This whole entire comment thread is everything I love about this community and all of you are awesome, even and perhaps especially in the places that people's opinions diverge. This community makes the internet a better place.

Okay. Substantive responses to this particular letter:

Young people trying to come of age in the past five years deserve perhaps just a little bit more compassion than usual for confusing "Grand Guignol satirical horror fiction" with "serious and meaningful critique of plan/policy decisions" because there's a whole set of their elders who are getting away with doing that in real time and some of those have been or still are in high public office.

I agree with everyone who's said that Evan's parents are doing a really good job of teaching him to have no respect for the adults in his life.

I like conuly's point that a failing grade is the appropriate punishment--- and I'm going to roll that up with several different threads here discussing "casually writing about animal torture to advance a minimally related point is a poor rhetorical choice in general" and/or "the appropriate response here involves how to better frame your argument, not to never ever disagree with authorities because it's an authority and therefore deserves your a priori deference" with fox's really, really on point pithy comment about referencing Jonathan Swift.

Namely, somebody in this process could have given this kid a whole curriculum about satire--- "here, go read Swift's 'A Modest Proposal' and for that matter here's a whole reading list worth of people who've used zany screwball arguments to make their point and did it effectively". And/or a whole curriculum on how to effectively critique a policy. I mean, I had my mother and some teachers in high school and college do this to my equally literally sophomoric arguments and I am a better thinker and a better person for it.

Also, tielan is almost certainly right about the gendered stuff in this between the parents, and personally I think a better solution is to support more female-configured people in pushing back against injustice and poor planning by those in authority, rather than trying to make a male-configured kid be complicit with those things--- not least because... male-configured kid; therefore more likely to have opportunities to find himself in positions of authority and do you really want to teach him that he gets to be unjust and bad at planning and other people have to put up with it as long as he's "in authority" over them? Really? Is this what you want your son to become? Think about that.