"No tolerance" policies and the "Jena Six"

You may have read about the sad case of Jena, Louisiana, where confrontations born of (we're told at least) who might sit under a particularly nice shade tree escalated into "humor" about lynch mobs, the burning of the local high school, escalating fights, and finally an incident where six young men beat another young man unconscious. Lots of folks on both sides of the issue desperately need their daddy to take them on a quick trip to the woodshed, and sadly, Daddy's not there for a lot of them.

Perhaps even more importantly, this incident illustrates what's wrong with school discipline; notably "no tolerance," where both aggressor and victim get the same punishment. When you do this, you cannot teach children that certain words are fighting words, that it's OK to defend yourself, and that it's not OK to continue to pummel someone who can no longer fight back--you've already established moral equivalence between aggression and defense, after all.

In other words, you have just devoted the full authority of the school to the destruction of a child's moral sense, and we then wonder why kids act as if their moral senses had been destroyed. What Dabney predicted around 1870, and Lewis predicted in the 1950s, is coming to fruition today. We have castrated, and bid the geldings be fruitful.