Our educational system in America is in the toilet. We are letting our children, our future generations, down in an inexcusable way.

Several months ago, I read that a kindergarten child had to be handcuffed and removed for his/her behavior. I am a retired public school teacher. I taught kindergarten for a number of years.

IN "LOCO PARENTIS" means in Latin "in place of the parent." I learned that in college many years ago and it was one of the charges that I never forgot. I tried to imagine myself in the situation described where a small child – let’s see, around five – had to be handcuffed and removed. What’s wrong with this picture? Everything!

In my kindergarten class one year, I had 44 students and one aide. Never in all of the years I taught did I feel the need to call in the authorities to take care of a problem in my classroom and heaven help the official who would even try to "handcuff" one of my babies. In these days, I would probably be serving 10 to 20 for interference with a federal official or some other ridiculous charge.

Yes, God forgive me, they were my babies. I taught them, protected them and loved them dearly. I never brought out a workbook until after the Christmas holidays. I had other things to teach them like, where and how to find the bathroom, how to behave in a group, open their milk cartons, sit in a circle and listen to a story, share and how to interact with others in the building or on the playground. Yes, the children used to have what is now considered an antiquated word "recess."

Recess, for those of you who have forgotten, was a time when we, as educators, turned them loose. Not literally, of course, but it was a time of activity that was not controlled, not restrictive or played by any set of regulations. Supervised, of course, but from afar. The children were allowed to play free and many an argument was settled in that 15- to 30-minute environment, many a friendship made and lots of laughing and tons of fun. Now, recess isn’t in the curriculum and isn’t acceptable behavior, plus it takes away from the real important issues that are literally a plague upon our school system.

THE IMPERATIVE SOLs (Standards of Learning) is a test Virginia considers the epitome of a child’s intellectual competence. Personally, I hate testing of this magnitude. It’s unrealistic to think that a child’s ability, total performance and intellectual capacity can be judged, put in a "very" permanent record and evaluated by one, two or even more standardized testing scores. What happened to daily grades?

When my three grandsons started school, I downloaded the SOLs and was astonished by what I read. The expectations of a child at a certain grade level are stupid! Written by some of the most academically educated people in Virginia, I believe that the most important element left out was that "while our expectations of children have obviously changed, our children haven’t." They will learn at their own rate and set their own schedule of comprehension if educators are allowed to let them.

Don’t blame the teacher. I can assure you that the teachers today and yesterday are not working for huge salaries, praise, acclaim or any honors. They are teaching because they want to do that work and care about the children.

We only see the horrors of teachers on the news. Let me set you straight. There is not one teacher in one million who would intentionally hurt or abuse a child, yet we grasp the few and destroy the many. Teachers are afraid to teach. Parents are afraid to punish and our judicial system is too quick to pass judgment at the request of one or two individuals who have not accessed the situation entirely.

LET THE teachers teach. Let the teachers demand respect. Let the children realize that we are a world that demands authority. Children cry out for boundaries we can’t give them. Children cry out for someone to give them guidance. We’re afraid. Children cry out for love. We are accused of sexual abuse for hugging a precious child. Our country has lost its way.

Parents, teachers, grandparents and all of the communities in our land need to stand and say "enough," but will we? We stood by as one woman, Madeline O’Hare, an atheist, said, "I don’t believe in God," and we have removed him from our schools, government and public places. I don’t understand, if we are truly a country founded on Christian values and morals, how this happened. Yes I do. We are pathetic and weak and our children are raging, killing each other.

I actually wanted to write about the idiocy of the purple T-shirt controversy at Vance Middle School but, after re-reading the story in the newspaper, I decided that someone needs to speak up about the central problems. If purple T-shirts worn for a good cause give the principal a basis to suspect gang activity, he has a much bigger problem than purple T-shirts.

Brenda Lester-Sprinkle is a retired teacher who lives in Abingdon, Va.