Organized Crime in the Third Grade

I heard on the news that a group of third graders in Georgia didn't appreciate their teacher's scolding. So they banded together and cooked up a plan to tie her up, stab her with a steak knife, cover up the windows, and then clean up the mess.

You have to give them credit for organized planning, but this is a pretty cold and ugly plan to be cooked up by a group of eight and nine-year olds. They must have had the modern "teamwork" approach to education, since they parcelled out the tasks so neatly. These kids could run a junior crime organization; perhaps they'll be hearing from recruiters.

But somewhere along the way, someone forgot to teach them right from wrong.

I don't think this can happen at school. It comes from the parents, and apparently the parents in this case were not up to the job. Or, maybe they were too busy scraping out a living, but that doesn't fly with me. Plenty of people have scraped for a living but remembered to instill some values in their kids.

It's pretty frightening when kids who should be playing at Chucky Cheese or watching cartoons are instead plotting to stab their teacher. What kind of a world are we creating by leaving kids to learn their morals from a TV set or a video game?