No one should put their kids in public school if they are unhappy with the local district. Home schooling and private schooling are totally legal options. Keep in mind that public schools have to be everything to everyone......they are the default position originally created to educate the children of those farmers and factory workers who could not afford private schools or tutors.
No public schools don't have to be everything to everyone. They were not intended to be that in any generation until the current one. They were expected to educate children--REALLY educate them--in all the basic subjects including proficiency in English, spelling, writing, math, history, geography, social studies, basic science, and if the budget allowed it, they also provided some specialized and advanced course for those with special aptitude or interest including the arts. The best schools prepared students for college and/or to succeed in the real world and that included encouraging them to use logic, reason, and employ critical thinking. Students were required to know certain facts included in their subjects--they might have to know that Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492 for instance--but they were not required to have a specific opinion about that. They were given the facts and encouraged to think about the deeper consequences and results that the facts indicated. The students who were able to think outside the box often were rewarded for that even if the teacher personally disagreed.
Schools should educate, not indoctrinate. To require them to be everything to everyone pretty much insures they won't be able to educate anywhere near as competently as they otherwise would.
A kid should be able to express or act out a harmless fantasy without political correctness tyranny knocking him/her down for it.
While I agree with your goals for education, I disagree that public schools are "indoctrinating" anyone. When the right wants to destroy a public institution, they start by casting it as some sort of liberal bastion out to destroy the country. The current vilification of the public school system is entirely reasonable, on the grounds that they are not providing a quality education, but not on the grounds that it's liberal indoctrination.
There has been a lot of criticism with the last few school shooters that these guys were giving off signals and everyone ignored them until too late. This thread is complaining that nobody can joke about school shootings at school any more. No they can't. Such jokes, all too often, turn out to be the precursor to actual shootings which are in no way funny.
So how do we know who to take seriously and who is "just joking"? How is the teacher to know?
When the left wants to destroy and or control a nation, they infiltrate education and control the minds of the children including what they are allowed to say, think, believe, understand as truth, demonstrate.
The teacher is supposed to be trained herself in logic, reason, and critical thinking and if she is, she knows the difference between a threat and kids just being kids. At the very most the 'offense' as described in the OP merited a simple warning that it violated the rules and, unless it was repeated, that should have been it. Given no other information, the school greatly overreacted. And I can believe that to be the case because of so many incidents of this type--many involving very young children--in which the school overreacted every bit as inappropriately.
It's sad to say this but in this day and age we really don't know who is joking and who isn't. Who is on the verge of snapping. School age children are holding "shooting drills" the way we held Fire Drills when I was growing up.
This is what is going in your schools now every day. Children are afraid to go to school because they fear their school is next. If you're are arming teachers, locking down schools, and having armed guards with semi-automatic weapons in the hallways, you're telling them their fears are justified.
I agree. Political correctness, hyper partisanship, what I call the 'snowflake' syndrome of being afraid or hyper senstive of anybody or any idea that is uncomfortable to you, and a society in which coarseness, rudeness, violence, cruelty, and villains are glorified has made us a hugely divided and more dangerous society than I would have ever though possible 40 or 50 years ago. Irresponsible parents now leave it up to the schools to feed, sometimes clothe, and look after every aspect of a child's well being and don't care what the kids are actually learning or not learning. And because most schools are simply not up the task either to rear or educate those kids properly, we all have suffered.
And the school puts more importance and reacts most forcefully on a kid simulating 'bang bang' with his finger than it puts on how that kid is being prepared to be a happy, successful, productive citizen.
So yes, with very few exceptions, I would not trust the schools with the well being or education of my children these days. I would home school.
