Pubdate: Sat, 07 Mar 1998 Date: March 7, 1998 Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA) Author: Ajit Dongre The relatives I left behind when I adopted America as my country call us Americans faddists. They observe our obsession with calories and diets and exercise; our political correctness about secondhand smoke; and our schizophrenia about sexuality. They have concluded that our relative newness as a people is responsible for a certain lack of judgment, a certain naive belief in the power of human engineering, and a certain lack of wisdom or common sense. The behavior of school officials in countering the threats of drugs and violence in schools appears at first to be another example. Common sense suggests that punishing students for innocuous transgressions of a ``zero tolerance'' policy will do nothing to combat drugs and violence in schools. I almost wrote a letter denouncing such inflexibility -- and then I changed my mind. So why do these officials take such apparently silly actions? It's because if a school used judgment, instead of inflexible policy, in forgiving a kid's obviously innocent mistake in bringing a forbidden item to school, that would set a scary precedent. School officials would then have to investigate and judge a multitude of incidents and pronounce the students ``innocent'' or ``guilty.'' In most cases, it is possible to separate deliberate violations from innocent mistakes, but not always. Given the importance of the job of ridding our schools of drugs and violence, I think it's better to be inflexible. Having to be paranoid and searching my kids' backpacks twice before sending them to school is a price I am willing to pay for a chance at achieving a clean school environment. And if my kid gets ``caught'' giving the French teacher a bottle of wine for the holidays, or cutting an apple with a knife with a blade longer than three-quarters of an inch, I think I can explain to him why he got suspended for a week -- without him being traumatized for life. Ajit Dongre San Jose