“We never know what’s percolating in the minds of children,” Vernon Schools Superintendent Charles Maranzano said in an interview, defending the principal’s actions. “And when they demonstrate behaviors that raise red flags, we must do our duty.”Government is the thing we all do together.
Reason #1,186 for home-schooling
1,186. Home-schooling may decrease your chances of having your parental rights terminated when your kid twirls a pencil and someone thinks it looks like a fancy gun move from an old Western, and then school officials notify DCS, which demands a psych evaluation, and then a second psych evaluation when the first one comes back "What are you, kidding me?"
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15 comments:
The response to Maranzano should be
We never know what’s percolating in the minds of school administrators. And when they demonstrate behaviors that raise red flags, we must do our duty.
And terminate them for cause.
If we're going to have zero-tolerance policies, we should aim them exclusively at school administrators. I'll decide what tolerances should be zeroed out. Trust me.
Eric Hines
The Nazis had it right with the Youth Brigade.
I think I'm more worried about what percolates in the minds of school superintendents....
Right--the alarming thing about a story of this kind is how many people have to be as crazy as a rat in a coffee can for it to get going. Sounds like the teacher was a nut, and the principal was a nut, then the Superintendent at one point grasped at a shred of sanity, then the CPS apparatchik was a nut, then the shrink let a glimmer of sanity peek through, then more CPS apparatchiks went barking mad.
I'll be interested to see if Gov. Christie picks this issue up. He doesn't usually have much patience with insane educators, regardless of his other faults.
Honestly, if I had kids in public school I'd be in jail by now.
It's a little like people who are violently opposed to Halloween because of its pagan or occult elements, only it takes it a step farther, as if those people began to lose it whenever a party involved a word with eight letters that started with H, or any word involving an optional apostrophe, or frankly the entire month of October. "Burn him!"
Sanity is a dangerous thing, Tex.
We cannot allow it to get a foothold in our public schools.
The evaluation found Ethan to have no behavioral issues, however the state has persisted in harassing his father, and is now demanding he take him in for an additional screening, or “they will terminate his parental rights and free Ethan up for adoption,” according to Pix11.
This is why the state must be stripped of the capacity to intervene in family matters. Yes, some families are abusive; that's a very regrettable fact about human nature. But the state's machinery is worse than the problem it seeks to solve.
"Terminate his parental rights"! They can have no legitimate power to do that; it is as clear a matter of natural law as exists.
The state itself were better terminated, first.
As a stopgap measure until government powers are brought under control, I'd settle for a faint attempt at triage. I'm sure there are some babies that still need to be removed from crackheads before we start worrying about baton-twirlers whose parents refuse to consent to electroshock therapy.
The state didn't step in to save kidnapped sex slaves. That was some random guy moving around the streets, thinking he could break into people's houses when he heard screaming.
Instead of putting all the eggs in the state basket, people should diversify their portfolio and use WMD and other socially engineered weapons. One might work better than the others.
WMD=Weapons of Mass Deception
Union labor.
This is why the state must be stripped of the capacity to intervene in family matters. Yes, some families are abusive; that's a very regrettable fact about human nature. But the state's machinery is worse than the problem it seeks to solve.
Grim, this is a perfect example of the kind of reasoning that drives me nuts.
Why is it worse? What evidence is there that it is worse? Such unexamined value judgments don't strike me as reliable - they are essentially opinions.
Is a psych evaluation for one kid worse than allowing a parent to torture a child, free of the possibility of government intervention in family matters? Where is this bright line you see?
Any system of rules is subject to human folly or even evil. If the test of whether a system works or not is "No bad thing ever happens under the system" then we're left with anarchy. Life isn't as black and white as that.
I'm pretty sure I want government to be able to intervene in some family situations. If a child is being tortured or sexually abused, I want that child to have some protection and the hope of being delivered from their abuser.
It's easy for you to say that children are always "better off" with their natural parents when you're not the one being abused. But I would hope that statement would be subjected to some critical scrutiny.
Why is it worse? What evidence is there that it is worse?
It's a matter of principle, rather than of evidence. To do a statistical analysis would be to start on the wrong foot. It is wrong, that is, not because you can show empirical harm, but because it is wrong by nature.
The standard of whether a state -- any state -- is just or unjust is the natural moral law. There aren't many things we can prove about natural moral law, but there are a few. One of them is the priority relationship between families and states. Now families are fully natural, so much so that it is impossible to come into being without having family relationships. Even in the case of someone born an orphan -- due to whatever tragedy -- the father and mother of the child must necessarily have existed, and their places in the world define the structure of the child's relationships.
Now families come together and form polities, for defensive reasons and for reasons of mutual profit. Thus, the polity has an end (what the Greeks called a telos): it is an artifact created for a purpose, and that purpose was to defend the families and help them pursue their well-being. You can judge the justice or injustice of the state by how it attends to that end.
A polity that comes to think of itself as having the right to "terminate your parental rights" is thus in direct violation of the end for which any state is formed. It has crossed the line between justice and injustice. Justice must be restored, or the state must be replaced with a better one. A state that thinks of itself as having the right to exercise such a power has adopted a vicious principle, and it must be corrected.
Now, I suspect that empirically you will find that in general children are benefited by having a family whose internal integrity is sacrosanct. The number of cases of abuse are going to be far smaller than the number of cases of benefit; so if you wanted to apply a utilitarian calculation, I think you'd get to the same answer.
But I also think that the person who did such a calculation would be wrong, even though he got to the same final answer as me. In moral reasoning, it is often more important how you get there than where you get!
None of that establishes, by the way, that I think it ought to be impossible to punish actual crimes. If a man rapes, he rapes regardless of whom he rapes. The punishment for forcible rape is ideally death, and you can kill him without bothering me.
But if the state undertakes not merely to kill the man but to dissolve the family, it has gone very much too far. If I do wrong, punish me. But to believe that you could 'terminate my parental rights' and 'free my son up for adoption' is to punish not only me but my son, my wife, my parents, my sister, my cousins, my aunts -- everyone else who has a primal blood tie to the boy.
If I ponder the possibility of the state doing that for very long, a dark cloud begins to form at the edges of my vision, and a black wrath kindles in my heart. I don't experience any similar sense of outrage at the idea of being punished for a genuine crime, should I commit a genuine crime: but family is the most important thing in the world. It is what the state was ever founded to protect.
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