“It is our belief that to best prepare young people for today’s society, education is so much more than just academic achievement. We must also address personal and social issues to produce responsible citizens for the future of our local, wider and global community.” – Drew Povey, Head Teacher, Harrop Fold School, Manchester, England
I occasionally use this space to share examples of political correctness run amok, especially when the PC police charged with enforcing PC violations come down hard on innocent children. My favorite (if that’s the word) example concerned 11-year-old Skylar Capo of Fredericksburg, Va., who rescued a woodpecker from the clutches of her own cat, nursed it back to health and released it back into the wild. For her humanitarian efforts she was visited by a Virginia state trooper, who frightened her into crying while issuing her mother a $535 ticket for Skylar’s violation of the Federal Migratory Bird Act, which makes it illegal for anyone to “take, possess, import, export, transport, sell, purchase, barter, or offer for sale, purchase, or barter, any migratory bird, or the parts, nests, or eggs of such a bird except under the terms of a valid permit issued pursuant to Federal regulations.”
Then there is the case of 14-year-old Codie Stott, a student at the Harrop Fold School in Manchester, England. In 2006, her class was assigned a science project and the teacher split the class into study groups of six students each, and Codie was assigned to a group with five others who, being recent immigrants to England, only spoke Urdu, a language native to the Hindustan region bordering northern Pakistan and India. Codie, being a native of England, couldn’t understand what her study group partners were saying, so she asked her teacher if she could be assigned to another group.
“It’s racist,” her teacher replied. “You’re going to get done by the police.” Codie was then put in isolation for the rest of the school day. A week later police arrested her on suspicion of committing a Section Five “racial public order offense.” At the police station, after her jewelry and shoelaces were removed, she was photographed, fingerprinted, put in a jail cell for three-and-a-half hours and interrogated, before being released.
“An allegation of a serious nature was made concerning a racially motivated remark,” said Anton Edkins, Harrop Fold’s headmaster, adding that his school “would not stand for racism in any form.” A police department spokesperson said their treatment of Codie was “normal procedure,” although he denied Codie was locked up for nearly four hours in a jail cell, but rather in a “juvenile unit” that has “picture windows and comfy furniture” — a distinction that was somehow lost on Cody and her red-hot angry mother.
