Sheesh, when I was 13, I brought the SI swimsuit issue to school. The first guy who wanted to see it was one of our teachers! Of course, that was in the late-80s, when the swimsuit issue was a bit less racy.
I agree with Ghamina that school rules are typically written by bureaucrats who have to answer to often obnoxious parents. I would go one step further and say that too many rules are just overreactions to isolated incidents. It seems like most schools start with a basic set of rules, then add or subtract to them depending on what seems to be irking the school board or the PTA at any given moment. At my HS one of my friends remarked that, according to the school rules, the maximum penalty for bringing explosives and firearms to school was the same as the maximum penalty for bringing a deck of playing cards. (An aside: I managed to get the rule against bringing playing cards to school overturned. Really.)
I think my first reaction to being called by the school is “what the fuck are you bothering me about some stupid Sports Illustrated magazine? Don’t you have enough to worry about with all the drugs and guns and pre-marital sex to disturb me with this bullshit? Call me when my kid brings a ‘gat’ to school. Until then, go back to pretending to prepare our children for a future working in call centers, retails stores and autobody shops.”
The thing that bothers me most of all here is the mother’s reaction. She sounds like the typical over-reactive parent who can’t believe her son can do anything wrong and will fight any sort of punishment the school levies. It would have been much simpler for her to simply not fight the in-school suspension and tell her kid that shit happens. It’s a lesson he’s going to have to learn in life when he gets out of school and his mom isn’t there to stick up for him. Sometimes you have to put up with unfair stuff in life. Oh, well. It’s better to learn it when you’re young.
Sure, maybe the school is over-reacting, but that, too, is part of life. Furthermore, as someone mentioned, it’s likely that there is more to the story here than we’ve heard. It is probably not quite as simple as the kid had a magazine at school and he was suspended for it. I would bet he was being disruptive with it and that’s what triggered the punishment.
But back to my point about the mom – one of the things that I see being wrong with education today is that parents are too willing to believe that their children are perfect angels who are being treated unfairly by the school. It used to be that parents would back up the school when a child was being punished. The kid would learn that his actions have consequences. Now, a kid gets punished and he runs home to mom and dad, and then mom or dad berates the principal and gets the punishment reversed. What kind of lesson is that teaching? Now, of course some kids are unfairly punished by school administrators. But, as I said above, sometimes you just have to take the unfair stuff life throws at you. There is no perfect justice.
It should also be clear that I’m speaking in generalities. Often parents do back up schools when a child mis-behaves, but it seems like the worst kids often have parental support whenever they are being punished. I think back to my school days (not that long ago), and one of the worst kids in school knew he could do whatever he wanted in school or on the bus, because as soon as he was punished, his parents would be at the school yellng at the principle.