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An honor student gets busted for possession of a controlled substance: candy. Another student is suspended for wearing a gun to school. On his t-shirt. Zero-tolerance strikes again.

The role of the public school, in theory, is to educate children to be good citizens: Reading, writing and calculating are fundamental skills for self-government. In practice, many public schools are warehouses for children run by bureaucrats operating arbitrary and capricious rules. "Zero tolerance" policies are the reductio ad absurdum of government schooling: one-size-fits-all discipline that punishes innocent mistakes as harshly as any malicious breach of law and order.

Consider the circumstances of the aforementioned stories:

• "Michael Sheridan was stripped of his title as class vice president, barred from attending an honors student dinner and suspended for a day after buying a bag of Skittles from a classmate."

• "One day in December, Donald Miller III wore a gun to school. As you might imagine, it got him in trouble. But the gun wasn't loaded; indeed, it wasn't a real gun at all. It was the image of a gun, printed on the front and back of a T-shirt — a shirt the Penn Manor freshman wore to honor his uncle, a soldier in the U.S. Army fighting in Iraq... His parents, Donald and Tina Miller of Holtwood, got angry and called a lawyer. And now a lawsuit has been filed in federal court..."

Idiotic overreaction! Mostly indefensible, too. But that should go without saying.

Mocking "zero tolerance" isn't new, I'm well aware. James Taranto runs a regular feature in Best of the Web Today. There is a terrific website called Zero Intelligence, which never seems to want for tales of "zero-tolerance" excess (at least, when the site is updated regularly).

Still, every time I read one of these stories, I get angry. The school officials in Lancaster saw that gun on the t-shirt and instantly thought "Columbine." The administrators in New Haven, well trained in weeding out dangerous drugs, knew just what to do when faced with banned carbohydrates. They probably didn't have to think once, let alone twice.

You could argue (as I once tried with Taranto) that zero tolerance policies are the fruits of conservative reaction to an explosion of drugs and violence in schools in the 1980s and '90s. The answer (as Taranto rightly offered) is so what? Boneheaded policies are boneheaded policies. Get rid of 'em, already!

So what is the answer to school administrators' penchant for overreaction? Prudence would counsel moderation, but there has been neither prudence nor much moderation within the education establishment for a long time. So in the spirit of more than two decades of preposterous "zero tolerance" rules, errant, stubborn, cowardly or downright stupid principals and their flunkies should face suspension, termination, a choice of stocks, bastinado or the lash, followed by banishment and/or exile.

What's that? Too excessive? Too cruel? Well, the alternative would be to actually elect sensible people to local school boards and state office and repeal the policies. But everyone knows that's impossible. So the bastinado it is!