Melissa426 said:
HHJH,
Thanks for the posts from FIRE. Being out of academia for 15 years has left me completely out of the loop on these matters.
After a brief scan of several cases, a couple observations:
1. Does it not seem that it's mostly the administration, not the students or professors, who plays the part of Big Brother, trying to curtail the rights of students or student organizations, probably in the interest of keeping everybody happy? Including the big-time money donors?
2. This, of the cases I read, I fthought hit the nail on the head.
http://www.thefire.org/index.php/case/645.html
Read the second paragraph. "Trumpeters of tolerance intolerant"
Peace,
Melissa
Students are children,not adults covered by the Constitution/laws. Children are 'protected' because the constitution and laws dictate what fair and reasonable treatment of them will/should be.
Teachers and Administrators have a responsibility to teach students more than just content area matters. They also are teaching conduct, citizenship and work ethic. I think supervising (at times with prior approval) student selections, comments, clothing and such is fine as long as it is done reasonably and equitably.
It's a damned if you do/don't situation.
If administrators/teachers don't enforce and supervise conduct standards (even to the point of 'censorship' in some people's eyes) to uphold standards then we/they aren't 'preparing students for the real world' when they scratch themselves in public, say inappropriate things in work/professional settings, have NO concept of appropriate work attire for a business setting.
We/they do establish standards and enforce them we are the 'thought police.'
I would be careful to put too much wt. on a study with the base line of 'private High Schools' and not the general public.
Students are apathetic about learning at times. If they don't know the 1st Amendment is it because they didn't pay attention, read their student handbooks or some other 'personal accountability' issue or is it because 'no one told that to me...'
We may be looking at it from the perspective of 'civil liberties' but the students, to put another spin on this, MAY be saying that someone (heck the government in this case) should be stepping in to stop all the trash that has found its way into the media and entertainment.... who knows exactly what they meant when they responded. We only know what spin the interviewers put on the results.
And, interview/surveys fall into unreliability ranges when you take into account whether the person was being honest or understood the interviewer clearly (and in the process of explaining, how might the interviewer have skewed the interviewee's perspectives).
Lucky we were never caught. Seriously if we really listened to what teen agers say and think we would think that civilization was ending...I remember.
