it.  Should this give us comfort?

Men are not angels.  They are neither unconditionally kind nor omniscient.  When we are treated as guilty before we are proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, we are all at risk from the suspicion, paranoia, prejudice or even malice of those in control of the coercive apparatus of government.

The purpose of legal procedure is to protect the innocent from omnipotent government and to discover, at least beyond a reasonable doubt, what the truth of the matter is at hand.

In the modern world, military personnel are purposefully trained to have no sympathetic sentiments for the “enemy” and to follow the orders of authority uncritically. In military prisons, where there aren’t strict procedures to determine guilt or innocence, and where everyone is presumed guilty, what mercy is there for anyone?  Human beings are objectified.  People are no longer seen as individuals but as objects, part of a collective—“the enemy”.  You don’t have to treat objects like people.

It is not surprising what has happened at Abu Ghraib and Guantanimo Bay.

Torture is complete nonsense.  Torture is defended as a way of obtaining information to make us safe.  But the information gained from torture is worse than unreliable.  People will say what they need to say to stop the pain and fear of torture.  I say that information gained from torture is worse than unreliable because, not only is the information gained suspect, but leading questions of interrogators either through prejudice (pre-judgment), or malice will determine the content of the responses of the victims.  Torture does not tend to reveal truth, it tends to confirm the preconceptions of interrogators, interrogators who already think they know you’re guilty.

Imagine if police officers could compel testimony from suspects.  We call them suspects because they are not yet convicts!  Police suspect many more people than actually commit crimes.  Sometimes they probably have strong hunches about who is guilty.  But if they weren’t constrained by tough rules of gathering evidence and making a case against someone to an impartial judge, they would stop at their hunches.  They could compel those they suspected of crimes to plead guilty to avoid pain.

This reasoning is embodied in our constitution in the protection in the 5^th Amendment to the Constitution of the United which states: “[no person] shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…”  The law could not be clearer than that.

We need to understand the principles of liberty and the principles of respectful communication in order to have security and in order for truth and justice to be served.

This video of Jesse Ventura illustrates these ideas very well:

I have been reading Ayn Rand’s essay “Philosophy: Who Needs It” again recently. This is an excellent and accessible essay that almost everyone would enjoy. In it, Rand sets out to explain why everyone needs philosophy.

One of the main points of the essay is that every one of us is already possessed of a philosophy. It is impossible to avoid using abstract ideas to integrate our concrete experiences. We do not have a choice.

“Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberations—or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self doubt…”

This passage was particularly striking:

“When men abandon reason, they find not only that their emotions cannot guide them, but that they can experience no emotions save one: terror. The spread of drug addiction among young people brought up on today’s intellectual fashions, demonstrates the unbearable inner state of men who are deprived of their means of cognition and who seek escape from reality—from the terror of their impotence to deal with existence. Observe these young people’s dread of independence and their frantic desire to “belong,” to attach themselves to some group, clique or gang. Most of them have never heard of philosophy, but they sense that they need some fundamental answers to questions they dare not ask—and they hope that the tribe will tell them how to live. They are ready to be taken over by any witch doctor, guru, or dictator. One of the most dangerous things a man can do is to surrender his moral autonomy to others”

I highly recommend this essay.

I have a number of very intelligent and eager students who meet with me after school for various intellectual clubs. (There is Philosophy on Mondays, Logos, a math and logic club, on Wednesdays, and Debate on Thursdays. I also facilitate the Socrates Café in Houston on a Sunday once a month and Benjamin Cohen-Kurzrock, one of the other authors on this blog, runs another group called the Dynamist Roundtable once a week dedicated to the Austrian school of economics.)

In the Philosophy group at the moment, we are reading a long excerpt from John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism. In it, Mill states the basic assumption of Utilitarianism is “that pleasure and freedom from pain are the only things desirable as ends; and that all desirable things (which are as numerous in the utilitarian as in any other scheme) are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain”.

In response to the charge that Mill is advocating mere bodily pleasure as the highest goal for man, he protests that “it is quite compatible with the principle of utility to recognize the fact that some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others”. In fact, he states, “human beings have faculties more elevated than the animal appetites and, when once made conscious of them, do not regard anything as happiness which does not include their gratification.”

Mill is also famous for saying that “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.”

Is Mill arguing that there are things that are desirable by nature to all human beings as human beings?