Last week, a six-year-old boy from North Carolina was suspended from school after kissing a girl on the cheek.

More recently, a school-age kid from New York was suspended for doing the same thing.

Are there people actually dense enough to think that these kids had evil intentions on their mind?

Do they really think these two kids were trying to sexually harass these girls? They’re 6 years old! They don’t even know the meaning of the word.

A couple of months ago, a Sacramento kindergarten teacher had her students picket the principal’s office to get a new VCR. Can you imagine what this classroom would be like?

“All right class, we’re going to put off our lesson on addition today so we can go down to the principal’s office and handcuff ourselves to his desk. We’ll show you kids how we liberals do things in the real world. Eight-six-four-two, we want Barney and big bird too!”

These instances are exposing the true evils in our educational system: Educational Administrators. These people don’t want students to learn. They use their students as case studies for more inane educational programs like “outcome based education,” (a program where students don’t receive grades, just a “GJ” mark for a “good job” or a “NT” for “nice try”).

They bide their time until their studies are done and leave so they can write their worthless books and talk about it with their elitist liberal buddies.

These administrators are more concerned with their students being politically correct than teaching them the three R’s.

No wonder our children have the lowest test scores in the industrialized world. Instead of teaching them math and science, we’re busy showing them how to sue their parents and reading them books like “Johnny Wants to be a She for Free.”

This is the legacy of our educational system. We are turning out masses of young people that are “p.c.” but can’t find the U.S. on a world map.

When did this get out of hand? When did Americans start putting up with this crap? The United States was the envy of the world for its educational system 20 years ago. Now we’re a laughing stock because of it. What was once a system that stressed learning fundamentals has become a mouthpiece for failing left-wing ideas.

Students aren’t even being failed or held back anymore. Teachers who want to keep students in the same grade for another year are only met with static. Holding a child back, the administrators say, will unduly damage his/her self-esteem. Well, as long as they feel good about themselves it’s OK to be a moron.

Parents are partially to blame for this. Once concerned with their children’s education, far too many are apathetic and measure their child’s performance strictly on the basis of grades.

If their child comes home with a B, that must mean he learned something. Unfortunately, that grade isn’t as indicative of positive performance as it used to be. He could be failing and his parents wouldn’t know it.

Membership in PTA’s, groups that can affect a change in this system, are also at record lows. Many parents don’t involve themselves in their children’s education any more than they have to.

Children aren’t even allowed to have fun in school anymore. Last year a Waterloo elementary school student was suspended for bringing a water pistol to school.

His actions, the school board said, violated the district’s zero-tolerance policy against guns. Just because a couple of gangbanger punks bring a real gun to school they punish an 8-year-old because he wanted to play around.

This isolates another problem. Administrators are reluctant to kick troublemakers out of school. In my parent’s day, if you caused trouble you were history.

Today the schools of urban America are more like prisons. Students are forced to walk through metal detectors and submit to ridiculous searches. Instead of removing the problem students like they should, the administrators inconvenience the legitimate students who are there to learn.

Once again, their belief is that students shouldn’t be kicked out of school (even if they deserve it) since that would damage their precious self-esteem.

These are just a few examples of this foolishness we call the American educational system. What was once the biggest asset of our nation is now an embarrassment. The bulk of the responsibility for this tragedy falls on the administrators. Our system was never broken, and they tried to fix it. Their botched “repair” job now has to be tended to by us, the American public.

Steps must be taken now by parents, teachers, politicians, and concerned citizens. It is our responsibility to take back our schools. We cannot wait any longer. Further delay will result in more minds lost to these vacuous ideas.

---

Robert Zeis is a senior in finance from Des Moines.