For education. Get written up for anything three times and you lose the priviledge of going to school.
I would go farther than some of my conservative friends in agreeing that public education in some form is an acceptable level of socialism (I will note in passing that public education was a demand of many socialists in the 19th century, until they got it). I think it offers a pathway for the diligent to raise themselves up, to our collective benefit. It keeps class barriers from being impermeable, and in my view is an important part of at least the modern American dream.
At the same time, the right to education comes with responsibility. I believe everyone in America has the right to own a gun, of any sort up to and including assault rifles, but not the right to use them to impose their will on anyone. If they do that, they forfeit the right. They also forfeit the right to participate in our electoral process, which is both prudent and just.
Likewise with education, kids should have the right to attend, but only to the extent they value what would have been clearly a priviledge in almost any other time and place in human history. For context, please read Doris Lessing’s useful Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
If a kid EVER threatens, much less hurts, another kid, and for which there is compelling evidence, he should be expelled for the remainder of the school year. If he does it twice, he should be permanently expelled and referred to the police.
If a kid is disobedient or talks back to teachers three times, he should be expelled for the remainder of the school year. If he does it three times twice, he never gets to come back.
Correllated to mental capacity, which is to say given demands appropriate for a child’s capabilities, if a child gets 3 F’s in a year, he forfeits a semester of school. If he gets 6 overall, he no longer gets to attend school. He simply is not trying.
We don’t owe kids schooling who hold it in contempt. We are paying for them to sit in a chair they don’t value, to learn things they aren’t learning. They graduate stupid, and many around them graduate knowing less than they ought to have owing to the kids who either slowed them down, or who made going to school a frightening experience.
40-50% of kids drop out of most inner city schools. The numbers are similar in many rural areas. The difference is that most kids in rural areas can get work on farms.
I have to wonder if some high percentage of those drop outs–I’m going to go with half–have to do with the fact that the kids are walking into uncontrolled war zones.
We see stupid people citing compassion as a reason to give kids a second, third, twenty-fifth, 87th chance. Bullshit. The compassion needs to be given to the kids they are terrorizing, putting ourselves in the shoes of those who did not create the problems, but are suffering from them. Juvenile criminals become in my view very early matters for the police. If they are going spend their lives in jail, the earlier it starts, the fewer people they hurt.
The larger compassion, of course, also needs to address the bigger picture of why those kids became criminals in the first place. Why would that be? We had no large problem with juvenile criminality 80 years ago, outside of isolated urchins who lacked families. People everywhere made do with half of what our poor today take for granted.
The reason for this was that kids grew up in two parent homes that read the Bible. This sounds so simple it sounds stupid. But that is the reality. They were not immersed from an early age in media which glorifed violence, and which discouraged self restraint, and personal responsibility. We lacked, then, a cult of the victim. If you screwed up, you screwed up. It wasn’t society.
To the extent society IS to blame though, it is to blame for failing to teach useful lessons. Teaching people to feel sorry for themselves, and to blame others is not useful. It is teaching people to fail in their emotional and economic lives at the same time. It it teaching them to hurt others rather than discipline themselves.
This policy would enormous differences, in my view, immediately. It would reduce inner city dropout rates, if I am right, by 10% within the first year.
Anyone out there who claims to care about humanity, consider this, and the means by which I reached my conclusions.