Guest opinion
Dismembered toy soldiers sent wrong message
By Doug Jorrey

"Teach your children well . . ."

The words of a song from the dark ages of my youth came to mind as I scanned a news clip from Rancho Palos Verdes.

It seems that it's local custom at one public school, for students being promoted from the fifth grade, to decorate their graduation caps with symbols that represent who they are or who they want to be.

One student, with military aspirations, decorated his cap with little plastic soldiers.

However, before the ceremony, he was told that he could not participate unless he agreed to cut the little guns and grenades from the arms of the plastic soldiers. According to the principal, this was necessary because of the school's zerotolerance policy for weapons on campus.

There's no doubt to me what this young man and his classmates were being taught- but were they being taught well?

The primary purpose of publicly funded instruction, ever since the first compulsory education laws of the 19th century, was to provide useful, productive citizens- citizens who could function and prosper within the American social fabric and ultimately within the world at large.

As a result, the schools taught reading and writing so their gradu- ates could communicate. They taught them mathematics and science so they could manage their finances and understand the technology they would work with. They also taught them history and social studies so they would understand the reality of the world they would be living in.

In short, public schools were meant to prepare their students for life- but are today's schools preparing their students for life as it is or for life as imagined in a Disney animated cartoon?

If the lesson that was being taught was that "guns are always bad," even when wielded by tiny plastic men, then how do those same teachers explain the decision by flesh-and-blood farmers and tradesmen at Lexington and Concord to resort to guns to protect their homes and rights?

Were the guns and grenades carried by the soldiers who liberated the death camps of the Third Reich bad? What about the rifles carried by soldiers in the hunt for medieval misogynistic killers today in Afghanistan and Iraq?

Unfortunately, in the real world beyond Rancho Palos Verdes, sometimes violent force applied with guns and grenades is necessary to defeat evil.

Guns are just tools. It is the morality and judgment of those who use them that determines if they're being used for good or evil. If we want to teach our children well, it is morality and judgment that they should be learning along with the bedrock principle that safety is born of strength, not weakness.

We should not be preparing our young men and women for life in the real world by pretending that it is something different from what it really is.

It is all too easy in a rich, secure society like ours to become enamored with that which is trendy and transitory, to take for granted all that we have and believe that it will always be that way no matter how often we ignore and violate the fundamental rules that have governed mankind since the dawn of time.

The real world will not change to suit our fancy, and we violate its most basic rules at our peril . . . so teach your children well. Their future depends on it.

Retired Lt. Col. Doug Jorrey is a 1971 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy and holds a master's degree in military art and science from the USA Command and Staff College. For 22 years he served in various command and staff positions in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He retired after service in the First Gulf War and spent another 10 years as a military consultant living and working in the Middle East. He is the father of Acorn editor Kyle Jorrey.