judgment

A friend directed me to a recent article about school suspensions and their effectiveness. The author, Ashley Nicole Black, began as follows:

“When I was in high school, I was almost suspended twice. Bad to the bone trouble maker that I was, the first time was for being late to ‘zero period”’(the optional early morning class for honors students) more than five times in one semester (I literally lived on the wrong side of the tracks and would get stuck behind long trains on my way to school). And the second time was for a stash of “drugs” that fell out of my backpack in front of a teacher. I carry pain pills on me at all times because I’ve always gotten debilitating migraines. So when a bottle fell out of my bag a teacher took pity on me and didn’t report me… doing me a big favor because I went to a zero-tolerance school where I would have been expelled for a bottle of aspirin.”

So today’s students are disciplined for tardiness and Tylenol. I get it. I get that schools need standards. I simply question how we measure.

One of the trends of the past decade, for example, is to eradicate bullying. Bullying is bad — no more celebration of “bad, bad, Leroy Brown.”

Campaigns have existed. Many have stood and cheered at their onset… The Bully Project… The National Bullying Prevention Center… Stop bullying now! I agree. I have cheered as well; there is no place for the aggressive, intimidating behavior that is intended to make another person feel lesser because of who they are. There’s just one, small, but still huge problem…

In the evolving, litigious society in which we live — in a culture that rarely, willingly cedes vengeance to the divine — we like to take things into our own hands (… stop it now, remember?). Please hear me; bullying should not be allowed in any form. But we are challenged in authentic discernment of the bullying, because we are not always fully capable of discerning the heart of another. We often examine only the external factors or behaviors, making judgments and decisions completely from them — because measuring the heart is hard… measuring motive might be errant. And so we arrogantly justify making judgments solely on the external. I think that’s dangerous. I think that’s also a gaping pitfall for even the seemingly most intelligent.

Several years ago, one of my three sons was suspended from school for two days. He had said something inappropriate to another and then shoved the elementary student strongly. My son was the agitator and completely in the wrong. (Tangent note: it’s ok to admit when our kids are wrong.) Because my son’s physical behavior was (1) a repeated offense, (2) accompanied by a verbal threat, and (3) because he aggressively attempted to dominate another student, suspension under the school’s bullying policy was considered. All incidents which meet such criteria are treated the same way.

I’ll say it again: I get it. There’s just one problem; this was my son with Down syndrome.

Now let me briefly offer two relevant side notes. Just because my son is deemed by society as “special” does not qualify him for sainthood; he, like every other thriving young man does some things well and some things not. He is just as in need of discipline as you and me. That means when he makes a mistake in my absence at school, the teachers and administrators will have my full support; we’re in this together.

My frustration, though, was not with the suspension — Josh deserved it. My frustration was the suspension possibly falling under the bullying policy. Bullying implies an internal intent — yet we as a society aren’t good at measuring the internal. We think we are; we make judgments off of the external instead because it’s far easier. The challenge is that man cannot fully judge the heart. We have blindly lost sight of that reality.

We live in a society which likes to think we know it all. In my opinion, that equates to failing to recognize that only a one, true God has the omniscience we subtly proclaim. If we recognized that reality — that judging the internal is not something of which we are fully capable — we’d be more comfortable with the subjective, less judging of the external, and be ok with tardiness and Tylenol.

Respectfully…

AR