Photo Credit: Medford Mail Tribune
A 6-year-old boy in rural Southern Oregon has been suspended for making a drawing depicting what his teachers believe to depict violence.
The boy's paper is crumbled. The two stick figures wide-eyed. Now, the boy is home from school, and the father is furious.
The incident symbolizes an escalation in tension between what children are exposed to in the media and what children are taught at home and in school. In this case, the father of the first-grader said that the drawing was inspired by an episode of The Simpsons.
Some people believe the boy's suspension is an over-the-top, knee-jerk reaction to violence in our nation's schools. Other people see the school's action as justifiable. The boy is now labeled a menace in the school's fight to maintain a healthy and safe learning environment for all students.
Media violence in society is pervasive. However, children do not always differentiate between such adult abstract concepts as fiction and reality, right and wrong, play and work. These ideas are never clearly defined until they are learned. The line between conformity and deviance is changing in an age where violence is the norm on-screen.
We trust and hope that children learn to distinguish the constructs what our society deems as normal through learning -- at home and in the classroom. However, when the things children see on television are recreated in a classroom drawing, it reflects a deeper, more disturbing cultural pathology.
Whatever the case, the message is clear -- even first-graders can be terrorists.