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?
Ellie-
ReplyDeleteWhile I agree that Mercedes's protest for tater tots wasn't hurting anyone and she should have been able to make her voice heard, I see how the school found the authority to stop her protest. Mercedes was breaking a few little rules, like standing on tables while protesting and chanting loudly, which may have been a distraction for learning. As long as the school board can argue that Mercedes was infringing on another student's safety or right to learn, then it is allowed to infringe on her freedom of speech. But this is not only specific to a school setting, if protesters on the street were breaking small rules in order to make a protest, they could also be stopped by the government.
Ellie,
ReplyDeleteThanks for doing the extra research for this post, it really strengthens it. As for whether of not the school had the right to end the tater tot protest, it seems that according to in loco parentes it did. Keeping in mind the "loco" part-- the school should only intervene if someone is causing harm. They could have asked her to be quieter and get off the table. If she did not comply, then ending the protest makes sense. In a best case scenario, the teachers would have asked for the protest to be less of a distraction (by getting off the table, for example) but continue spreading their message. Parents should not silence a child's voice, so neither should the school.