Zero-tolerance stupidity at school: Column

• In Pennsylvania%2C 10-year-old Johnny Jones was suspended for using an imaginary bow and arrow.
• A Maryland boy was suspended for gnawing a Pop Tart into the shape of a gun.
• Then there%27s the 6-year-old boy charged with %22sexual harassment%22 for kissing a girl.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal's Alison Gopnik reported on research from professors Jacqueline Wooley at the University of Texas and Paul Harris at Harvard that showed a surprising degree of sophistication among preschool kids. Apparently, though they spend a lot of time in fantasy pursuits, they're actually quite good at distinguishing fantasy from reality:

Children understand the difference. They know that their beloved imaginary friend isn't actually real and that the terrifying monster in their closet doesn't actually exist (though that makes them no less beloved or scary). But children do spend more time than we do thinking about the world of imagination. They don't actually confuse the fantasy world with the real one; they just prefer to hang out there.

On reading that, my first thought was that these kids are actually a lot better at distinguishing between fantasy and reality than the teachers and administrators in the schools that they attend.

At South Eastern Middle School in Fawn Grove, Pa., for example, 10-year-old Johnny Jones was suspended for using an imaginary bow and arrow. That's right - - not a real bow and arrow, but an imaginary bow and arrow. A female classmate saw this infraction, tattled to a teacher, and the principal gave Jones a one-day suspension for making a "threat" in class.

To be fair, it probably takes a lot of imagination to turn what sounds like a bit of old-fashioned cowboys-and-Indians play into a "threat." But while the principal, John Horton, gets an "A" for imagination, he deserves an "F" for distinguishing between imagination and reality. Sadly, he's not alone.

You've probably also heard about the 7-year-old Maryland boy who was suspended for gnawing a Pop Tart into the shape of a gun. And then there's the case of the 8-year-old Arizona boy whose drawings of ninjas and Star Wars characters -- and interest in, gasp, zombies -- led to threats of expulsion. And, of course, there's the six-year-old boy charged with "sexual harassment" for kissing a girl. So much for Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher.

So is this steady stream of incidents an indication of widespread mental deficiency among America's K-12 educators? In a word, yes.

It's already well-established that education majors have the lowest test scores of any college major, but nonetheless tend to graduate with high grades. That certainly suggests a lack of critical faculties. But the constant stream of stories of zero-tolerance stupidity suggests that there's something more lacking here than just academic smarts: There seems to be a severe deficit of the very sort of critical thinking that the education industry purports to be instilling in kids. One might dismiss any one of these events as an isolated incident, but when you have -- as we clearly do -- a never ending supply of such incidents, they're no longer isolated: They're a pattern.

This is a serious PR problem for the American education establishment, but underlying the bad publicity is a serious substantive problem: When your kids attend schools like these, they are under the thumb of Kafkaesque bureaucrats who see no problem blotting your kid's permanent record for reasons of bureaucratic convenience or political correctness.

At some point, voluntarily putting your kid in such a situation looks a bit like parental malpractice -- especially if your kid is a boy, since boys seem to do worse in today's nearly-all-female K-12 environment. A private industry that generated this much bad publicity would be in trouble already.

With home schooling and online school becoming steadily more popular, the education establishment needs to worry that parents will be taking their business elsewhere. And it's not just the loss of pupils that matters: If too many taxpaying parents abandon the public schools, taxpayer support will evaporate. Why, people will ask, are we paying for public schools when everyone with any sense is paying (again) to send their kids elsewhere?

Will school officials worry enough about this possibility to change their behavior before it's too late? I don't know, but I kind of doubt it -- they don't seem to be especially bright, now, do they?

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is professor of law at the University of Tennessee and the author ofThe New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself. He blogs atInstaPundit.com.

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