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Students Banned from Blogging
wayward writes "Students at Pope John XIII, a Catholic high school, were told to take down their blogs from sites like Xanga and MySpace or face suspension. Rev. Kieran McHugh, the school's principal, said that he was trying to protect students from online predators. Not too surprisingly, free speech advocates got more than a little concerned.
Blog anonymously? That should solve the problem.
Which is a good reason not to go to a private school and actually work to improve your public school system. Of course, exactly the opposite is happening as people have lost all concept of community.
How we know is more important than what we know.
A School acting in loco parentis doesn't trump the actual parents. When the kid's not at school, he's the parent's responsibility, not the school's.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Joking aside, I think it is a bit unfair to suggest that a Catholic institution has no stake in protecting its students from online predators. This is like suggesting that a community (like say, a state such as MA) has no stake in protecting its citizens from murderers because the state has a certain percentage of murderers in it. Yes, there are predatory priests, but that does not define the Catholic church, nor its members.
Furthermore, Free Speech as provided by the First Ammendment, like so much of the Constitution, is completely misunderstood by a large portion of Americans, and a great deal of the rest of the world. There are pleanty of examples, not the least of which is the Dixie Chicks crying foul (and using the term censorship) when other free citizens decided to boycott their product. Free speech is for everyone, good and bad, and I'd argue that it is more important to protect the bad, since it needs the most protection. Having said that, and digressed, in this case the body silencing the speech is a private organization silencing its membership. That membership is neither a right, nor involuntary. They may do as they please legally, and the membership that doesn't like it can certainly leave.
Be careful what you wish for. If the fed gets control of what private organizations can do in every regard, its only a short put to your front door...your living room...your bedroom.
But hey...at least the term SPLOG wasn't used...
Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate
Wrong. That's NOT what the article says. The principal has prohibited the kids from having blogs at all, regardless of what they discuss on them. He is not just telling them not to reveal information about their school schedules that might conceivably put them in harm's way.
In any case, blogging is not what gets kids in trouble on the net. All of the cases that I've heard of of serious problems involve kids, mostly girls, getting involved with predators in chat rooms. If he were really concerned about the kids, that's what he would warn them about. This guy is either more ignorant about the net than a school principal in this day and age should be, or concern for the kids is just a pretext and he's really trying to prevent the kids from posting anything critical of the school.
Stopping blogs or chatting or other online behaviour won't stop that. It will only teach them that they need to hide what is going on in their life from you - destroying trust may very well prove to do far more damage to their safety than not by stopping them from telling you about worrying things before it develops further.
... protects citizens from GOVERNMENT-IMPOSED restraints on speech. Private institutions such as Catholic schools and private employers are immune.
Seriously. Look it up and then stop complaining about how CowboyNeal* is infringing on your rights.
* not a federal institution