You can’t let kids get away with anything.
Schools must apply some discipline. Otherwise, chaos would ensue. Talking out of turn, pulling pigtails, passing notes … and, not least, an epidemic of expressing benign thoughts inconsistent with the poisonous race-conscious ideology that some schools seek to inculcate.
In March 2021, a little girl known as “B.B.” in court documents got into trouble for drawing a group of classmates of different races. She added the words “Black Lives Matter” and, below that, “any life.” She gave the drawing to a black classmate to try to comfort him, as she later explained.
Had B.B. been more attuned to the racial controversies of the day — does she not follow The New York Times and CNN? — she might have realized what treacherous waters she had dived into.
As it was, she was surprised when the school forced her to apologize to her classmate and forbade her from drawing any more pictures while in school and from attending recess for two weeks.
The parents sued. A district court ruled in favor of the school, but the parents, helped by Pacific Legal Foundation, are appealing.
The district judge says that whether First Amendment protections of free speech apply here depends on whether such speech, however innocent, would “significantly interfere with the discipline needed for the school to function.”
The drawing could hardly have thus interfered unless part of the school’s “function” is to impose race-conscious orthodoxy.
And suppress even the slightest peep of unwary dissent.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly
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2 replies on “The Racial Land Mine of First Grade”
At some point, the state becomes a greater danger to human rights than are informal assemblies of the public. Judges should take care not to allow that point to be seen to be crossed. And perpetrators should understand that if the point is seen to be crossed, then their fates will be determined by those assemblies rather than by the courts.
Forbade her from drawing any more pictures while in school? Doesn’t the school have art class? Is there no way for young children to explore creative outlets?