Alex Evans is a seven year-old second grader at Mary Blair Elementary School in Colorado.\u00a0 Recently, he was suspended for throwing an imaginary grenade while pretending to \u201crescue the world\u201d from \u201cpretend evil forces.\u201d<\/p>\n
Little Alex, it turns out, violated his school\u2019s \u201cabsolutes\u201d against fighting and weapons, \u201creal or imaginary.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
So-called \u201czero tolerance\u201d policies of the sort on display at Mary Blair have long been in place in public schools throughout the country.\u00a0 Alex\u2019s mother said that she thought that they were \u201cunrealistic\u201d for kids her son\u2019s age. She is right as far as she goes.\u00a0 The problem is that she doesn\u2019t go nearly far enough.<\/p>\n
Such policies are indeed unrealistic, yet they are unrealistic for people of all ages.\u00a0 Moreover, they aren\u2019t just <\/em>unrealistic. They are at once idiotic and outrageous<\/em>: rather than enable children to become responsible adults, zero tolerance policies threaten to retard this developmental process. <\/em><\/p>\n Boys are particularly harmed by it.\u00a0 Alex Evans is a case in point.\u00a0 Here is a seven year-old child whose only infraction is that he possesses an imagination that is both lively and heroic.\u00a0 Think about it: he delights in envisioning himself as a self-sworn enemy of all that is evil, a world savior.<\/p>\n The kid dreams, not about harming <\/em>the world, but rescuing <\/em>it.\u00a0 He longs to be more like Superman, not Stalin.<\/p>\n Yet for this, the childish adults at his school punish him.<\/p>\n Speaking as one who was once a boy, I can assure you that the sort of play in which Alex Evans and a gazillion other boys engage in is not at all atypical.\u00a0 When I was a kid, my cousin Wade and I would regularly pretend to be superheroes: Superman, Batman, and Spiderman were our crime fighters of choice.\u00a0 We would also not infrequently imagine ourselves as characters from Star Wars.\u00a0 <\/em>But Wade and I were especially creative: we would essentially play out our self-assigned roles as if we were enacting or\u2014in the case of Star Wars\u2014re<\/em>enacting films.<\/p>\n Of course, since there was only two of us, and since no hero is complete without a nemesis, we also had to pretend to be villains. Unlike Alex Evans, however, we didn\u2019t just hurl imaginary weapons at one another; we also really wrestled.\u00a0 If the rules of Mary Blair Elementary School been our family\u2019s rules, had our family a \u201czero-tolerance\u201d policy, we would have been in some serious trouble.<\/p>\n The value of these imaginative exercises to a boy\u2019s intellectual and moral development is sorely underappreciated.\u00a0 They expand his mind\u2019s horizons, awakening him to possibilities to which his counterparts of duller sensibilities will remain oblivious.\u00a0 And inasmuch as it is the hero that he plays and replays, they serve as the means by which he cultivates those excellences of character that will make him into a virtuous man.<\/p>\n This is no new insight.\u00a0 Prior to our generation, it went without saying\u2014though it was often repeated\u2014that the key to maintaining and strengthening civilization lies in heroic men showing young boys how to become heroic men. And it was as well obvious that the virtuous would not infrequently have to deploy force against the vicious.<\/p>\n Those commentators who see in the case of Alex Evans but the latest battle in the so-called \u201cWar on Boys\u201d are only partially correct.\u00a0 If \u201czero-tolerance\u201d policies like those at Mary Blair are the proverbial shots fired in any kind of \u201cwar,\u201d it is a war against men<\/em>, for in stifling the intellectual and moral growth of boys, they produce men with neither heads nor hearts.<\/p>\n But if it is a war on men that is being waged here, then, ultimately, it is a war on civilization. \u00a0<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Alex Evans is a seven year-old second grader at Mary Blair Elementary School in Colorado.\u00a0 Recently, he was suspended for throwing an imaginary grenade while pretending to \u201crescue the world\u201d from \u201cpretend evil forces.\u201d Little Alex, it turns out, violated his school\u2019s \u201cabsolutes\u201d against fighting and weapons, \u201creal or imaginary.\u201d\u00a0 So-called \u201czero tolerance\u201d policies of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n