Posted by adam.dada on May 18th, 2006
I’m talking with some parents and friends in a local school district where the school system is overstepping their bounds and trying to replace parents even more — by banning free speech outside of the campus. A public school system, in my opinion, is held to the same Constititional restrictions that all government should be held to — free speech is free speech. Here is yet another reason why I don’t like any public financed education. I believe a private school has every right to set the rules of order within the school (clothing, speech, actions, etc) but they, too, have no right to control a person outside of their property. Public schools have no private property, so they have no right to control what is said within a publicly-funded campus.
This school district is one district south of mine, within the cities of Libertyville and Vernon Hills. These are wealthy school districts, but they believe that they can restrict what students say or do offline. The Chicago Tribune has an article that offers just a vague understanding of what this rule would entail:
The proposed change states that “maintaining or being identified on a blog site which depicts illegal or inappropriate behavior will be considered a violation of this code.”
What is considered inappropriate? What is considered illegal and by what law does the school have the right to police and judge a person? If a student talks about smoking pot, who has the responsibility to castigate and punish that person? The school? The law? Or the parents?
I’m sick of public schools, and even more sick of public school teachers. They’re not parents. They’re educators — meant to just teach the basics. A public educator has no right to produce their opinion on the life of a student, nor should they. They’re not to have political opinions or religious ones, they’re not to have goals on how they’ll mold the students’ beliefs. They’re just there to teach the basics.
This is why I am no fan of public education, but many parents are stuck because of the high taxes they must pay just to live near a school. The kids today are inbeciles in general, obvious if you try to read an e-mail from the average “intelligent” teen. Try reading their MySpace accounts and you can see why the public school doesn’t want a student posting anything on a blog — it is obvious that the public school system has failed.
I say shut them down. Lock the doors, disconnect the power, sell the land to be used as a landfill and return the money to the residents so they can decide to be responsible or not. I’m sick of paying for the garbage that comes out of the local school district, and now I have to worry about my future rights as a parent in setting the moral standards that I want to set for my kids.
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