Schools banning tag.

Yes, sure, on rare occasions kids can get hurt. So? It’s certainly not life-threatening, and if you banned every activity in which kids could get hurt you’d end up having them sit quietly in a dimly lit padded room.

Kids do get hurt. They skin knees, bark shins, loosen teeth, bleed and cry. And then the play some more. They win games and they lose games. They try and fail; they try again and sometimes succeed. They fall. They get up.

This is childhood. This is learning that the world is not a dimly-lit cushioned room.

Schools’ (and others’) like to tout their "zero tolerance" policies for drugs, weapons, bullying, and so forth; it’s supposed to sound strong and tough and all those good things.

In reality, though, if a school district has a zero tolerance policy, what it means is "we don’t trust our teachers and administrators."

Zero tolerance is like the beepers on McDonalds’ fry vats. It’s there because you don’t believe the people in charge are smart enough to make their own decisions.

That’s why you end up with students suspended, expelled, or arrested over stupid things — pointing a finger the wrong way, or sketching the wrong thing, or having a butter knife in your locker.

School administrators defend these decisions by pointing to Columbine or Virginia Tech and saying that zero tolerance is the only way to avoid another one. The girl with the butter knife today could be toting an AK-47 and an attitude tomorrow, you see.

Translation: We don’t trust our staff to differentiate between a real threat (e.g., the kids who post on Facebook their detailed plans of how and who they’re going to kill) and innocuous mistakes (e.g., the kid who left a Swiss Army Knife in his glove compartment.).

The thing is, anyone with an ounce of intelligence can tell the difference. So putting zero tolerance policies in place says the school districts don’t think the teachers are that smart.

And what does that tell us?