> damage school property

Look, we're mostly talking about elementary/middle school students here, right? So they're age 7-12 or so. Mostly boys, I would imagine.

So perhaps we've got an unjust proposition these days. Students often mark up their textbooks and their backpacks and vandalize their lockers to some degree. That's always going to happen -- it's a given for any school and any group of students.

Now we're routinely saddling each student with an advanced computing device. It may cost $300-500 to replace this thing. It is very high-tech and very delicate, and very resource-intensive, being a netbook type thing. And we say it's "school property" but the students themselves are responsible for lugging it around to every class, every day, doing homework on it, studying and taking notes on it, day in, day out.

I say that's nearly ridiculous. I say that in the United States, we shouldn't be uniformly training children from 7 years of age to be docile worker bees in the white-collar office. I say that a $500 high-tech device is an enormous responsibility for any child.

Now I had a similar experience in high school. The band director lent me a series of saxophones so that I could participate without my family purchasing one on our own. It was very kind of the school to lend out such equipment. A baritone sax could've cost five digits to replace, plus all the accessories. It was huge and unwieldy. I treated that thing gingerly, as if it were my own. I cleaned and maintained it in working condition. I returned it with regrets when I finished, having earned an academic letter for my service to the band.

But my cousin is a Kindergarten teacher. During the lockdowns, they put her kids on Zoom. They told her "now teach 'em". That's just beyond the pale. These are young children, and cannot just be babysat by someone on a screen. Now TikTok is their babysitter, and they're obeying TikTok more than their parents or their teachers. Perhaps that is a symptom of worse things going on.