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?
