I’m fortunate to have grown up in an earlier era.

If I had been a child in the last generation, I would be spending much of my life in prison.

Our culture today has embraced the notion of “zero tolerance” when it comes to children. I refer to it as zero judgment, or zero common sense.

A story that surfaced last week reinforced this view. It concerned a Delaware first-grader, Zachary Christie, who had been taken out of school and was facing 45 days in alternative education, because of zero tolerance rules.

It seems that Zachary enjoys camping. And one of his camping tools is a pocket knife with a spoon and a fork that fold out. He took the knife to school so he could eat with it in the cafeteria. That’s when things turned ugly, and he was labeled a threat to the social order.

Zachary’s plight took me back a few decades. I, too, had one of those knives when I was in grade school. And I routinely carried it with me. I even used it a few times in the cafeteria. It wasn’t very efficient, because the spoon and fork tended to collapse and pinch my fingers.

Back then, no one questioned my possession of a pocket knife or the fact I was using it in the cafeteria. It was no big deal. I grew up when kids were expected to do goofy things and not be branded as threats as a result.

Those days, alas, are gone. And kids like Zachary Christie pay the price.

Fortunately, Zachary has a mother who refused to go along with officialdom. She created a Web site, www.helpzachary.com, that was devoted to his plight. It includes details about the incident, media coverage and a petition for people to sign. There is even an award-winning video Zachary made a year earlier where he doesn’t exactly come off as a menace to society.

As it turns out, the public embraced Zachary and Delaware’s Christina School Board felt enough heat to back down. Zachary was told he could return to school and the board agreed to make changes in its 80-page code of conduct for students.

Interestingly, news reports noted this wasn’t the first time officials in that school district had reason to question the wisdom of zero tolerance. Last year, a fifth-grade girl was ordered to be expelled. Her crime? She showed up for class with a birthday cake and knife to cut it.

Reportedly, that expulsion was overturned and the case led the Delaware legislature to allow districts to have more leeway in dealing with such matters.

Now, I am willing to accept the argument that — in this day and age — school officials needed to act when Zachary was seen with his camping knife. So why not simply take it from him, and send a note home for his parents, telling them they could pick the knife up but to make sure it never returned?

That option would involve far less bureaucracy than treating the kid like a criminal.

Zachary’s story isn’t all that unusual. He’s fortunate that his encounter with authority ended relatively well, but that’s not always the case. Kids who make mistakes or who somehow fail to fall in line wind up paying high prices because of zero tolerance policies. And who knows how often they are scarred or classified as “problems” by a system that’s quick to categorize?