‘Revenge Attack’

Now I have one more reason to be glad I have only 79 more days as a teacher after reading about the Irvine Unified School District’s decision to put the “suspected” juvenile criminals on “independent study” (“2 in Revenge Attack on Irvine High Boy to Be Transferred,” Orange County section, Feb. 22).

It is a fact, apparently, that the two boys did beat up on and break the leg of another student because that student upheld the law.

Granted, we are not privy to all the details. Perhaps there is some evidence not available to us that proves the victim of the mayhem is not entirely blameless. Surely he would not be transferred for “fear of retaliation” if he were. The retaliation has already occurred and the retaliators removed.

Neither case precludes a proper and just punishment for the criminals. However, the kind of solution posed by the school administrators in this case is all too common these days in our public schools.

In the district I work in, these kinds of deals are done under the guise of “humanism”--a current code word among school administrators and used, for the most part, by those who are not aware of its meaning except in the most simplistic terms.

What it has come to mean among school administrators is that those who scoff at society’s rules and laws are to be given an unlimited number of chances by those who are humanists or kind and sensitive to the needs of others. The rest of us, those who are not professed humanists and therefore cruel and insensitive because we do believe in adhering to rules, are placed at risk.

These humanists either apply rules selectively or have no rules except those created on the spot. Thus, the definition of humanism as educators use it has evolved.

To begin to set things straight, the Irvine School District can expel those two juvenile offenders with the additional condition that they cannot enroll in any public school in the state, or maybe even in the country. That is the proper and just, and humanistic, solution.

WANDA KELLY

Fullerton