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Why Are Students Liable for School Insecurity?
yamamushi asks: "Within the past few weeks, students across Boerne ISD were being called into offices to discuss the use of proxies to circumvent the schools websense system. The problem is that some of these students are being suspended from school for up to 3 months at a time. Shouldn't the school district be liable for their own insecurity? Why are they punishing so many students for something that should be handled from the district's end? I know at the time I was going to school there, I was punished for using a Linux LiveCD to login to their computers without using a password, even after I told the admins how to disable booting from CD-ROMs. They refused to update any of the computers and as such I was using the same tactic till the day I graduated." While security breaches by students are something to take seriously, should school administrations continue with their knee-jerk mentality to something like this, especially at the times when its obvious that no malicious intent was involved?
Part of the function of education is to teach children how to behave and what their boundaries are.
Exactly right. Children must be exposed to arbitrary and capricious authority so that they will be good obedient drones when the enter the workplace.
No, not really. Schools should be something more than conformity factories.
If they're told that these are rules, but you don't *really* have to obey them, what other rules will they choose to ignore?
If they're brought up right, they'll obey the rules that make sense (i.e. no guns) and disobey the rules that don't make sense (i.e. no drugs). If you teach people to think for themselves they'll figure out right and wrong based on their own sense of justice and compassion and equality.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
This isn't about the school district doing anything inappropriate. It's about kids doing something that they knew was inappropriate and being punished appropriately.
... regularly ... in full view of the public ... without being punished. What's the take-home lesson here?
The Boston Tea Party was inappropriate, according to rulers of England at the time. Maybe they shouldn't teach children about that in schools.
If they're told that these are rules, but you don't *really* have to obey them, what other rules will they choose to ignore? Will they ignore the rules about bringing weapons to school? Will they ignore the rules about bringing drugs to school? Will they chose to ignore the rules about cheating on tests?
That's what happens when there are too many rules --- rules made by one class of people for another class to obey. Furthermore, the students need only watch the news to see that many, many, many people in a position of authority break the rules
Civil disobedience. Fuck the law and rules. If they are wrong it is your *duty* to ignore them. Fuck boundaries and so on. Do you know why these kids were trying to by pass the proxies? No. But I can guess, perhaps there was some sites that they (the kids) knew were fine, but were blocked because some fascist controlled the blocking software ... Or maybe it was a Chinese Communist Party official. You would be the sort of person saying, "oh those dissidents, if only they had have not tried to access those websites they would be fine. But they broke the LAW!".
I wank in the shower.
Or to put it another way:
It's okay for me to beat you up because you're not strong enough to defend yourself. If you didn't want to get beat up, you should spend more time learning how to defend yourself from my physical attack.
Maybe it's just me, but that sounds to me like I'm being a bully to you, which is exactly what you're doing to the school. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. In a similar way, if a store leaves their front door unlocked and you steal something, you're still guilty of stealing, even though you're not guilty of breaking & entering.
Rules & Laws are there to stop you from doing things that you may be capable of, but the powers that be have decided you shouldn't be doing.
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.