School Is Hell

It was only last week when a student was arrested for writing an essay, and a few weeks ago when another innocent kid was thrown into jail because of a Daylight Savings Time bug.

now a student has been arrested for making a video game map of his school, something that is apparently quite common for people learning to make video game maps. Now granted, I can see how fuddy-duddy grown-ups with no understanding of video games might be freaked out by a kid (look out, he's Asian!) playing what appears to be a simulation of himself running around shooting inside his school. But any sane school administrator will simply talk to the kid and see if anything's up, as opposed to searching the kid's house and arresting him when they find a hammer, which he apparently needed to fix his bed.

My high school wasn't much better. When I was a junior, several kids got caught with marijuana. In addition to getting the DEA involved, the administration told some of the kids that if they ratted out their friends, they would get suspended and not expelled. They ratted and got expelled anyway. This was not lost on the rest of us kids, nor our younger siblings, nor their friends... the administrators completely alienated their students as well as future students by betraying their trust. I don't see this getting better any time soon.

--YY

p.s. As a bonus, here's an excellent essay by Paul Graham: Why Nerds Are Unpopular: "If life seems awful to kids, it's neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life actually is awful (as you believe). It's because the adults, who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to spend years cooped up together with nothing real to do. Any society of that type is awful to live in. You don't have to look any further to explain why teenage kids are unhappy."