For example, Ben Franklin, sometimes once a year, and in spite of his much greater age, would ride his horse to Virginia to visit Thom Jefferson, for a month or so.

The ride took a couple of weeks.!!!

For whom would you ride a horse for, about, two weeks (each way), to see a friend, for your own happiness and sense of life?

Chew on that. Rise above the crap of today, and stand for the good. Today is intellectually much better than then, even as the politics and education have become worse. Your children are advantaged… if you can help them see it.

The point: in the grand, multi century view, do what you can and make sure your children gradually grasp that same view. They are utterly wonderful, but the millennium into which they were born is another A, and A is A.

As they say, “Deal”. Your parenting situation, despite your pain and frustration with modern nonsense, is actually MUCH better than Franklin or Jefferson had to face.

The greatest distinction between today’s culture and Jefferson’s is information availability. Guide your children to better information, and YOUR children are better off than children of any century.

I get that, along with your well-founded concerns about the parents being “very cooperative” in the face of overwhelming over-reaction. My suspicion that they were plenty angry, let that be known and were at least perceived as a potential source of grief for the school and rescue personnel doesn’t change the fact that they did indeed cooperate, up to the point of (presumably) consenting for their garage to be “checked.”

Maybe that would have been a good place to draw the line and challenge them to get a warrant. Surely after the MAST robot inspection of the bottle and wires there could have been no reasonable grounds for suspecting a bomb lab.

Still, I won’t fault the parents for going along and making the decisions they did. Maybe they just wanted to stand aside and let the authorities make as big a fools of themselves as they wished. Or maybe they just wanted to be done with the whole moronic matter as quickly as possible, or simply demonstrate clearly that they had nothing to hide.

As for the central question of how all this affects the kid’s initiative, creativity and drive, I’d say that seeing petty bureaubots for what they are can arm him as easily as discourage him. Even this –

[The vice principal] told the student body that everyone there is a suspect and that those in charge will panic at the slightest provocation.

– is information worth having, heeding and, when expedient, exploiting.

Richard: I agree. Zero tolerance is the new “I was just following orders.”

Michael: I’ve met enough principals to say that their competence, such as it is, lies in managing teachers and parents. Any acquaintance with the curriculum is superficial and incidental. That being said, it doesn’t take much knowledge to be able to assess the bomb-worthiness of something.

It’s more than I had when I was a kid. I came to some bad conclusions as a young kid and they limited me for a long time from acheiving more than I have. But despite the mixed premises, I turned out pretty well and have been good at promoting my life and defending my values and have mostly been happy. I can’t imagine how much better your kids and alot of the others I’ve met being raised by other good parents will be.

I have been accused occasionally of pollyanaism, and a “We the Living” circumstance is possible: great people stifled by the overwhelming darkeness of the culture around them–but I just don’t see it yet. I keep getting surprised at how quickly one can go from despair to joy, and how easy it is for people to maintain their happiness if they have the right perspective and skills. Give them the right metaphysical value judgments, if you can, and events like this one are likely to slide off their shoulders as unimportant–or at least not stick as any kind of general conclusion–as they enter adulthood.

Agreed, but I’ll go you one further — it is supposed to be a “technology” school, so the vice principal should have been competent to tell it was harmless and let the boy go on his way. (From the article, it was supposed to be some kind of rudimentary motion detector.)

Notice that “it was decided” to evacuate the school in the article? I love how responsibility for the overreactive decision is nicely avoided by everyone. Viva la passive voice.

I probably could have phrased it better, but the point I was driving at was that there was a heavy-handed response that included going to the boy’s home. Presumably, the bomb squad figured out that it wasn’t a bomb before the fire department paid a visit to the boy’s home. It’s now not enough to call home to the parents to let them know that their son is bringing something disallowed to school; authorities must physically go and make sure that the non-bomb wasn’t just the tip of some terrorist iceberg.

As far as the counseling goes, the point I never made was that the authorities at every point overreacted, freaked out, and treated this situation as a elementary school Columbine. Instead of owning up to their disproportionate reaction, they had the gall to recommend counseling for the boy and his family. It is just like what happened in Boston a few years ago. What should have happened is that the vice principal should have personally inspected the “device,” told the boy that he can’t bring such things to school, and that he could have it back at the end of the day to take home. End of story. Instead, he told the student body that everyone there is a suspect and that those in charge will panic at the slightest provocation.

I apologize for my brevity. I should have elaborated my point better.

Reading between the lines, I suspect the Fire-Rescue department spokesman was emphsizing their cooperative attitude in a lame effort to sooth and mollify their justifiable outrage; he was praising and thereby encouraging their (likely very strained) composure.

He says in the article that the student and his parents were “extremely upset.” I bet they were, along with all the parents who were scared half to death for no reason and had to leave work to go pick up their kids.

As for counseling — which “authorities were recommending,” not reportedly attempting to require — I suspect that would consist of effort on the part of said authorities to spin away potential lawsuits or (further) bad publicity.

I don’t mean these observations to counter your larger point that we’re vulnerable as individuals in this society to ever more comprehensive and intrusive governmental management. And there’s no reason to think the tide will turn itself. But absurd instances of ignorant over reaction and overreach like the one reported do at least serve the good purpose of inviting scoffing and ridicule of clueless “authority.”

As to whether the kid will ever make the same sort of “mistake,” he’s probably taking offers from classmates for another assemblage of empty bottles and wires that will get them an early release and some national press.