To the editor: The Dec. 2 edition of The Chronicle contained an unusual item in the police blotter. It seems that the school resource officer in Goshen had arrested an unnamed youth on a charge of aggravated harassment after an investigation into a threatening note. Recently many public schools have hired school resource officers. These hires are usually accompanied by statements packed with disingenuous platitudes about the security of students in a hostile world and the fostering of team spirit with law enforcement. This arrest proves the reality behind the lie. The posting of policemen within our schools is simply the most recent step in the converting schools from safe havens of learning into locked-down institutions. This change has been a sad inevitability ever since our cowardly teaching culture came to the madcap conclusion that traditional social discipline had to be abandoned along with all absolutes like moral right and wrong. After all, why teach something so difficult as the ability to judge right from wrong when it’s so much easier to let our teenagers run lose without a rudder until they sink themselves with an arrest? Perhaps we should ask ourselves whether we would invite the local police into our homes to watch our children or to conduct random searches with bomb and drug-sniffing dogs. If this doesn’t seem an appetizing option then why do we subject our children to a monitored life when we send them off to learn about how the world really does work? I believe that our children should be allowed to make juvenile mistakes and that their only fear of retribution should be the disapproval of Mom and Dad and the frowning principal that orders them to write “I’m thankful I don’t live in a police state” one thousand times on the blackboard. Brad Morrison Chester