Educating Ahmed

The other morning, I was going through the radio channels and wound up on some locally produced radio show that was talking about a number of teacher’s strikes in Washington State. I thought of the irony since classes began two or three weeks ago and now kids are being kept home because teachers are demanding higher pay.

I remember when I was in school our teachers also went on strike which meant that we didn’t have to go to school.

I always thought to myself as a child, I hope the teachers stay on strike forever – that way I could do the things I wanted to do. When we were told that we would have to make up that time and that it would cut into our summer vacation, I thought that maybe we as kids should organize against teachers and tell them it isn’t our fault that the teachers wanted to strike.

We tolerated school when we were kids.

It wasn’t going to school we hated – it was the home work. In fact, homework was so bad I actually created a petition in junior high school to ban it. I stated in my petition that if every other teacher, in every other period would issue homework that would be at least an hour of homework for every teacher which equated to at least 4 hours of homework.

That meant from the end of school in the afternoon, we would be doing homework all the way up till bedtime.

There were assignments that didn’t bother me. I really enjoyed inventing some really fun things for science fair. I guess it was because I always had great science teachers and I also had great history teachers. They certainly were challenging enough. I guess they are they are the reason why I turned out the way I did.

The reason I say this is because as I got older I realized it was my education and environment that basically made me who I am today. I know many people want to believe that their children turn out the way they do because of how parents raise them, but reality as uncomfortable as it is points to the fact that the majority of parents have little or no long term effect on their children’s personality, mental health or intelligence.

Most children today are nurtured from the time they are baby’s to the time they are toddlers. Then due to commitments with work, divorced single parent scenarios or other projects most parents put their children in day care until they are in elementary school.

From there the child spends time in the public education environment and all that they eventually become is a byproduct of their relationship with both teachers and other students. It is in the classroom where students learn about racial histories or heritage, tolerance of those with distinctive sexual roles, and inheriting and disseminating norms, customs, and ideologies.

The state is hoping that parents rely heavily on the education system to tech core values to young minds and provide an apt pupil with the skills and habits necessary for participating within their own society.

Now many parents believe they have enough influence on a child and many parents do have an interest in their child’s well-being by teaching those values that they feel are important; mostly moral and religious values.

The question is: Are the children capable of taking those values and behaviors with them back to school or the day care center of the playground? There is very little correlation between how children behave with their parents and how they behave with their social circles at school. A child may appear to be fine at home. The child may be cooperative and participate is family functions. However, the behavior may be different at school and vice versa.

Children (more now than ever) are being shaped by the state and parents feel helpless, but the system has been set up that way. It used to be that if a child turns out badly it is the fault of the parents—now their behaviors as adults can now be blamed more on the state.

Annette Fuentes the author of the book “Lockdown High,” has researched the national climate in the school system and what she found out is very surprising.

Children are now going to schools that literally seem like they are more like penitentiaries than schools. Children are now being subjected to searches with metal detectors and drug tests for aspirin, police profiling of students with no records, arbitrary expulsions, armed teachers, increased policing, and all-seeing electronic surveillance.

Students are constantly being programmed into being obsequious due to the permitted climate of fear that provides the imposition of unprecedented restrictions on young people’s rights, dignity, and educational freedoms.

The new “zero tolerance” measures push the most vulnerable and academically needy students out of the classroom and into what Fuentes calls the school to prison pipeline.

By now you’ve heard the story of Ahmed Mohamed a 14 year old Muslim boy that brought to school a beeping, strange-looking homemade concealed device that turned out to be a clock.

School officials, thinking, as 95 percent of Americans would, that it looked like a bomb, hauled the young boy out of class. Police put him in handcuffs and, even after the confusion passed, the boy was suspended from school.

What is odd about this story is that while the faculty of the school reacted as they would with anything suspicious, the entire story has now been exploited as a racist move by school officials.

Now, the young boy has been praised by Facebook President Mark Zuckerberg and has even been invited to the Whitehouse by President Obama.

The news website, “The Daily Beast,” has also praised the boy as the Muslim hero America is looking for. It is all of this focus on the “maligned Muslim” that we forget that all children are dealt with more harshly than Ahmed Mohammed and all of the praise is hollow and hypocritical when you consider how all children are being treated in the public school system.

Many people may have forgotten the story about Josh Welch, a white Maryland kid with ADHD who was 7 years old when he was kicked out of school for chewing a Pop-Tart into the shape of a pistol and pretending to shoot other students with it.

Well, I wonder how his parents are dealing with this confusion? I wonder how he is reacting to Ahmed’s overblown case?

Josh didn’t get a Whitehouse invitation for being creative with is food — and his parents were forced to hire a lawyer and spent a year and a half just trying to get the suspension erased from the kid’s record.

They were told no.

Alex Stone, a 16-year-old white kid from Summerville, SC, wrote a short story in which he imagined using a gun to kill a dinosaur. For this, his locker was searched and he was arrested, handcuffed, charged with “disorderly conduct” and suspended from school for three days.

President Obama said nothing –he could have encouraged the kid by saying said he sounded like a budding Michael Crichton writing a plot to Jurassic Park – But no… Ahmed on the other hand is invited to the Facebook headquarters, offered an internship at Twitter and Microsoft has sent Ahmed some very expensive computer tech like a tablet, smart watch, key board and 3D printer. He is now being encouraged to go to MIT to become a theoretical physicist.

In Dyer County, Tennessee, Kendra Turner says she was suspended for saying “Bless you” after a student sneezed, and that her teacher told her that she would have no “godly speaking in class.”

Now do you think the Pope will give her a ride on the Pope mobile? Not a chance.

You see, Ahmed has become useful for the media.

For 14 years the media has been desperate to find some evidence, any evidence, that Muslims in general are facing deep-seated discrimination because of the 9/11 attacks.

Other examples include the recent comments by Ben Carson regarding a Muslim should not be president – and Donald Trump not addressing the accusation by a supporter that Obama is a Muslim and that all Muslims should be kept from entering the country.

Ahmed is an example of how the state and the media are bending over backwards to cover up the fact that Ahmed and other kids get treated like criminals in the school system by creating a racial profiling story – when it should be a story about police and school overreaction to all students that are being kept in a detention facility like atmosphere – and being taught to have a daily diet of fear and paranoia.

How can this incident help students who feel their spirits are being crushed in a system that treats them with suspicion?

I think that President Obama, Mark Zuckerberg and all of the Ahmed sycophants should educate Ahmed and apologize for how all kids are treated in the school system.

As microcosms of the police state, America’s public schools contain almost every aspect of the militarized, intolerant, senseless, over criminalized, legalistic, surveillance-riddled, totalitarian landscape that plagues those of us on the “outside.”

From the moment a child enters one of the nation’s 98,000 public schools to the moment she graduates, she will be exposed to a steady diet of draconian zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior, overreaching anti-bullying statutes that criminalize speech, school resource officers (police) tasked with disciplining and/or arresting so-called “disorderly” students, standardized testing that emphasizes rote answers over critical thinking, politically correct mindsets that teach young people to censor themselves and those around them, and extensive biometric and surveillance systems that, coupled with the rest, acclimate young people to a world in which they have no freedom of thought, speech or movement.

John Whitehead reports via the Rutherford Institute that by the time the average young person in America finishes their public school education, nearly one out of every three of them will have been arrested.

More than 3 million students are suspended or expelled from schools every year, often for minor misbehavior, such as “disruptive behavior” or “insubordination.” Black students are three times more likely than white students to face suspension and expulsion.

For instance, a Virginia sixth grader, the son of two school teachers and a member of the school’s gifted program, was suspended for a year after school officials found a maple leaf in his backpack that they suspected was marijuana.

Despite the fact that the leaf in question was not marijuana a fact that officials knew almost immediately, the 11-year-old was still kicked out of school, charged with marijuana possession in juvenile court, enrolled in an alternative school away from his friends, subjected to twice-daily searches for drugs, and forced to be evaluated for substance abuse problems.

Many state laws require that schools notify law enforcement whenever a student is found with an “imitation controlled substance,” basically anything that look likes a drug but isn’t actually illegal.

As a result, students have been suspended for bringing to school household spices such as oregano, breath mints, birth control pills and powdered sugar.

It’s not just look-alike drugs that can get a student in trouble under school zero tolerance policies. Look-alike weapons toy guns—even Lego-sized ones, hand-drawn pictures of guns, pencils twirled in a “threatening” manner, imaginary bows and arrows, even fingers positioned like guns can also land a student in detention.

However, it looks as if a disassembled clock that looks like an IED that is claimed to be the invention of a Muslim boy—gets him an offer of a paid scholarship at MIT?

There is a conspiracy in our public school system where students are purposefully being trained into becoming deficient in common sense. They are constantly having their spirits broken and are being shown with examples like the Ahmed fiasco that those they trust will overreact, and then not have the moral courage to admit that they have become fearful sheep and that they are pouring praise on a young Muslim boy that serves a purpose in the mainstream narrative that now we are all racists.

Unlike Ahmed, most students accused of being disorderly or noncompliant have a difficult enough time navigating the bureaucracy of school boards, but when you bring the police into the picture, after-school detention and visits to the principal’s office are transformed into punishments such as misdemeanor tickets, juvenile court, handcuffs, tasers and even prison terms.

In the case of Ahmed Mohammed – we all know that the overall attitude the media wants to put in the narrative is that Americans see all Muslims as threats… But a white or Hispanic youth with the same device would have been dealt with in the same fashion — only the media would not have responded – and they wouldn’t have made the kid the misunderstood darling of the moment.

We have to admit that, with the climate of fear in the school system that a school teacher or student will notice something that makes them concerned about a young person.

You don’t need to be a counterterrorism expert to understand that these types of flags will bring attention to huge swaths of people unlikely to even think of committing a violent act.

The media has somehow overlooked the problem in the public school system by using Ahmed’s story to prove that all Muslims are considered suspects and not Americans.

The truth is all students are considered suspects – and they are being trained to be that way up until the point when they are released into the real world and realize that they too are not being treated as Americans but as slaves to the state.

Text – Check out Ground Zero Radio with Clyde Lewis Live Nightly @ http://www.groundzeromedia.org