Category: Education

CAMPUS FREE SPEECH ISSUES AREN’T WHAT THEY USED TO BE

Back in the heyday of the 1960s, when everything seemed urgent and salient, there was a righteous battle for academic freedom. As the decade drew to a close, a delightfully liberal Supreme Court declared that free speech does not stop at the “schoolhouse gate.” 

More than a half century later, the issue of academic expression is up for relitigation. Unlike their solid and compelling predecessors of yore, these new cases are, in keeping with the tenor of our times, petty and silly.

Before wading into the shallow waters of what passes as today’s version of educational free speech, it’s worth a brief reminiscence of the far more glorious struggle of the ‘60s.  As the decade began, many public colleges and universities prohibited students from engaging in any political activity on campus.  In 1964, the issue came to a head at the University of California at Berkeley. 

While distributing leaflets proselytizing against the Vietnam War, Berkley student Jack Weinberg was arrested and placed in a squad car. Within minutes, thousands of student activists surrounded the vehicle, immobilizing it for 32 hours while making speeches from its roof. That was the beginning of the Berkley Free Speech Movement. 

Over the next few weeks, Joan Baez showed up to sing “We Shall Overcome”.  Berkeley Free Speech leader Mario Savio uttered his infamous command for students to “put your bodies on the gears . . . when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part.”  

After more than 800 students were arrested, many injured by police, a student strike shut down the campus until the administration lifted its restrictions on political speech.  Many other schools gradually followed course. For those that didn’t, the Supreme Court made it abundantly clear in a 1972 opinion that public colleges are a “marketplace of ideas” and that students and have a First Amendment right to express those ideas, regardless of how unpopular they may be. 

Meanwhile, a similar free speech movement was making its way through junior and senior high schools.  In 1965, then 13-year-old Mary Beth Tinker and her friends decided to protest the Vietnam War by wearing black armbands in their Des Moines, Iowa public school.  They were quickly suspended. That discipline was eventually declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. “Students,” the court wrote, “do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”  

Now flash forward 50-plus years, to what legal commentators are calling the most important free speech case since Tinker v. Des Moines.  Sometime next month, the Supreme Court is expected to decide the fate of a trash-talking middle schooler from Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania. Back in 2017, Brandi Levy was a 14-year-old junior varsity cheerleader who had just been turned down for a promotion to the varsity squad.

Stewing over the rejection, Brandi, of course, reached for her smartphone and composed a Snapshot message preordained to become a landmark free speech case.  With her middle finger raised, she uttered nine words destined to live in judicial infamy: “Fuck school, fuck softball, fuck cheer, and fuck everything.” Brandi was summarily suspended from cheerleading for one year. 

Needless to say, Joan Baez didn’t rush into Mahanoy City to sing “We Shall Overcome.”   And regardless of what the Supreme Court does with this case, you can be pretty sure it will not wax poetic about finding space for “fuck school” et al, in the marketplace of ideas.  

Meanwhile, from the professorial side of the classroom, comes this annoying trifle of a contention that teachers are somehow enshrined with the “academic freedom” to choose the pronouns they will use for their students. Court dockets are filled with teacher lawsuits insisting they have the constitutional right to refer to transgender students with pronouns and honorifics based on their birth gender (here, here and here).

Take, for example, Nicholas Meriwether, a philosophy professor at Shawnee (Ohio) State University.  As the semester began, Meriwether called on a student he assumed was male by using the honorific of mister.  The student, a transgender woman, sought out the professor after class and asked that he refer to her as Ms and use the pronouns she and her.  

That, Meriwether said, would be a problem.  As a Christian, the professor explained, he believes God created only two genders, and for him to use female honorifics and pronouns for someone born as a man would be a violation of his faith. Citing school policy prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender identity, the administration ordered Meriwether to refer to the student as she, her, or Ms. The professor rejected the order on First Amendment grounds, sending the issue up a crowded federal flagpole of similar cases.

What a difference a half-century makes. In the 1960s, academic freedom was about the right of professors and students to have an open exchange of ideas.  It is now being subverted to mean that a teacher can ignore with impunity the very identity of a student.  

For God’s sake, Professor, just call the kid what she wants to be called! You’re a philosophy teacher, so teach it. Share with your class the foundation for your principle that gender is binary and unalterable. Invite your students to explore other thinkers – including Christians – who have a contrary opinion (here, here, here and here). Let the dialectic be part of the learning.  Meanwhile, use she, her or Ms when referring to the transgender woman in your class. It’s just a name, a title, and since it is hers, she controls it. This isn’t about you or your beliefs, it’s about the basic human decency of calling someone what they want to be called. 

It has been years since I’ve been in a classroom, but I seem to recall that a strong predicate for learning was a welcoming, respectful student-teacher relationship.  You don’t get there by using the word mister for a 19-year-old transgender woman, someone who has undoubtedly struggled with a level of transformational pain most of us will never comprehend.

So there you have it: two vastly different free speech movements, one in the 1960s and one in the 2020s.  We sang “We Shall Overcome” back then.  We obviously need a new anthem. 

How about: “We Shall Overlitigate”?

WATER POLO: THE NEW AFFIRMATIVE ACTION FOR COLLEGE ADMISSIONS

Now that we’ve spent a couple of weeks shaking our heads over the college admissions scandal, it is time to reckon with the fact that our system of higher education is seriously broken.  This is about more than a water polo coach on the take.  It’s about affordability, access and equal opportunity. It’s about how the decimation of those qualities has put a generation of young people at risk.

A four-year private college degree now carries an average price tag of a quarter of a million dollars. Even with scholarships and parental assistance, the typical graduate starts adult life $30,500 in the red.   Nationwide, student loan debt exceeds $1.5 trillion.  The insanity of those economics has created a scarcity of opportunity, a Hunger Games-like competition in which 18-year-olds are forced to fight for an educational slot that might give them a shot at the good life and upward mobility.

As a result, high schools throughout the country are experiencing a mental health epidemic. The intense pressure on kids to compete for grades and test scores that could create a path to the “right” college has heaped enormous stress on students. Wrote a high school counselor in Maryland, “Honestly, I’ve had more students this year hospitalized for anxiety, depression and other mental-health issues than ever.”  A February Pew survey showed that 70 percent of teenagers saw anxiety and depression as a “major problem”.  An additional 26 percent said it was a minor problem.  

From a public policy perspective, the fix for this predicament is not exactly rocket science. Rather than treating college education as a scarce resource, it needs to be offered in abundance, free of charge, or at least on an ability-to-pay basis. In addition to academic ability, admission decisions need to reflect a need for racial and ethnic diversity and a leveling of the family income playing field.  What we have now is just the opposite: a college entrance turnstile heavily weighted in favor of the financially advantaged.

The real travesty in the college cheating scandal wasn’t that rich parents bribed their kids’ way into top schools.  Sure, it was sketchy for coaches to take payola for greasing the admission skids of phony athletic recruits who had neither the ability nor desire to play on their teams.   But in terms of applying a moral compass, the repugnancy level of that alleged felony is not that far removed from standard operating procedure on many campuses. This broader ethical quandry is a quiet affirmative action plan favoring well-heeled white kids with a mastery of sports like water polo, sailing, fencing, golf, tennis, lacrosse or hockey.  

According to the recent cheating indictments, all of the elite colleges involved had a set number of admission slots for each sports team.  Coaches identify the kids they want for their teams and, for the most part, they get in.  The National Collegiate Athletic Association estimates that between 61 and 79 percent of student athletes are white. Of the 232 Division I sailing athletes last year, none were black. In the case of lacrosse players, 85 percent were white, as were 90 percent of the hockey players. 

Kirsten Hextrum, a University of Oklahoma professor, told the Atlantic that it is not unusual for parents to spend $10,000 a year or more on equipment, private trainers, summer camps, and travel to tournaments in order to help their kids achieve the level of athletic proficiency needed to secure one of the admission slots reserved for their particular sport. Her research, and that of others, shows that students admitted through the athletic route have substantially lower academic ratings than non-athlete applicants. 

This preference pool of mostly white and privileged water polo stars – and others of that athletic ilk – was constructed with the same architecture as the old affirmative action and quota systems that once promoted ethnic and racial diversity.  For the past 40 years, however, those routes to college enrollment diversity have been battered into near oblivion at both the state and federal level.

Eight states have banned race-conscious admissions. The U.S. Supreme Court, in the 1979 landmark Bakke case, struck down the use of racial quotas in college admissions, but left the door open to the consideration of race as one of many criteria in student selection.  Through subsequent court decisions, however, that door has been slowly closing, and many legal observers believe it is about to be slammed shut in a case currently before a very conservative Supreme Court. As a result, according to a New York Times analysis, black and Hispanic students are now more underrepresented at the nation’s top colleges than they were 35 years ago. 

This leaves us with a startlingly absurd result:  Colleges are prohibited from creating a diverse student body by giving preference to ethnic and racial minority applicants, but it’s perfectly acceptable for them to create admission quotas for a pool of predominately affluent white athletes with less-than-stellar academic records.  Affirmative action isn’t dead. It has simply become a codification of white privilege.

In a TMZ kind of way, it was tantalizing to see television stars and investment brokers doing the perp walk on accusations that they bribed their kids’ way into top schools. But their approach differs only in kind – and legality – from what has become the accepted norm in college admissions. Affluent white families go to the head of the line, and everyone else battles it out for whatever is left.  Delusional defenders of the system call it a meritocracy, but it is far, far closer to being a plutocracy. And it needs to change. 

TRUMP’S EDUCATION PLAN: TEACHERS WITH GUNS

Until last week, Donald Trump had been the first president in modern history not to have an education policy. But no longer are America’s public schools a blank slate in the White House’s policy shop. The Donald has a plan, and he’s mighty pumped about it. He wants to give teachers guns and train them to shoot. Welcome to the 2018 edition of education reform: No Glock Left Behind.

As a nation mourned the shooting deaths of 17 students and faculty at a Florida high school, our self-absorbed reality star president maneuvered himself into the spotlight. Survivors of the massacre, along with some of the victim’s family members, were summoned to the White House for a “listening session”. There, with the cameras rolling, Trump clung to a note card reminding him to offer an empathetic “I hear you” after his guests laid bare their raw emotions of profound loss.

And when it was all over, our leader of the free world had been majestically infused with the wisdom that would forever stop school shootings: a well-armed faculty. He had not sounded so bubbly and manic since he described his mating rituals on that “Access Hollywood” tape. “We have to harden these schools, not soften them,” Trump said. He then constructed a truly original simile: “A gun-free zone to a killer. . . that’s like going for the ice cream. These people are cowards. They’re not going to walk into a school if 20 percent of the teachers have guns – it may be 10 percent or may be 40 percent. And what I’d recommend doing is the people that carry, we give them a bonus. We give them a little bit of a bonus.”

There you have it: Trumpian education policy. At long last, underpaid and under-appreciated public school teachers would no longer have to worry about teaching to the test in order to capture merit pay. They just have to pack heat and pick up their loaded gun bonus.

Many astute political observers have dismissed this call to arms for teachers as just another crazy flight of fancy from a president totally void of serious policy chops. Others have gone so far as to suggest it’s an intentional diversion designed to deflect a renewed push for gun control, to buy time until the anti-gun fervor cools. Maybe. Yet, it’s not hard to see the arming of educators as the absurd-but-understandable result of a decades’ long practice of expecting our public schools to somehow magically solve every societal ill. It’s an American obsession that has never worked, and has, in fact, repeatedly impaired the delivery of quality education.

Take race, for example. The tumultuous civil rights struggles of the 1960s eventually, through judicial and congressional actions, created a more just society, at least on paper. Yet, the rigidity of segregation was not about to go quietly into that good night. So we moved kids from one neighborhood school to another. Public schools became the national laboratory for the dismantling of segregation and the racism that created it. Black students were bused into white neighborhood schools, and vice versa, albeit more vice than versa. Learning was trumped by transportation. The result? The enormous achievement gap between black and white students of the 1960s has narrowed only slightly over 50 years. It was wrong, noted the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell in 1973, to turn the attention of communities “from the paramount goal of quality education to a perennially divisive debate over who is to be transported where.” A North Carolina NAACP official at the time put it even more succinctly: “My daughter does not need to sit beside a white person to learn.”

Unfortunately, we didn’t learn our lesson back then. There has not been a major social problem that we haven’t schlepped to the front door of the public school house. Take poverty for example. More than half of public school students come from low-income families. Here’s what a New Mexico Kindergarten teacher told the Washington Post her day was like: “When they come in my door in the morning, the first thing I do is an inventory of immediate needs: Did you eat? Are you clean?” She cleans them up with bathroom wipes and toothbrushes. At her own expense, she stocks a drawer with clean socks, underwear, pants and shoes. She is the face of anti-poverty policy to those children, but is left with precious little time to teach.

Once upon a very long time ago, teachers had control over their teaching. They used their skills and experience to map out a learning strategy for their students. Not anymore. As Stanford University Education Professor Larry Cuban noted, “policy elites” at the local, state and federal level have taken over by mandating schools to solve an array of social, economic and political problems. Policy makers, Cuban says, have not hesitated to foist upon classroom teachers such issues as: alcoholism and drug addiction, tobacco use, teenage pregnancy, AIDS prevention, automobile accident reduction, environmental protection and test-driven accountability for producing graduates who can help companies make even more money in the global market place.

A recent study of 30,000 classroom teachers reported that 89 percent said they were “strongly enthusiastic” when they began teaching, but just 15 percent felt the same way today. No wonder many areas of the country are experiencing a teacher shortage. There has been a huge exodus from the profession in recent years. With all the mandates and expectations thrust upon them, teachers have precious little time to do that one thing that drew them into this line of work: teach.

And now the president of the United States wants to turn them into gunslingers. It’s a fitting parody on this society’s long degrading march to dismantle the essence of what it means to be a teacher. Unfortunately, Donald Trump is no satirist. To borrow his phrasing, he’s a “sicko” with “demented” thoughts.

SHIELDING STUDENTS FROM EVIL WON’T HELP THEM ALLEVIATE IT

College campuses, once a hotbed of anything-goes radicalism, are morphing into antiseptic bastions of thought cleansing. The source of this depressing trend is a new breed of students, determined to avoid offense or emotional discomfort at any cost.

Harvard Law School students, according to The New Yorker, have asked their professors not to teach about rape law because the subject is traumatic for them. Northwestern University students filed federal charges, eventually dismissed, against their instructor for writing a professional journal opinion piece opposing prohibitions against faculty-student dating. They said it made them uncomfortable. Students in a number of colleges have been allowed to skip reading assignments that contain passages that might upset them. Here’s how Atlantic Monthly introduced a lengthy analysis of this trend: “Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities.”

Indeed it is. The movement’s origins were benign and well intentioned. It started with infrequently used “trigger warnings” on assigned readings, designed as a heads’ up for students who had experienced trauma – sexual assault or other violence. They weren’t excused from the assignment, but the advance warning allowed them to consult with a therapist or take other precautions. In those same early days, human rights training for both faculty and students focused on a concept of “microaggressions”, a form of subconscious racism or sexism typically involving a stereotype. An example would be telling Asian students they must be good at math.

Those noble and sensible beginnings, however, evolved into darker outcomes. As a result of student pressure, backed by threatened social media attacks and the filing of federal discrimination charges, trigger warnings expanded way beyond the traumatized few and are now issued by more than 50% of the faculty, and for such subjects as racism, classism sexism, disregard for personal autonomy, spiders, drug use, suicide, indigenous artifacts, Nazi paraphernalia and slimy things. Worse yet, many schools report that a trigger warning now means students don’t have to read the objectionable material. Fortunately, leaders of some of the country’s leading educational institutions have recently tried to dial this movement back. American University, the University of Chicago and others have adopted policies against trigger warnings. Meanwhile, microaggressions have gone from a human rights learning strategy to a list of things that should never be said. In the University of California system, for example, the faculty has been warned against using a long list phrases, including, “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”

Sheltering students from unpleasant thoughts and offensive ideas is anathema to what education is all about. How do you teach history without exploring the horrible trauma of war, slavery, Jim Crow laws and the treatment of American Indians? How do you teach literature if you have to trigger out Shakespeare’s “Othello” because of its violence against women, or his “Henry V” because of Henry’s use of warfare and threatened sexual violence as a way of obtaining political success? What about the suicide themes of Sylvia Plath’s poetry or the fear, pain and suffering caused by totalitarianism in Kurt Vonnegut’s novels? If the goal of education is to teach students not what to think, but how to think, you don’t get there by allowing them to remain in their comfort zones.

Trying to shelter students from racist and sexist microaggressions may alleviate momentary angst, but it does nothing to eradicate the broader problem that produced them. When they surface, why not use them as teachable moments so the entire class can learn what stereotyping is and the pain it causes? It is sadly ironic that this push to create a sanitized, safe and protective campus environment is happening at a time when this country is 30-some days and a handful of poll points away from electing as president someone whose campaign has been filled not with microaggressions, but with “YUGE” macroaggressions. Here is a small sampling of the headlines: (TRIGGER WARNING: These news reports are likely to cause anxiety, depression and a sudden interest in Canadian real estate.)

Donald Trump Eats a Taco Bowl to Prove His Love for Hispanics
Trump Campaign CEO Complained of Jews at Daughters’ School
Donald Trump: If Black Lives Don’t Matter, Then Go Back to Africa
Trump Calls for Banning Muslims From Entering U.S.
Trump Wanted to Fire Women Who Weren’t Pretty Enough

That’s the world outside of the campus cocoon. The Donald Trumps out there do not come with a trigger warning. Dealing with them, resisting their vile hate and racism is not optional. That’s why we need college graduates who are ready, willing and able to work against the forces they’d rather not think about. It’s the only way we can move this evil trauma from the headlines to the history books.

COLLEGES CALL IN THE DOGS TO SAVE THE STUDENTS

Just in case you haven’t visited a college campus recently, these are not exactly the easy, lazy, hazy days of higher education. Student anxiety and depression are off the charts. Suicide prevention is a major concern. The long and winding road to pomp and circumstance is paved with stress and tension. And for good reason. A gloomy and uncertain job future has mortgaged-out parents pushing their kids away from liberal arts to science, technology or engineering, regardless of their offspring’s aptitude or interest. As a result, 2016 graduates left campus with an average debt of $37,172, many with a major foisted upon them, and no immediate job prospects.

Relief, however, is in sight. The chieftains of academia put their heads together, probably in multiple conference rooms lined with white boards and coffee urns, to take up the urgent matter of student stress. What to do? What to do? With $1.3 trillion in student debt and climbing, helicopter parents buzzing overhead and a student body stressed to the max, these administrators brainstormed this dilemma with their collective PhD wisdom and came up with a solution: animals.

That’s right. America’s universities and colleges are going to the dogs – and cats, snakes, chinchillas, pigs and small horses – but in a good way. Rather than fix the underlying causes of student stress, like tuition cost and the job market – administrators turned to the animal kingdom as a source of relief. Pet therapy programs, long used by hospitals and nursing homes, have a solid track record in reducing blood pressure, anxiety and depression. And compared with drugs, major medical interventions or eliminating the source of the angst, animals come pretty cheap. That’s how they quickly rose to the top of the white boards.

Yale Law students can check out Monty, a border terrier mix, from the school library for 30 minutes a crack. The University of Connecticut brings cats and dogs in for stress reduction during finals week and to help students cope with their classmates’ suicides. Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia has “puppy rooms” staffed by trained therapy dogs to help stressed out students relax. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York allows students to have their own therapy animals live with them on campus. That makes a variety of dog breeds, along with a menagerie of ponies, snakes and chinchillas, etc. permanent fixtures on the RPI campus.

The trend began with a small number of pets brought in occasionally by nonprofit groups to help with campus stress. It quickly morphed into the RPI approach of allowing students to bring their own pets. As a result of litigation under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Federal Housing Authority regulations, schools receiving federal funds cannot stop students from bringing their therapy animals with them for the entire college ride. These “service animals” do not necessarily need certification, but schools may request a doctor’s letter drawing a nexus between a specific physical or emotional condition and the pet selected to mitigate it.

The University of California at Berkley, birthplace of the 1960s’ free speech movement, has evolved into a virtual Noah’s Ark, with residence halls filled with rabbits, kangaroo rats, pot-bellied pigs, cockatiels, ferrets, ball pythons, Cuban rock iguanas and Chilean rose hair tarantulas, all appropriately leashed, caged and/or vaccinated. Administrators there say they err on the side of letting animals in as a way of helping students cope and keeping litigation costs at a minimum.

All of this is, in a way, kind of sweet and refreshing. Who can object to letting overanxious college kids get some moments of peace and calm from the pet of their choice? Besides PETA, that is. I suspect it is only a matter of time before we hear from the animal rights activists about subjecting dogs, cats, pigs, et al, to the ravages of undergraduate dorm life. Still, in a more perfect world, we would find a way to reduce or eliminate student costs and the helicoptering parents they produce. That way students could enjoy learning on their own with minimum tension, and the animals could return to their own stress-free habitat. Unfortunately, we aren’t there yet. So cue the therapy iguana. Midterms are coming.

THE JOE PATERNO STORY: DON’T LET FACTS MAR THE LEGEND IN OUR MIND

Joe Paterno, depending on your perspective, was either God’s gift to college football or a pathetic pedophile enabler. The continuum between those two extremes runs the length of a football field. And there is nobody at the 50-yard line; you either revere JoePa or you despise him. Although he has been dead for nearly five years, when it comes to a posthumous life, this guy has been more active than Elvis.

This past Saturday, for example, there was a celebration in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Paterno’s first game as Penn State University’s head football coach. During that time span, he won a gazillion games and became a beloved legend and prolific rainmaker for the Big Ten school in State College, Pennsylvania. Then, in 2011, his halo took on a sudden tarnish when his longtime assistant, Jerry Sandusky turned out to be a serial child molester. Many of the sexual assaults occurred in the university’s athletic facilities. Although Paterno denied any knowledge of his assistant’s crimes, an investigation by former FBI director Louis French found that he had likely known about the pedophilia and did not report it. Just a few weeks ago, according to the Washington Post, a judge unsealed documents in a civil suit showing that one of Sandusky’s victims told Paterno about his molestation in 1976, and that the head coach told him he didn’t “want to hear about any of that kind of stuff” because there was a football season to worry about. Sandusky was convicted and is serving 30-60 years in prison. Paterno was fired by Penn State in late 2011 and then died from lung cancer in early 2012.

It was against that backdrop that Penn State rolled out “Joe Paterno Day” at the football stadium Saturday afternoon. And everyone went to their corners of outrage. “Why don’t they call it Protect a Pedophile Day?,” messaged one camp. “Paterno is innocent;” said another, “he is vilified only by those who know nothing.” Some placards said, “We Love You Joe!” Others asked “What About The Victims?”

Lauren Davis, a journalism major and opinion editor for the Daily Collegian, Penn State’s student-run newspaper, incurred brutal alumni wrath with her understated editorial suggesting that, under the circumstances, a Paterno tribute was in bad taste. Emails, according to the New York Times, immediately poured into the school newspaper calling Davis a “clueless, treacherous traitor,” an “idiot” and several other names the Times said it could not print. They were from graduates from the 1970s and earlier, all unloading their venom on a journalism student. The message from one man was, “I hope God can forgive you for your actions, I sure as hell can’t.”

So much anger, so much hate, so much divisiveness. We’ve grown accustomed to it in our political campaigns, now we can’t avoid it at a football game. That’s what happens when we chose to live in a black and white world of heroes and villains. The truth is that Joe Paterno is neither. All of our lives are compendiums of choices, good, bad and in between. If JoePa knew about the molestation and said nothing, he made a terrible choice, but it doesn’t mean he didn’t make other choices that were good, that helped develop and shape his student athletes. It does mean, however, as Lauren Davis, the student editor, wrote, that Penn State should not be honoring this guy, treating him like a saint, particularly with the brutal testimony of the victims still haunting the community. The past is over. Sandusky is in prison. Paterno is dead. Let it be. This is not the time for a party.

Speaking of bad choices, those geezer graduates, who verbally abused a journalism student for spouting wisdom that escaped all of them, have hopefully exhausted their quota for the year. But probably not. Psychologist Eric Simons says his research shows that a sports team is an expression of a fan’s sense of self. He says self-esteem rides on the “outcome of the game and the image of the franchise.” That might explain why a bunch of Nittany Lion alumni in their 60s and 70s are insisting that a dead football coach is blameless. If JoePa covered for a pedophile, it’s a personal wound to them. And we thought football was just a game.

ARMS AND THE TEACHER: READING, WRITING & MARKSMANSHIP

(Caution! Trigger Warning: This post is about firearms in schools. Some passages may seriously agitate, irritate, exasperate or infuriate, particularly If you have the Second Amendment tattooed on your shooting arm, or routinely strap on a Smith and Wesson when stepping out to water the plants. In the interest of your health and my safety, you should probably leave now.)

The Washington Post reported today that Beth Dixon, a 63-year-old teacher at Pennsylvania’s Cumberland Valley Christian School, accidentally left her holstered pistol in a school bathroom, fully loaded and resting on the top of the toilet tank. The facility in question, police told the Post, was a single-unit, unisex restroom, the kind set aside in Virginia and North Carolina for transgender patrons, with or without guns. At Cumberland Christian, this bathroom is also used by elementary school students between the ages of 6 and 8. One of those kids spotted the teacher’s piece on the tank and alerted school authorities. Ms. Dixon quickly reclaimed her weapon and quit her job.

The incident, however, got the school thinking about what kind of a policy it should have on guns in the classroom (and bathroom). It might have been the last school in America without such a policy. The Associated Press reported that Cumberland Christian now wants to ban guns except for those specifically authorized by the administration. All things considered, that’s a pretty progressive gun standard.

The federal Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994, theoretically banned guns from school property, but contained a gaping loophole that was quickly filled by a slew of loopy state legislatures. In effect, if a state lets people carry guns in public, they can carry them right into the schoolhouse. The Washington Post reported two years ago that 20 states have laws expressly permitting licensed adults to bring guns into schools.

In Claude, Texas, there is a sign on the schoolhouse lawn boasting that the faculty is armed. Despite a growing concern over the quality of our schools and lack of sufficient funding, many districts are requiring teachers to take in-service training at shooting ranges. Johnny might not be able to read, but his teacher can hit the bullseye at 50 yards. Sadly, this rush to arm the faculty did not pause for reflection after an Idaho State University instructor accidentally shot himself in the foot during chemistry lab.

On the other side of the bullet, many schools are proudly enforcing a zero tolerance standard when it comes to students and guns. Forget that the teachers are armed to the hilt; these kids have to learn that guns are bad. A seven-year-old boy who brought a water pistol and a Nerf gun to school in Portsmouth, Virginia was suspended for 10 days and is now facing expulsion. A five-year-old girl was suspended from Kindergarten in Brighton, Colorado after she carried her pink Princess Bubble Gun into her classroom. While Texas teachers are packing heat, a seventh grader in suburban Houston was disciplined for wearing a “Star Wars – The Force Awakens” shirt because it depicted a Stormtrooper holding a weapon.” If the Stormtrooper had been a certified teacher, it might have been okay.

This all becomes even crazier at the college level. The carrying of concealed handguns is now legal in Texas higher education classrooms. However, it is a violation of Texas law for a student to possess a dildo or similar sex toy. That duplicity earned the University of Texas in Austin major agitation by returning students this month. Their irresistible campaign theme: “Cocks Not Glocks”. Not quite as poetic as “Make Love, Not War”, but the point is well taken.

This continually escalating domestic arms race is beyond baffling. Guns,, once an instrument of war, crime fighting and food gathering, have evolved into an angry political symbol. All the mass shootings, which now occur with the regularity of a sunrise, bring new calls to arm the populace. If it happens in a school, arm the teachers; if it’s a bar, arm the drinkers, a workplace, arm the workers. It’s like a bizarre science fiction movie. And you just know there won’t be a happy ending.