Free the Tots!

     Over this wonderful Thanksgiving break, I have been catching up on the episodes of Glee I have missed in the past few weeks. In a recent episode one of the main plots is the students campaigning to get tater tots back into the cafeteria. When Mercedes, one of the glee club girls, decides to protest the ban, she ends up getting in trouble for making her voice heard.

     This episode reminded me of when we discussed how you lose a lot of your rights when you walk through the doors of your school. I was curious about this so I did some research. After looking at numerous articles on this topic, the two main reasons that kept reappearing were maturity level of children and an idea called "in loco parentis". In loco parentis basically says that when a child is at school, the school has both the right and responsibility to act as their parents, which gives them ways to infringe upon a child's national rights in order to keep them safe.
     Even though I understand both of these arguments, I don't think they apply to freedom of speech. In the case of Mercedes on Glee, she wasn't harming anyone by protesting the ban of tater tots, so why did the school have the right to quiet her? Do you agree that the school had this right?

Born Colorblind

After I wrote my first blog post about racial tokenism, I have been noticing it everywhere. Today, when I was helping out in a Sunday school room at my church, I noticed these posters on the wall. Despite the fact that the class I help with has very little diversity, the posters all over the room are extremely racially diverse. At first, you would think that the kids in the classroom wouldn't relate to kids of other ethnicities as well as those of their own, but none of them seem to notice race at all. After observing how young children don't seem to see race a lot (or at all), it makes me wish that adults and teenagers could be that way too. If everyone in the world was colorblind, it would be a lot more peaceful place.