I learned a lot about outside society too, even if obliquely. When the police marched a sobbing seventh-grade boy out of school because he had stolen another student’s iPod, the mood in our classroom was one of stunned, somber incredulity. How could it be that these adults did not understand the feeling of a child looking at something they desperately wanted but could not afford? What was the thought process that allowed criminality to encroach on a 12-year-old? What was the basis for the profound lack of compassion in this action, so evident to us, a class of preteens? Couldn’t he just have given the iPod back? The boy came back to school the next week. I did not learn what eventually happened, but never forgot the profound injustice, the suspicion, the shock. I think back to it especially now as students across the city lobby their local school councils to rid their buildings of police officers. I trust and believe deeply that these students have learned the same things I did as a child; law enforcement is heartless and belongs nowhere near children in schools.
