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Suspension of Disbelief
Well, you knew this post was coming when you read the news. A federal judge has ruled that Katie Evans, who had been suspended from high school for creating a Facebook group calling one of her teachers "the worst teacher I've ever met," can proceed with her suit seeking attorney's fees from her principal for violating her First Amendment rights. Evans, now a journalism student at the University of Florida, is represented in her suit by the ACLU of Florida.
If any of the recent student online free-speech cases should have been adjudicated in the student's favor, this would most clearly be the one. As Judge Barry Garber wrote in his ruling, Evans's page did not contain threats of violence (if it had, it would have been a matter for the police, not for a school punishment), and the principal didn't even find out about the page until two months after she took it down. It's hard to believe that the principal's lawyers, if he consulted with them, would have gone along with a recommendation to suspend the student. And once the Florida ACLU contacted the principal, wouldn't he have realized that the longer he fought the case, the more legal bills the ACLU would amass, along with the possibility that the principal could be ordered to pay them? Even if he had estimated that there would only be a 5% chance that he could end up being ordered to pay legal fees, was it worth the risk, if the fees could come to thousands or tens of thousands of dollars? Well, now he knows.
When a different judge ruled that a student had no right to challenge his suspension for making a vulgar Myspace page about his principal, I said that there was no more objective basis for saying that the ruling was legally "right" than it was "wrong," because if you put 10 judges in separate rooms and ask them how they would rule on the case, you could get 10 different, mutually contradictory answers. Well, fair is fair — even though I support Judge Garber's ruling 100%, I have to concede that it did not necessarily follow inevitably from the facts and the law, and there's no objective basis for calling it "the" right ruling. Judges are not like doctors who look at a mammogram, and draw on experience that the general public does not have, in order to see something that would be hidden from the rest of us. In cases like these, judges simply have multiple plausible interpretations in front of them, and they pick one. As such they're acting more like referees (who make a decision so that the game — or, in this case, society — can move on) than true "experts."
There is a temptation to think that there is some consistent reasoning behind the different courts' rulings — say, that the student who created a vulgar page mocking his principal (the student was identified in papers only as "J.S.") went too far and crossed a line, while Katie Evans's page complaining about her teacher was clean enough to stay on the safe side of the line, and make her eligible for damages in a First Amendment suit. This, I think, is nonsense, an attempt to put a consistent theory on top of a legal system that does not follow consistent rules from one court ruling to the next. If different judges had been randomly assigned to J.S.'s case and Evans's case, then it might have been J.S. who won and Evans who lost. After all, it was a federal judge who once ruled that a Utah high school had the right to suspend a student for wearing sweatshirts emblazoned with "Vegan" and "Vegans Have First Amendment Rights." (The judge and the principal had apparently confused veganism with eco-terrorism.) How do you reconcile that with any of the recent rulings? (No prizes for guessing how that judge would have ruled if the shirts had said "Christian.")
But even if it's still a roll of the dice how a court would rule in a particular student free-speech case, what matters from the point of view of a principal in a future case, are the potential payoffs. What if you're thinking about suspending a student for a non-threatening, non-libelous Facebook page? If the case ends up in court and you win, then you get the satisfaction of being "vindicated." But if you lose, you could be ordered to pay tens of thousands of dollars to the student's attorneys. So even a small number of victories for students in free-speech cases, even if mixed in with an equal or greater number of victories for the schools, still create an enormous incentive for a principal not to risk the case at all, when the potential gain is so small and the potential loss so huge. Even if you think there's only a 5% chance of being ordered to pay the student's $10,000 legal bill, that means you'd still have to decide if it's worth (on average) about $500 to get the satisfaction of suspending them.
(On the other hand, if a student created a page that was so threatening or libelous towards a staff member, that the school would run the risk of being sued if the principal didn't suspend the student, then the school and the principal are taking some legal risk either way, but the risk involved in suspending the student is much smaller. Fine — there's nothing wrong with suspending a student for threats of violence.)
So the ruling is a much more significant victory for student speech than many of the parties involved probably realize. Even though Judge Garber didn't actually award Evans her attorney's fees (yet?) — he only said that she could proceed to seek them against the principal — just the fact that it's coming dangerously close to that, means that principals in future cases now know what the risks are.
But why was all this necessary? How did the legal and societal climate of attitudes toward people under 18, lead to a principal thinking that he could punish a 17-year-old for comments that she made about a teacher, on her own time, to a third-party audience? If the students in the school had been comprised, not of minors, but of adults from some other minority group — African Americans, immigrant women, native Spanish speakers — there's no question that the principal never would have thought he could get away with suspending the student for criticizing a teacher.
Similarly, students at Harriton High School in Rosemont, Pennsylvania just discovered that school officials had given laptops to students to take home with remotely-activated webcams, that could be used to take photos in student's homes and transmit them back to school officials. Incredibly, this was discovered not by students or their parents examining the laptops, but because school officials used the feature to take a photo of a student in his bedroom, and then confronted him about "inappropriate" behavior, not considering that the students and their parents might consider it "inappropriate" that the school snuck spy cams into their bedrooms. (The school has issued a denial claiming, "At no time did any high school administrator have the ability or actually access the security-tracking software" — which doesn't seem to make sense, since the lawsuit was filed in the first place because the student was told by the assistant principal that the webcam had caught him engaging in "inappropriate behavior.") What was the school thinking? Probably, they were thinking, "These are minors, we can do what we want." If their student clientele had been comprised of adults, they never would have dreamed that they could confront a student about behavior in their room that they captured with a hidden camera. (Ironically, the school may end up in more trouble for spying on minors, as this editorial argues, since the school officials may now be guilty of recording and possessing child porn, depending on what the cameras "captured" in the students' rooms!)
So no matter how much ink is spilled analyzing the legal technicalities of suspending a 17-year-old student for off-campus speech, that's not what the case is really about. The case is really about attitudes. Change society's attitudes to think of 17-year-olds the way we currently think of 25-year-olds, and no judge is going to deny them their right to criticize their school on their own time, any more than a judge in today's society would deny that right to a 25-year-old.
And where does this attitude towards minors come from? I suspect that most people who believe that we have to draw the line somewhere around age 18, believe it for no better reason than because they were raised in a society where most other people believe it too. If you think that setting the cutoff age at 18 is just "common sense," then I would bet my house that if you had been raised in a society where the cutoff age was set at 13, that would seem like "just common sense" to you as well, and similarly if you had been raised in a society where the cutoff had been set at 22. This may seem like an unremarkable observation, but my belief in minors' rights has always been motivated by a more fundamental belief that you should not believe things merely because most people in your society believe them. If that sounds like a trite platitude, consider how few people in the US seem to question the rule that you can show a man's chest on television but not a woman's chest. In more liberal Denmark, supermarkets can stock tabloids at toddler-eye-level with photos of topless women on the cover, while in Saudi Arabia, adult women can't leave the house without covering their faces, and in all three societies, the majority thinks these regulations are just plain "common sense." Is the age of majority just another arbitrary illusion caused by the power of consensus?
When I said this on The David Lawrence Show, the host made the thoughtful observation that most countries all over the world set the age of majority for most purposes at 18. Close, I said, but it doesn't quite prove what it seems to prove, because those globally diverse societies did not reach that conclusion independently — they move in similar directions because of cross-cultural influences. (The voting age was set at 21 in many democracies before many of them lowered it to 18 in the 1970's within a few years of each other.) To get a better sense of whether there is any merit to the idea, we'd have to do something like the "putting the 10 judges in 10 separate rooms" test — put 10 different societies in mutual isolation from each other, let them develop and debate things on their own, and see if all or most of them reach the conclusion that 18 us a good cutoff age for adulthood.
The idea that actual children — under the age of, say, 11 — are qualitatively different from adults, has in fact been re-discovered by civilizations that developed independently at different points in history, all over the world. So there's probably something to it. The idea that teenagers are qualitatively different from adults, is something particular to recent history, and a wise person transported forward in time from the 1500's to the present day might scratch their heads and wonder why we think that 18-year-olds should be allowed to criticize their teachers but 17-year-olds cannot. I suspect the artificial extension of childhood grew out of the fact that because modern jobs are more complicated than they used to be, we need more years of schooling before we can go out and compete in the workforce. The fallacy there, though, is that just because we need more years of schooling, doesn't mean that the natural age of "human maturity" has gone up. So we end up with 17-year-olds having to go to court to establish their right to criticize their teachers on their own time.
Judge Garber wouldn't have been in a position to make this argument in his ruling even if he agreed with it. But even if his ruling was based on logic that has nothing to do with the underlying case for minors' rights, it was still a step in the right direction.
I've always been against ageism, and have been active in youth rights, first as a minor, but later as an "adult".
The scary thing is, I just don't think age has much to do with maturity.. I've met plenty of minors who seem to have a really decent grasp on maturity, while I've met plenty of 18+ who will never grow up.
Curfews and other discriminatory things are inherently ageist, and should be examined. Let's let parents do some parenting, shall we?
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
Can someone tag this 'article in the summary'?
More contributors like this please.
If it happened outside of school and it was illegal, call the police.
If it happened outside of school and it was legal, mind your own business.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
How many different directions and issues do you need to drag up in one Slashdot posting????
Maybe you make some good points, but your rambling makes me put you in the "tinfoil hat" category. Don't drag down one good argument by associating it with 7 less important ones.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Seems like the current Scalia conservative court set the tone for this whole matter http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/opinion/20tue1.html
So why should they be allowed to say whatever they want?
We rage against our parents, get older and then oppress our kids. Happens without fail.
What's disturbing now is that the current generation looks like kittens compared to the last three or four that came before. Truth is, they're being oppressed by adults who came from a generation of serious trouble makers.
I suspect that's where a lot of the worst of it comes from. We just assume the problem is with young people, and never stop to consider whether the problem was if our generation was maybe a little too fucked up.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
Not a lawyer but found resources (site is cosmetically terrible but information rich) on some case histories in this sort of thing.
... was the teacher really that insecure of themselves that they thought the Facebook group hurt them?
Probably the closest case to that is Morse v. Frederick in which students stood just off school property with a banner reading "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS." Basically what it seems to come down to is that you have some first amendment rights as a minor in school unless your message contradicts stated school goals or hinders the learning process.
So the banner contradicted their anti-drug agenda and therefore it was ruled as okay to suspend them for the act. Similarly I guess a judge could interpret undermining a teacher's status as an authority figure to be an inhibition of the learning process in the facebook page. I don't agree with that ruling but this didn't seem to be addressed in the lengthy opinion piece presented above.
A classic case of a message not hindering the learning process was Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District in which black armbands were worn to protest the Vietnam war.
In high school some kids circulated a 'zine that was laden with four letter words and was distributed via a student's access to his mom's work's photocopying machine during after hours. We were aware that some of them had been confiscated and you got detention for profanity but since we never really attacked teachers, it never resulted in suspension or worse. During the 'vest craze' of the late nineties, I fashioned a vest out of duct tape and made "Old Navy Sucks, GAP Blows" out of duct tape letters on it. And I was allowed to wear it throughout the whole school day claiming it was a political message if anyone gave me grief. I actually recall being pretty disappointed at the lack of attention I was given for it. The school had some rule about profanity so if you wore a shirt with profanity you had to turn it inside out. I guess 'sucks/blows' wasn't foul enough.
Long story short: as a minor you have some free speech rights in school but not all of them. Any that violate the reason you're in school are restricted. Any that undermine the stated goals of your institution are restricted. I think it's sad that this gets escalated so much
Whatever was going on in Utah needs to be looked at though. That story was downright disturbing. "Curbing the straight edge movement" was one of their school's stated goals?! Vegan statements were construed as 'straight edge'?! I must have missed something about the dangers of the straight edge movement and veganism because that smells like complete administrative bullshit from where I'm standing.
My work here is dung.
What is the source of society's attitudes toward the free-speech rights of 17-year-olds?
When one human being is in a position of authority over another in one domain, they will tend to leverage that into coercion in any and all domains in which they are related.
How dare they trick us into reading TFA! It should be my constitutional right to have a genuine Slashdot summary complete with mis-quotes and misinformation not this bloated full page article masquerading as the former. I don't have time to read TFA, I'm supposed to be working...
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
There is a temptation to think that there is some consistent reasoning behind the different courts' rulings -- say, that the student who created a vulgar page mocking his principal (the student was identified in papers only as "J.S.") went too far and crossed a line, while Katie Evans's page complaining about her teacher was clean enough to stay on the safe side of the line, and make her eligible for damages in a First Amendment suit. This, I think, is nonsense, an attempt to put a consistent theory on top of a legal system that does not follow consistent rules from one court ruling to the next.
If you read the opinion, you can easily see it's distinguishable from the J.S. case. I do not know why a non-lawyer has become slashdot's quasi-official legal analyst.
The issue is whether the school has jurisdiction over activities that a student performs outside school. Legally, the school does not have any such jurisdiction.
For example, consider a Christian fellowship meeting. The governing council of a school district can ban the conduct of such a meeting on the premises of the school, but students wishing to attend a Christian fellowship meeting off campus are free to do so. Once you walk off the premises of the school, you are free to do whatever you want.
Consider another example. Smoking cigarettes on campus will result in a suspension. Yet, smoking cigarettes at about 1 foot outside the perimeter of a campus will result in nothing.
...how could the school have thought they had the right to punish her for that in the first place?
Probably the same reasoning they used when thinking it was ok to spy on students and their families with school-issued laptops...a severe God complex.
It's even more ridiculous than that. In 1999, Lil' Kim went to the MYV video music awards with one breast hanging out. She covered her nipple with a pasty and all was well. So breasts are allowed, but showing a woman's nipple turns it from a normal (ok, maybe slightly more-than-normal) show of skin into "OMG!!! THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!"
In addition, we've gotten to the point that we (as a society) can't seem to see a woman's breast as anything other than a sexual object. If a woman breastfeeds her child in public, she risks being told to cover up her breasts because someone doesn't get that her breast isn't being used in a sexual manner but is being used to feed her child. She might even be told to take it to the bathroom. As if anyone really would like to eat their meal sitting atop a toilet! But breasts are involved so therefore someone, somewhere might see this as sexual and therefore we must push them out of sight entirely.
I often imagine a world where women are free to go topless whenever they want. Yes, a lot of guys likely just started drooling, but really think about it for a second. After a few weeks of that, seeing a topless woman would be just a normal part of life. It would be like seeing a woman's leg: Yes, a guy might be attracted to that piece of her anatomy, but it wouldn't cause him to go into a frenzy. Of course, the THINK OF THE CHILDREN crowd would eventually move on to another body part, calling kids seeing that as inherently harmful and thus required to be hidden from view at all possible times.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
The problem is not one of free speech rights, but of a culture that promotes subservience to authority. There are those who want to blame public schools, as if it were some government conspiracy of indoctrination, but those very people would drill the same values into their children at home or at private schools. The schools reflect the culture of its community, and that community values football, Jesus, and doing what you're told.
We must establish a war mentality, draw sharp lines between the "real Americans" and those who value rational inquiry and the open society. It is too far gone for reconciliation to be possible, they will never come to see the error of their ways. I mean, they actually bugged the laptops of children to spy on them in their homes! The who kids accepted that... what kind of adults do you think they're going to become?
These laws, rules, and regulations are in place because they're governing a population, not individuals. When dealing with populations you have to work by statistics. Statistics show that people in certain age groups have attained certain capacities to function in our society. They are given rights and freedoms to meet the stereotypical capacities of people of that particular age, with rules and punishments for individuals who break the rules for persons of their age.
Why did we choose this age? Historically this is the age when persons seemed to achieve the ability comprehend their society, culture, and rules well enough to function as a member of the group. Why did a different culture choose a different age? Same reason. Why did one culture change to match another? Because of the same reason they were aware of the other culture - we are now becoming a single world culture. With communication happening instantly around the world (and into space!) and transportation to anywhere in the world taking less than a day the world is shrinking. Common rules between governing bodies have been developing, likely, for centuries.
But I feel I haven't directly answered your question.
What is the source of society's attitudes toward the free-speech rights of 17-year-olds?
Because we think that generally speaking people who have not reached the age of 18 are a bunch of emotionally charged twits who are more likely to spew angst filled hate than provide anything constructive. They're scientifically proven to be less in control of their own actions and easily swayed by their peers and civilization. Puberty is still wreaking havoc on their psychology and the people defining the rules are aware of the unstable nature of this group because they experienced it first hand.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
There are too many people that don't want anyone to have our God-given/Constitutionally-recognized (however you choose to see them) rights, period. They view rights like free speech as dangerous because such a right allows others to criticize them and possibly undermine their authority or whatever else it is they're afraid of. Since it's easier to condition young people to not claim those rights than it is to strip those rights from older people , who are already accustomed to exercising them, that's the route that has been taken.
That's why schools now have essentially the same authority over students that the parents do. In many ways, it's nothing more than an end-around that bypasses the First Amendment--and many others. Schools were transformed from a pure agent of the state into quasi-parental figures without losing their state-given powers of coercion.
Since there's no magical age at which people begin to think responsibly, schools have decided that allowing no differing thoughts of any kind is the way to go. And they can, because they have that power. Eventually, all of society will be like our schools; no one will know how life could be different because no one was ever allowed to taste the thrills, or responsibilities, of freedom.
"osake no hou ga, biiru yori ii" to omotteiru.
If I called my boss "the worst boss I've ever met" in a public forum, then I'd likely be fired, and no one would raise an eyebrow. The forum to make these kinds of complaints is not a public facebook page, but the principal's office, and failing that, the school board. If that fails, then it's time to go public - and at that point, facebook still isn't the right medium - you need to go to the press. That is, of course, assuming she has a real complaint, other than a vague "she's a terrible teacher".
Pretty simple, really. In an authoritarian environment, if you undermine authority, authority will come down on you.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
People, organisations, religions, philosophies, all of these should be used to the idea that they can be insulted by others without being able to stop them.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Legal age affects several rights, like the right to vote, to drink, or to drive (though at a different age, it's the same principle).
But this has nothing to do with First Amendment rights. These belong to everyone. Even toddlers. Before you know how to speak, your speech is protected. Anything else is plain and simple bullshit.
I don't fancy anyone would deny a 17-year-old the right to speak at a rally, for example. How is this any different? Except, of course, for the fact that a school principal has no legal authority whatsoever over a student beyond what the contract with him or his parents (in the case of a minor) allows, and never in a situation where the student isn't under immediate care of the school. This whole thing is ridiculous.
Nothing lasts forever but the certainty of change.
Obviously the principle went to public school... there we learn that it is our right to rail against anything and everything (rhetorically) before we learn to study the nature of the system in which we operate. Venting is a national past time, and the opportunity to do so has been greatly expanded by the web. (Thank you Slashdot!)
Apparently this principle runs a model school because he has enough time to find and suspend a student for criticizing one of his teachers. No need to look into the merits of the argument, the politeness of the presentation or the ramifications of his own decision. I think any student who implicitly acknowledges the limits of their experience by qualifying the scope criticism (e.g. "the worst teacher I've ever met") deserves accolades for being both polite and self aware. This principle could take lessons from the student.
How would I fix this situation. Send the for training as a mediator, demote the principle and investigate the allegations of incompetence on the part of the teacher.
Maybe I'm missing something... but public schools can't have public prayer (in most cases--there are exceptions) because that would be government "establishment" of religion. Yet they're allowed to do other things that government is forbidden to do on grounds that they're in loco parentis--like radically restricting student's freedom of speech, against their real parents wishes. I understand that the processes and procedures that one would follow with adults are not necessarily appropriate to schools (I have four children, okay?) but it seems like the application of the bill of rights and the fourteenth amendment is rather selective--as if we as a society are trying to have it both ways.
One of the things I observed a number of years back, while taking a course (for my B.A. in Philosophy/Religious Studies concentration) called Religious Freedom and the Law was that most of the modern conflict over the Bill of Rights comes up as we see government involved in things that simply were not part of Government's mandate when the Bill of Rights was written. In 1789, there was no public education to speak of. Unfortunately, government run education has become a place in which children are "socialized" with little regard for the wishes of their parents, especially when those parents are an ethnic or religious minority. Simply put, "civic virtue" is only "virtue" for the "civic"--for the insiders and the establishment. Public schooling is, by its very nature, an assault on freedom.
This to me is one of the best arguments for vouchers--not that children will necessarily get a better education, but people of modest income will be able to get an education that reflects their values and beliefs rather than the beliefs and values of the establishment. If you say, "but I don't like the choices some people will make, so let's keep the current system!" you're kind of proving my point.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
You aren't free to do something if you are punished for doing that thing. You wouldn't maintain that she was free to post the web page if she was jailed for a day, or harassed by the police for doing so. This is an issue of free speech AND limitations on the authority of schools, who should, incidentally, get back to teaching children, not trying to raise them.
That's how it should be, but I bet one could amass a large group of people who have been disciplined for smoking near school grounds.
As a teacher, it is best to suspend these kids. From the outside it appears harmless. But inside the building, these things boil over because the people involvedd are actually together. Facebook and blogs are done at a distance; but confronting the content of those writings takes place at school in the form of knives, yelling and disruption, fighting, and in our inner city also gang payback, destroyed property and rape.
As teachers, we have enough crazy people and nutty kids go bonkers and violent during the day, without having to pile on more tension from trash written at home. The judge is clueless and so is anyone that disagrees.
This is what happens when you have socialized education, rather than a competitive market where parents are customers, rather than consumers of a limited good (consumer and customer are not the same social standing). If education were run more like a business, the schools would actually be afraid of overreaching against parental authority because the parents would be the ones writing the checks that keep the school afloat.
Of course, since parental authority is meaningless to the public schools aside from when it means parental responsibility (more specifically, culpability), they feel perfectly free to take the legal equivalent of a sledgehammer to their children and teens.
Since the parent government of the schools thinks they can suppress dissension by labeling people "terrorists", the schools think they can do the same by extension.
Ok, now carry on.
What about a current student sitting one foot outside the school perimeter holding a sign that reads "The principal is an asshole!"?
IMHO, anything that disturbs the teaching going on in the classroom should be squashed. Kids need to focus on the big picture and why they are there in the first place.
Judges are not like doctors who look at a mammogram,
At first glance, they all think the same thing: "Tits! Awesome!"
Why in the hell would you show a judge a mammogram anyway?
The tag of "rant" is correct. "Rambling" would have been correct, too.
I do note that a lot of the "evidence" put forth here is actually simply assertions:
... because if you put 10 judges in separate rooms and ask them how they would rule on the case, you could get 10 different, mutually contradictory answers.
That's an amusing argument; suggesting that your argument is correct because, if something that didn't happen would have happened, it would have proved it.
Repeated many times, e.g.,
... If different judges had been randomly assigned to J.S.'s case and Evans's case, then it might have been J.S. who won and Evans who lost.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
OK. let's outlaw the NEA. That teachers union has done far more to hinder and disturb actual learning than any amount of speech by actual students. All in the interest of their own greed.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
The idea of a teenager didn't even exist until the 20th century. Before that, you were either a child or an adult. There wasn't this artificial in-between state. I have no idea why the concept seemed to pop out of nowhere, but I would love to know.
In any case, the concept of the teenager has been very damaging to our society. Since we have allowed adults to act like children...no, worse, expected and told them to act like children, many adults decide to continue acting like children even as they get older. People in their 20s and even 30s continue to seek out childish pleasures, simple thrills with no meaningful purpose requiring no significant degree of work or even, *gasp*, responsibility. And why shouldn't they act like this? They became adults, but learned they could still act like children. If they could act that way at 15, 16, 17, why can't they continue it to 25, 26, 27? So they do.
So even worse than denying young adults a role in society, we're teaching them that it's OK to continue to have no role in society even as they grow older. Denying adults under 18 their proper rights and appropriate respect harms us all.
Not that I, in any way, think it's right we've ended up in this situation, nor that the conclusion is right. For the sake of providing an alternative perspective, however...
"And where does this attitude towards minors come from?"
Under the legal age of consent, minors are considered a group that require additional guidance: greater praise to encourage positive actions, protecting from greater long term consequences of negative actions, more immediate short term consequences for those actions.
Under that system, it's generally considered a parent's responsibility to discipline.
Unfortunately, the common belief is that a hell of a lot of parents don't bother. They've got other things to do, are absent, would rather be the kids' friends, had kids whilst kids themselves and never learned the lessons they need to teach, a whole slew of reasons.
The common belief holds that they tend to dump pretty much the entire responsibility for parenting on a school system that has to deal with the consequences of that lack of parenting every day.
Given they've had both the responsibility and consequences dumped on them, for the entirety of raising a child, time and again... and they know the parents often won't back them when it becomes the parents' responsibility in situations that overlap... how surprising is it that issues keep coming up where they overreach what would ever be acceptable in a world where every parent acted like a parent?
I'm not saying it's right. As is always joked, there are tougher requirements on having a beer or driving a car than there are on becoming a parent. It's not acceptable that many parents do a terrible job of raising their kids. It's not acceptable that responsibility and consequences are dumped on the school system. It's not acceptable that some parents acting so poorly leads to some teachers generalizing for all parents and overreaching in all cases. It's not acceptable that we value education as poorly as we do, have class sizes as large as we do, and create a situation where teachers don't have time to genuinely assess each case.
It's wrong in every way. But the only way you stand any chance of fixing something is to understand the whole broken system and everything that needs fixing... rather than just finger pointing at one symptom at the end of the chain and declaring that it is wrong. Sadly, as a society, we much prefer that fingerpointing and scapegoating to actually facing tough truths. So, I imagine these teachers will get sued, we'll all feel very righteous, then wonder why it's continued to get worse next year.
Maybe next, some teenager can sue movie theaters for charging 13 year olds "Adult" prices when they're not legally adults until they're 18. That always bugged the heck out of me.
The bigger problem is that kids are considered "property", or "wards" of their parents, and have no rights, themselves, until they reach the age of majority. However, that's wrong. Children under the age of 18 are still considered citizens and the courts have rules that they do, in fact, have rights unto their own, including the right not to be searched without a warrant, and the right to free speech.
This particular case is just an example of a power-tripping ego-centric principal who thinks he can get away with it because he's The Man. That the courts have slapped him down is just as it should be. That it happened in the first place is just testament to the fact that the district hired the wrong person in the first place. Will they learn their lesson? One would hope. Will other district's learn from this district's lesson? Probably not.
Truth, Justice. Or the American Way.
Beware, you could get suspended in your school for posting as AC in slashdot, thats just the next step... and ok, if well most AC comments on slashdot somewhat deserve suspension or jail, this one in particular don't.
Those interested in a cross cultural exploration of "protecting" children (admittedly the flip side of this issue) should check out the book Not In Front of the Children: "Indecency," Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth by Marjorie Heins
If this were a private school, you'd be right. The student is free to go elsewhere. However, this is a public school, paid for with tax dollars, and numerous court rulings have found that such are at least in some respects agents of state. This is why school prayer, for example, is not allowed. Accordingly, this is a punitive government action taken against a citizen, without due process, for expressing an unfavorable view of a government functionary in a public forum. You could even mount a reasonable argument that publishing on Facebook is equivalent, in context, to "the press."
Blink.
How is the principal's action any better than Richard Nixon's enemy's list?
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
I'm tired of school administrations being so petty that they think a student disliking them is a reason to suspend or otherwise "punish" students. It's one thing to punish someone for interrupting class by insulting a teacher outright, but entirely different and downright immature to say that they are not entitled to express themselves at home. Between this and the recent spying laptops scandal, whatever happened to being "for the children", rather than "anything so the f#!kers sit still in class"? If they're so worried about not being liked, why punish them arbitrarily?
I certainly hope they get lawyer fees repaid, because this behavior is outright unacceptable. Having the power to unilaterally grant or deny education to these kids based on whether or not they "like" you, is power that is apparently being abused. The "Vegan" sweater case is a nice example, but I'd imagine most of you TL;DR'd the hybrid TFA/summary, so here's the link: http://libertarianrock.com/1999/09/vegan-student-may-seek-new-judge/
I fear a world where education is taken or given away on the whims of a single official.
Once had my "computer privileges" revoked at my high school because the sysadmin/network admin (who didn't deserve to be given that title) found a blog post of mine denoting his flaws.
Needless to say, I bypassed the need to login to Novell and still did my schoolwork.
By the way, Bill Gade of 83 North (877-734-6044) in Swan River, MB, you're gay.
The principal's legal bills will be paid by the taxpayers. He is insulated from the consequences of his actions.
That SOB hit the girl (whose care he was entrusted with) where it hurts--he kicked her out of her AP classes.
If ever anybody deserved microscopic public scrutiny of his personal life . . .
The same thing happened to my friend recently and he was suspended for a week. No one ever thought about challenging it and my friend just took it as a free holiday.
At the time I considered that it was outside of the schools jurisdiction and they should have informed the police instead but obviously for the student a week off school is far better than police involvement.
If they had asked politely I'm sure he would have taken the page down but instead they choose to blow it out of proportion and suspend him for a week which can only make him more hostile towards them.
I care not for your karma and your mod points.
How do you teach students to think, question and critique (skills required in a representative democracy and an information driven society) when they aren't allowed to do it in the vicinity of their school?
Well, you knew this post was coming when you read the news. A federal judge has ruled that Katie Evans, who had been suspended from high school for creating a Facebook group calling one of her teachers "the worst teacher I've ever met", can proceed with her suit seeking attorney's fees from her principal for violating her First Amendment rights. Evans, now a journalism student at the University of Florida, is represented in her suit by the ACLU of Florida.
No, the suit is apparently for injunctive relief; the attorneys' fees would be secondary. Which is the main reason the court rejected the qualified immunity defense.
Some people here compare discrimination against youth with discrimination against old people or different races.
They are not the same:
- you cannot change your race
- you cannot get younger
However you _inevitably_ grow older.
"A federal judge rules that a student can seek attorney's fees against a high school principal who suspended her for a Facebook page she made at home. Good news, but how could the school have thought they had the right to punish her for that in the first place? Posing the question not rhetorically but seriously. What is the source of society's attitudes toward the free-speech rights of 17-year-olds?"
This is not a case of free speech as people often misunderstand what exactly free speech means.
You can yell "fire" in a movie theater or insult your boss or company on facebook and than act surprised when you get fired or go to jail.
You are free to do those things, however your actions have consequences and getting suspended was the reaction to the students action.
you genuinely have, for genuinely logically coherent reasons, a widely understood lower capacity for responsible behavior
yes, there are some 12 year olds who are more responsible than many 40 year olds, but by and large, when you are under 21, you're an idiot. you're also an idiot from age 21-100, but usually slightly less of one, which makes all the difference
the law is not made to excuse those rare 12 year olds who can behave responsibly. no more than the law is made to excuse drivers who can drive 90 miles per hour all the time and never get in an accident. mainly because self-perception of responsibility is usually inflated: if you asked a random sampling of people if they can drive 90 miles per hour responsibly, 40 out of 100 people will say "yes", when in reality it is only 2 out of 100
likewise, if you are under 18, you're probably an idiot. in spite of your self-perception to the contrary. so just deal with the fact that those horribly oppressive adults oppress you, and show some humility and understand why they "oppress" you (ie, try to tell you why certain behaviors of yours is wrong from their horribly corrupt and enfeedbled minds)
you may be amazed that you can in fact show humility about the possibility of your own lack of wisdom rather whine about the cosmic injustice of it all. and if you can keep from whining in such a way, congratulations: you're a mature adult
if you still feel the need to whine, you're an idiot
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I don't understand how they can't have full free speech rights, yet be held accountable for criminal acts. If a 17 year old student came to school with a gun and killed someone, they would want to try them as an adult. If you're going to be held to adult standards in that situation you should also have adult privileges.
I don't disagree that there are more examples of institutional age discrimination against the young, but I feel I should mention that I've stayed at my share of hostels around the world that didn't allow anyone over 30. I'm sure I'm going to miss having such cheap accommodations available when I start traveling again.
The problem isn't so much with what they thought they could do, as what they wanted to do. Whether the student were 18 or 13, you darn well know that the government's desire to attack its citizen would be pretty much the same, and the decision to proceed with the attack against a 17-year-old, was purely tactical.
Ok, maybe we do have a problem where people magically gain rights on their 18th birthday that they didn't have the day before, but long before an administrator working for the government starts asking "Can we get away with this?" they should already have been fired in disgrace, unable to show their face in that city. But that just doesn't happen at all.
We spend a lot of words talking about "who should have freedom?" or "when should we reluctantly take away someone's freedom?" but those questions are based on the premise that, by default, we generally want freedom. That premise seems obvious to many of us, but it you listen to enough people, I think you'll see that it's not really most peoples' attitude. Society is actually really conflicted about whether or not freedom is a good idea. Otherwise we wouldn't have people in government asking whether a 17-year-old person's freedom matters, we wouldn't have people proposing amendments to "clarify" the definition of marriage, etc.
Instead of worrying about all the different ways it can be violated, I think we (everyone) need to get our heads screwed on tight and decide whether or not government's primary purpose is still to protect freedom. If it's not, then that sucks, but at least if we're honest about that, we can go down the road to fascism without hypocrisy. But if people say, "Hey, wait, yeah. Freedom is what it's all for," then a lot of this bullshit can get pre-empted before it gets too far.
As soon as the administrator took the first action against this student, whatever elected political leader this person answers to, should have gotten phone calls from 90% of their constituents, saying, "fire that dude, because whether the law happens to technically be on his side or not, this person is acting in a way that is deeply contrary to everything we want from government."
Freedom isn't just a good idea. It's the best idea. It is the primary objective.
Or is it? We're not actually so sure about that. The words are in our "sacred" documents, but maybe it's not really something we all really believe. Let's look into that and re-assert our values, whatever they may be.
When he "exercises his freedom of speech" it's always a marathon.
No one can Wall O'Text like B. Hassle.
Once again Mr. Haselton demonstrates his tremendous ignorance of the law by attempting to analyze it from his own preconceived first principles using his own methods of reasoning rather than from within the appropriate legal framework using legal reasoning.
Judges are not like doctors who look at a mammogram, and draw on experience that the general public does not have, in order to see something that would be hidden from the rest of us.
The general public does not have substantial legal experience or knowledge, so judges do indeed see something that would be hidden from most people, Mr. Haselton included, evidently.
In cases like these, judges simply have multiple plausible interpretations in front of them, and they pick one. As such they're acting more like referees (who make a decision so that the game -- or, in this case, society -- can move on) than true "experts".
Although Mr. Haselton almost certainly does not know it, this is close to a critical legal studies view of jurisprudence. It is a controversial view, to put it mildly, and the majority of judges and attorneys do not subscribe to it.
There is a temptation to think that there is some consistent reasoning behind the different courts' rulings...This, I think, is nonsense, an attempt to put a consistent theory on top of a legal system that does not follow consistent rules from one court ruling to the next.
Those rulings were written by judges in different circuits who were thus bound by different precedents. Furthermore, one was written by a district court judge who is generally constrained to follow the law in his circuit. The other was a decision on appeal written by a circuit judges who were considerably more free to deviate from prior precedent. Mr. Haselton is comparing apples and oranges.
And indeed in the 3rd Circuit case you see 3rd Circuit cases cited, and in the Southern District of Florida case you see different cases cited, including the earlier 3rd Circuit case! There is no inconsistency here: the Southern Florida judge is distinguishing his case from the 3rd Circuit case based on the facts present in the particular case. Judges do this all the time.
Mr. Haselton seems to think that rulings are always simplistic hard and fast rules. Here he seems think that the rule is something like "students can't be punished for something they do online outside the school." In fact, as the case discusses, there is a complex legal and factual inquiry that is dependent on balancing competing factors and making fine distinctions. The case itself makes this clear: "While the Frederick decision offers little aid in solving the specific issue of student speech published on the internet, it does, however, make clear that the operative test is not a simple one of geography. Where the speech is published is not the only question that needs to be asked." (emphasis added)
But even if it's still a roll of the dice how a court would rule in a particular student free-speech case, what matters from the point of view of a principal in a future case, are the potential payoffs.
Here Mr. Haselton is stumbling onto law & economics. But his argument rests on several unstated assumptions: first, he's assuming that the principal is a rational actor, which is a pretty questionable assumption. Second, he's assuming that principal's have sufficient information on which to base a rational choice; in particular he's assuming that the principals (or their lawyers) know about this and related cases and know all of the ground facts of the case that a court might use to come to a decision. This is also a questionable assumption. He offers nothing to support either of these assumptions.
How did the legal and societal climate of attitudes toward people under 18, lead to a principal thinking that he could punish a 17-year-old for comment
The OP seems to argue, without actually stating this thesis in a 2000 word essay, that there should be no distinction between the free speech rights of 17 year-olds and 18 year-olds. The argument appears to be that the line could just as easily be drawn at age 13 or 22 instead of 18, and therefore the line is arbitrary, and because the law should not be arbitrary the distinction should be abolished.
There are arguments to be made for a line drawn at any age, or that no line should be made at all. There are reasons for any of these points of view. However, there may be no rational arguments to favor any of these reasons above the others. The difference between reasonable and rational is that reasons just represent a coherent system of ideas and that rational arguments requires measurement and comparison (to find the "ratio" of the arguments). Religion and politics, and therefore law, are not suitable for measurement. The only rational argument that I can see is at the meta level of which coherent system of ideas best works in the current world. There is no rational argument to be made on a particular point unless we agree which system we will use to measure and compare the merits of the arguments. This is done in a de facto manner in each culture, where different societies use more-or-less coherent systems that lead to the conclusion that certain rights should be granted at any age, at age 13, 18 or 22, or never at all.
That said, law should not be arbitrary. The question is: should we give all people free speech rights, or only some? (I might favor giving them to everyone; the OP, however, seems to exclude children below a possible age of 11.) If we give them to only some, where do we draw the line? I'll go further than say that the law should not be arbitrary, because the law will necessarily be arbitrary at some point. Rather, the law should be as predictable as possible. If there needs to be a line, it should be known before one goes to court. Do we afford mature 13 year-olds rights yet deny them to immature 22 year-olds? That would be far more arbitrary than creating a line at age 18. The clearest way, the least arbitrary way, to draw a line relating to human maturity is with age. I will take a law that tells judges to give certain rights to everyone over the age 18, or any other arbitrary but reasonable age, over a law that tells a judge to discern whether a person has attained sufficient maturity to deserve the privileges of majority.
By the way, the OP puts too much faith in doctors' ability to read diagnostic materials without arbitrariness.
Zero Tolerance = Zero Intelligence
There is a reason that school systems nationwide adopted zero tolerance approaches: school administrators are not suited to making non-authoritarian, intelligent decisions. Zero tolerance means that no thinking need be involved and anyone who can follow a simple set of rules can be a school administrator.
Once you have a cadre of non-intelligent authoritarian administrators, you can easily see how school management eventually evolves. It's all about authority, that authority demands respect and any thought or whim or mood of that authority must be 'respected'. Woe to the student that disrespects that authority. They will crush you like the bug you are and you will be grateful to them for it.
I'm not saying that all school administrators are like that, just most of them. They care more about perpetuating the system, achieving bogus test performance awards and preserving their pension that they do about students. That is, unless those students annoy them.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
We teach them in history and every other class that they are free, and then treat them like they aren't. No chewing gum. You are free but you can't chew gum. Are you kidding me? Tuck in your shirt, wear this uniform, don't talk, don't stop in the halls, bring me your blue slip or get detention.
It's no wonder so many in our society is so ready to accept the loss of fundamental rights.
These bozos aren't just wiretapping a student, they're wiretapping the entire home. That laptop could be anyplace in the house.
Even though the lawsuits could come from the students; there would be much stronger weight to them if the homeowners filed them, not on the behalf of their children, but on their own behalf as well.
The difference is how people react when a 16 year old says "How could you do this to me?" as opposed to an adults scream: "How dare you do this to my children!" It might be even more interesting if both the students, and the parents files separate lawsuits.
And why haven't these wiretapping jokers be arrested yet?
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
In fact, they'll probably be worse because they'll be overcompensating for the fun they didn't get to have.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
The link to the article discussing the implications of photographing the "inappropriate behavior" is hosted at a NSFW site. That's inappropriate behavior.
can you just give us the link to the boobies?
anything that disturbs the teaching going on in the classroom should be squashed.
Are you saying that no one has the right to hold up a sign outside the school perimeter criticizing the principal? If so, then that would also restrict the rights of former students, parents, and teachers, as well. If the message is "disruptive," why does it matter who is saying it? Are messages from current students necessarily extra "disruptive?"
Kids need to focus on the big picture and why they are there in the first place.
Sure, this sounds good, but should be punish those kids that choose not to focus and don't hold up signs criticizing the principal?
I don't practice what I preach because I'm not the kind of person that I'm preaching to.
I'm reminded of a time in college when I ran a web site that hosted a forum among other things (about 10 years ago). Someone posted some comments as the president of the university and a couple days later I got a call from his office. While they would've legally been allowed to do all sorts of things to me, they posed the simplest question: "Will you remove those comments?" They even prefaced it with "we openly support your and your users' rights to free speech." I'm curious if they even asked her to take it down with the trade-off from the school being that they will audit the teacher to verify the allegations.
To my knowledge, free speech is an inalienable human right not an inalienable adult right. The age of the individual should not matter in the slightest, but be subject only to the conditions on free speech itself, ie. libel and slander.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Recent studies have shown that the executive portion of the brain, that is, the portion that makes complex decisions, doesn't fully mature until the early 20s. Important decisions, like voting, sexual activity, college major, marriage, etc, are controlled by this portion of the brain. The age of 18 is a balance between sexual development and mental development. By this age, most of the important mental capacities have reached maturity. The age of 18 isn't arbitrary. It may differ from culture to culture, but each culture has made this decision based on accurate observations and the responsibilities of adulthood in their society.
In fact, what one society values and requires of people may differ from another, and thus necessitate a different age of majority. An agrarian society may choose the age of 13 because by that age, you are mentally developed enough to function as an adult. You may not be mentally developed enough to choose a spouse, and therefore have one chosen for you by your parents, but you don't need to choose a career or even drive a car.
Modern western societies require much more by way of executive decisions, and place the burden of such decisions on the individual. Adult members of our society need to be capable of choosing their own career, their own spouse, and live with the consequences of their sexual choices without having the large network of social support that more "primitive" societies provide. This is also supported by many studies (which I am too lazy to cite at this time) that show a much greater rate of divorce among those who marry as teens (under the age of 20), the frequency by which college students change majors, and a higher rate of accidents, deaths, and road citations (per person) among new teenage drivers (16-19 year olds with less than 2 years of driving experience) vs. older new drivers (25-30 year olds with less than 2 years of driving experience).
It's my opinion that everyone should be considered a minor until age 22. That means no drinking, voting, marriage, sex, driving, military service, etc, should be permitted until the age of 22. College should be an extension of high school, made compulsory, and made more general. This would be more in line with the expectations we place on modern adults, and while it may delay the granting of liberties, it would equip them with the tools they need to deal with the demands we expect of them already. Of course, this would require many changes across all aspects of society, and therefore is infeasible at this time.
Here are some links to support my claims:
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/teenage-brain-a-work-in-progress-fact-sheet/index.shtml
http://www.aboutkidshealth.ca/News/Executive-Function-Part-Four-Brain-growth-and-the-development-of-executive-function.aspx?articleID=8071&categoryID=news-type
This research shows that the frontal cortex develops rapidly in early childhood, with important changes occurring at particular ages (at the end of the first year of life, between 3 and 6 years, and around puberty), and then continues to develop into adulthood. Grey matter, for example, doesn’t reach adult levels in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex until at least the end of adolescence, and myelination of this region continues into the 20s or possibly 30s.
A teacher had used facebook (outside of school of course) to say how useless and pathetic and thoroughly evil etc etc blah blah their students were. Would they be protected under free speech, or would they be dumped on by the law/authorities from and extreme height? Somehow I expect it'd be the latter. Which makes it "interesting" why a kid would get more right to be an idiot than a "responsible adult."
"...a wise person transported forward in time from the 1500's to the present day, might scratch their heads and wonder why we think that 18-year-olds should be allowed to criticize their teachers but 17-year-olds cannot."
Especially since anyone criticizing any authority figure in that era, regardless of age, would be equally flogged, caned, and placed in the stocks!
White males are the "accepted" group to put down for anything. Watch any murder mystery shows lately? They white husband is always the criminal.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
Teenagers *are* qualitatively different than adults; look at some of the recent work in circadian rhythms, for instance - there are definite differences. Of course, 20 year-olds are qualitatively different than 40 year-olds. The question is whether they are different in a way that is pertinent, and I think we should start by trying to pin down what exactly *that* means.
You can't legislate stupidity.
Sure the kid can say what she wants and should be able to say what she wants. But you know, if you don't have anything nice to say, keep your mouth shut. If you're going to get all teen angsty over this teacher you don't like, text your friends, not the world. You're a teenager, not a two year old.
I may not like what you have to say, but I'll defend your right, whilst rolling my eyes and giving heavy sighs, to say it.
IANAL but If I slandered my employer on facebook I would expect to be fired. I'm not sure how slandering a teacher at your school is (or should be) any different.
While it's legal, and you are within your free speech rights to post anything you want, that doesn't protect you from repercussions from the organization you are talking smack about. It protects you from getting arrested ; )
The school is well within it's rights to suspend a student who's publicly talking smack about a teacher. Free speech is guaranteed by the constitution, not your school's charter.
IMHO the student made a libelous claim on a public forum. The first amendment doesn't protect her from getting suspended. I guarantee this suit will be dismissed. It should be.
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
I agree with you. Unfortunately, you could also, amass a large group of people who believe that school is not about educating kids, but instead is about 'socializing' them. Right here on slashdot, you only need to find a thread on home schooling, and you will see the 'school is about socilizing' crowd coming out of the woodwork. It isn't any better in the general population. I don't know if the number of people who believe school is a social program is in the majority, or minority, but if it isn't in the majority, it is getting close.
Yes, but typically its from the police
IANAL but If I slandered my employer on facebook I would expect to be fired.
The First Amendment applies to the government, not private employers. And public schools, paid for with taxpayer dollars are a part of the government.
The school is well within it's rights to suspend a student who's publicly talking smack about a teacher.
How so? How do you justify the school having any jurisdiction over what happens off school property and after school hours?
IMHO the student made a libelous claim on a public forum.
Then the teacher can respond as any other private citizen can: by suing for libel. Not for using in school power in response to something outside of school.
That teachers union has done far more to hinder and disturb actual learning than any amount of speech by actual students.
As is usually the case, take the opposite of the wingnut viewpoint and you have reality. Teacher's unions protect "actual learning", by acting as a political barrier. Otherwise, you'll have children from Fine Upstanding Members of the Community get B's when they should get F's and get detention for misbehavior instead of expulsion.
All in the interest of not taking abuse while working for 70 hours a week on slave wages
FTFY.
I wish I had mod points for your post.
Bennett Haselton, your assignment is to revise your post to Slashdot to cut the number of words into 1/3 or less. With care you should be able to reduce it to 1/4 or less and make your arguments and questions much clearer.
CmdrTaco, what, did you lose a bet? Couldn't you let him know it was a rambling inchoate mess that was way too long?
"but how could the school have thought they had the right to punish her for that in the first place?"
This question could only be asked by someone clearly outside of the day-to-day functions of schools. Further evidence abounds in the summary "it would have been a matter for the police, not for a school punishment".
Schools do not operate under the same rules as "the real world". Commit violence upon someone and you are likely to suffer detention, really injure someone and you are likely to be suspended. Steal and you face a stern lecture. The police do not get involved, there are no assault or theft charges filed. Schools have operated as substitute parents since they were created, however public schools face the daunting challenge of trying to discipline children without having any real authority to punish and without recourse to the typical rule of law except in extreme cases. Even the punishment of suspension is only a hope that the parents will be so unhappy about having to arrange for care of their children that they subject the violator to appropriate punishment.
Are we surprised then that school administrators and teachers operate not only above the law, but clearly ignorant of it? For example, did you know that many school districts tell teachers that wholesale copying of sample textbooks is permitted under Fair Use for Educational Purposes? I know of a teacher who installed a cell phone jammer because it worked so well at his last school. My wife, a teacher, was incredulous when I told her about the PA spycam situation, but I am not surprised to see these administrators defending their position. If there is no way for you to use the law to enforce discipline for the students then why should it apply at all?
Perhaps this is why we just had a Principal plead guilty to diverting PTA funds for personal use.
You can quit your job at any time. You are compelled to attend high-school by force of law.
Stating your qualitative opinion of something is not libel, it is an opinion. It is protected under free speech regardless. You're a douche-bag. This is not libel, this is my honest and truthful opinion.
The principal was obviously a product of the US education system system, which is apparently too busy with the science/religion question to worry about something as mundane as free speech. That, plus a mistrust of even the least qualified lawyer to tell them what the constitution says about free speech, makes these issues increasingly frustrating, and expensive.
Separation of church and state is crucially important to avoiding idiotic laws. If you have some fundamentalists - be they muslim, jew, christian, hindu, whatever - demanding that their particular faith be catered too above others, you're going to have problems. The safest bet is the one that France made: cater to no religion, and require that anyone wanting to participate in French society has to keep their religion to themselves in government funded institutions.
As far as defending Nazism... well, good luck with that.
Children do not have the same rights as adults. Get over it. When you turn the age of an adult for your state (not all use 18), then you get the right to free speech, not before.
OTOH, she didn't use any school equipment to perform the speech, so the Principal should be sued and lose. Idiot. Even if she had used a school computer to post the article, it wasn't hosted at the school. The hosting provider is what counts in my mind. Did any other students post positive pages about that teacher?
When I was in school, my swim coach was not very popular with the normal students, but very popular with the swim team. Over her 25+ yrs of being a teacher, she'd learned that if you aren't a hard ass, then students won't do what they are told. Rather than worry about that, she was very clear on the expectations for each student and held them to those expectations. If she were still alive and teaching, I bet she'd have a bunch of I-hate-teacher-XYZ pages too. She wouldn't care. A number of state swimming championships covered any issues for us.
Two things teach my kids are 1) Don't be a product of your environment and 2) for their actions, there is an equal, opposite and skewed reaction. They learn that they have more control over their own lives and are much happier, healthy and less gullible. I wonder if theses school administrators are being bribed by media and advertising agencies to peek in at home. Either that or the independent thinker alarms started going off.
tl;dr
What a depressingly stupid machine.
I don't see how the last part of the text (about the arbitrary age-limit of 18) relates the the first part (about free speech for minors). Would it be OK to suspend a 10-year-old for criticising a teacher (in or out of school)?
There are plenty of activities that reasonably can be allowed for adults but not children. (E.g. alcohol does more damage to a childs brain than to an adults. Children in general do not have the experience needed to determine when signing a legally binding contract is good or bad for them etc.) But I can see no reason why a child or teenager should not be allowed to express views that an adult would be allowed to, whether they are 5, 7 or 17 years old. (Whether we adults should to take those views seriously is for us to decide when we hear them.)
I wonder what the US teachers have done that makes their organizations deserve this ridiculous level of hatred. FWIW, banning unions, and in particular banning any one union, would interfere with the right to assembly in most sane jurisdictions.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
You can do whatever you like, it's a free country. But the lesson is clear - don't be surprised when your right to free speech also entitles you to some free punishment because you opened your mouth. You can say whatever you like. Just remember there will usually be a retort.
Apparently, 300+ posters do.
Which makes it legitimate; that's always been my argument when it comes to social commentary.
But at the same time. . . Honestly, this focus on school-is-unfair stories is just a thinking man's "Octo-Mom".
School is full of bullshit and kids have no rights. Yes. We know this. We all lived through it. The only thing new going on here is that indignant internet denizens are watching and lawyers are involved. Marvelous.
Seriously. . . What South American country is the U.S. about to bomb back into the Slave Trade which the Powers That Be are desperate we should fail to notice?
-FL
It should be a crime to have sex with a Foolish person.
Foolish people shouldn't have kids for multiple reasons; we need to prevent that because they are too busy trying to catch up with the rest of us.
Foolish people say stupid shit and need to be punished with zero tolerance so someday they learn to act the way we want them to in if not from learning then by fear (terror) of being punished again.
All people do Foolish things sometimes but it does not make them Foolish unless they are that way most or all the time.
point:
Replace Foolish with child/teen because they are more "foolish" than their adult counterparts (in general) and its easy to measure by age than by how foolish or responsible they are. Their brains are not fully developed until the early 20s but it does not mean they develop in the same order-- and generally we judge by the level of socialization how "mature" somebody is - but age is more simple.
Essentially, it comes down to how humans think; we are wired to make correlations and we often make simple and false ones (far more than statisticians.) From lucky rituals & charms to red-heads having bad tempers. An island of clones would be forced to develop them based upon other traits because its human to do so.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Many of them suck, in one way or the other, and they get (sometimes) protected by the union when they should be fired immediately for various things ranging from holding grudges against children to simply being bad at what they do.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
While I see what you're saying, my memories of school tell me all those things are already happening. People pass when they shouldn't, idiotic parents have way too much clout with administrators, and there is no discipline.
It doesn't sound as if teacher's unions are getting anywhere
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Adolescence was invented in 1094 by Granville Stanley Hall.
I doubt that any of this crap comes anywhere near the bar of passing the Tinker test, and in loco parentis means "in place of the parent" only so much as to be in place in the parent's absence due to the impracticality of having all parents attend school with their children.
Seriously, though, who is surprised by this? Do we not remember school administrators with Napoleon complexes that fabricated arbitrary (and, frankly, dangerous) rules to satisfy their need for accomplishment? I watched school teachers and administrators drag kids by their arms and pick kids up by their necks. For administrators, it's all crooks and scowls. Given the triple threat of terror, shooting, and sextings, it's a perfect opportunity for a power grab in a tiny corner of society. It doesn't excuse their behavior, but the desire has been on simmer for eons.
Somewhere around here I have a picture of some runaway hippie at Kent State... She was 14! If only they'd had laptops back then!
The world is for adults, run by adults, and all about adults. If you are under 18 you are an adult in training. Why is it always about the kids getting to do what ever they want when you have no recourse against them because they are....Minors....HELLOOOOOO!!!!! I think you should have to be 18 to post on Facebook or anywhere else where you have to agree to terms of service. You cannot enter into a contract with a Minor so why do they have access to anything with "Terms of Use" ???
I think that you need to repost the last sentence, possibly with a link to what you are trying to refer. It looks like something was eaten by the system.
So, you think teachers would work better if they lived under perpetual threat of being fired based on accusations from students/parents, or their students performing worse than expected on standardized tests?
Hey, I've met bad teachers, too. Also ones that stuck out for each other when they IMO shouldn't. But unions didn't have much to do with it - they didn't have the same politics, and they weren't even in the same union AFAIK. The real problem was that they had a huge siege mentality.
But you're not going to make that go away by going to full frontal assault on the few things they feel they have to defend themselves. That smells more of an eagerness to punish to me.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Agreed.
Personally I think we should tag these "ohnoitsbennett" a la the old "ohnoitsroland" (RIP) tag. If Haselton wants to share his long, meandering ponderances with the world, he should get his own blog and do it there.
I wonder what the US teachers have done that makes their organizations deserve this ridiculous level of hatred. FWIW, banning unions, and in particular banning any one union, would interfere with the right to assembly in most sane jurisdictions.
You call it ridiculous, but judging from the way you phrased your question, you are not familiar with the US educational system.
For a lot of people (who aren't teachers) the union is simply a regular union. It serves the interests of the teachers and not the students. Sure, the interests of the public and the students sometimes coincide with the teacher's union, but that is just circumstance. If it came down to a zero-sum decision in which the teachers were on one side, and the students were on the other, I would expect the union to side with the teachers (and they should, since they are a teacher's union).
You also end up with a situation in which it is often a national union vs the 4 part-time or volunteer school board members.
The main vitriol often comes about as a result of the fact that they are a professional union. As a result there are often cases in which the union is siding on the side of teachers who have not acted in the best interests of the students (not their job).
If all things were equal, and the union were formed from scratch today, I wouldn't harbor any real ill will, but I certainly wouldn't default to being on their side at the onset.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Katie, sit down and shut up until you are 18, you Facebook slut.
You are the *property* of your parents and the school until then.
So, you think teachers would work better if they lived under perpetual threat of being fired based on accusations from students/parents, or their students performing worse than expected on standardized tests?
Not in the least.
I should have clarified more in my initial post; I meant more to enlighten the OP than anything. I'm not personally a fan of doing away with unionization in this particular context for exactly the reason you describe. But there's bound to be some decent middle ground between having local politics hang a sword of Damascus over every teacher's head, and incompetents being impossible to get rid of.
Realistically it's a mishmash of things of course, but siege is actually a pretty apt word to use, considering how many schools seem to be run as a little kingdom.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Ah, right, so we should ignore the plight of the last legally oppressed group in our society, the young, because in your mind there are brown people to worry about. Row, row, fight da powa!
With respect to free speech.
If they are human, they have the right.
how is babby formed?
Why "instead"? Educating is certainly primary, but if it were the sole goal, I would sure as hell be home schooling.
25 is college age?
If college is the problem (and I can understand that being an issue), then that's simply solved by not renting out to people at college (e.g., only renting out to people with a job, and ask for proof of that). An age based system is broken, as it refuses access to a 21 year old who is working full time, but allows someone who is 26, but at college.
without any means to pay for it.
Then ask for the proof that they have the means to pay for it. Given that they need to pay rent, this is a good idea in the first place, anyway. What does age have to do with anything?
When I rented a place straight after University, age 21, I had to show my landlord proof I had a job. I'd have been annoyed if places were refusing me simply on my age. And he'd have lost out too - I was a tenant of almost 10 years, with no problems or late payments.
Ah, right, so we should ignore the plight of the last legally oppressed group in our society, the young, because in your mind there are brown people to worry about.
"the last legally oppressed group in our society, the young". . ? Are you saying that with a straight face?
The education system certainly IS fundamentally (and imho very deliberately) broken, but none of these battles over the puppet theater of free speech on Facebook are going to fix or even address the underlying problems. And all of that aside, adults provide boundaries to the children under their care for a host of extremely valid reasons. While many of those adults are ignorant and thus dangerously inept, I really don't think that access to 'free-speech' for 17 year-olds is a particularly vital concern. I'd put brain-washing, economic warfare and simple malnutrition much higher on the list of problems. If children can survive that gauntlet into adulthood, then perhaps they'll have minds capable of seeing and comprehending the world, and thus be able to "use their words" to say something the state might deem worthy of repression.
And, yes actually, for fuck's sake. . ,
I certainly AM concerned with the U.S. thirst for slaves, both foreign and domestic. Any non-narcissist bloody-well ought to be, and no, I don't care what color their skin happens to be. Do you? Seriously?
-FL
This isn't a news submission, it's dude using a news story to get his opinion out about how he feels, without using /. comment & moderation system.
Be seeing you...
We all pay taxes, we all should have equal access.
By this logic, shouldn't those who pay more taxes get greater access? What about those who pay negative taxes (via welfare, unemployment, and/or Earned Income Credit), should they be denied access?
Answer the question. It matters.
Saying that being a kid tells you everything about raising children is like saying that being a private tells you everything you needs to know about generalship.
Power counts. Especially when we're talking about how power informs and distorts our decisions.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
While many of those adults are ignorant and thus dangerously inept, I really don't think that access to 'free-speech' for 17 year-olds is a particularly vital concern. I'd put brain-washing, economic warfare and simple malnutrition much higher on the list of problems. If children can survive that gauntlet into adulthood, then perhaps they'll have minds capable of seeing and comprehending the world, and thus be able to "use their words" to say something the state might deem worthy of repression.
Great, an ageist who doesn't even care that he's ageist.
The purpose of the school is to educate. They are not there to police behavior during the student's free time.
Great, an ageist who doesn't even care that he's ageist.
Uh huh. How romantic.
Without parents and guardians, how long would the average child be able to function in the world before being eaten alive? There's a reason the rent is free and life is filled with get-out-of-jail cards until you grow up. Granted, 17 is getting close to the end of that line, and some 17 year-olds are certainly wiser and more capable than some 30 year-olds. But most are vulnerable, ignorant, weak, easily manipulated, they cry easily and their hands quiver when they have to face down authority figures. And that's okay. It's normal! Kids are a blank slate when they enter the world, and during the time it takes to write their own code, they simply can't have the right answers because they haven't finished installing the wiring yet. They don't have the requisite knowledge to function effectively in the world, and so their parents take care of all that crap for them in order to give them the space necessary to grow strong. But to do this, parents need to have executive veto on all decisions they deem necessary. And yes, that can be frustrating, but without it, nobody would survive the first year of their lives, let alone the first 18. Where do you draw the line? The law is specific. Reality is fuzzy.
I tend to take kids seriously until they falter or get overwhelmed. Then I make space for that. Sometimes I meet a kid who I can talk with nearly full-on, but that's very uncommon. Most of the time, I need to hold back my full strength and be thoughtful about what I say and do in ways I don't when I'm around other adults. --And actually, I find I need to tread carefully around many adults because the simple fact of the matter is that most people have blind spots and sore spots and unfinished business in their minds which it would be dis-compassionate to tromp through. Kids have fewer knots, but larger tracts of unknowing. Being aware of this and acting accordingly is what responsibility is all about.
This is how the human race functions, and ideally it works hand in hand with love, compassion and wisdom. It doesn't always; I've seen parents falter and attempt control out of fear and ego. But then kids grow into adults and the world keeps spinning.
Ageism is realism. You don't feed a baby steak until s/he grows some teeth.
-FL
The only reason anyone ever asks this question is to use it as a trump card so they can dismiss an argument out of hand rather than rebutting it.
To show you just how bad this logic is, lets say you meet President Obama and tell him....
The writer of the lead article on this story has it correct. Judges are just as stupid as anyone else. It is a crap shoot whether or not you get a "correct" judgment, as there are many possible verdicts, based not only on the unique facts of any case, but the individual judge's view of reality and his/her basic prejudices. People way too often think that there is such a thing as objective justice. This is complete fantasy. There is no objective justice. There is only the sausage squeezed out of the "justice" machine in each case. Of course, the student's first amendment [free speech] rights were at issue in this case, but if the individual judge is sympathetic with the person or group being criticized or attacked, then the judgment is often twisted to favour the so-called victim, and if the judge is sympathetic with the voicer of the criticism, then the judgment is often twisted to favour the critic. Humans are most often incapable of being truly objective, and, in my experience as a long-practising lawyer and a judge, I have learned that lesson in spades. Dream on, lovers of justice.