I hope everyone is having a good summer. It’s been a while – busy life – but I found something to blog about.
June 15th, Salon.com, “Can students be disciplined for online speech?”
Ah, student rights. It is a tricky matter. Schools tend to argue that the administration ought to be able to discipline students for events, actions or speech that occur outside of school grounds or hours. This, the argument goes, is crucial because what happens outside of school can adversely affect the atmosphere inside school. For example, if Bobby writes a threatening message on Joey’s Facebook wall, then Joey will be too afraid to learn anything the next day, so racked with fear will he be. Fair enough, and I agree, cyberbullying should not be tolerated.
On the other hand, where is the line between a school’s ability to control or oversee the behavior of it’s students and the right to privacy of those students? Because surely there is a line, somewhere. One school crossed that line when they used a video camera to take pictures of students smoking pot in their bedrooms at home, and then disciplined them for it. Creepy and invasive, everyone agrees. But if a student is criticizing the administration, or saying nasty things about their school or teachers on a social network after hours, should they be under threat of punishment?
A landmark case against a student’s right to free speech occured in 2002 when a student was suspended for holding a banner that read “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” across the street from his school during an Olympic torch relay parade that was filmed by local media. The student was suspended. He sued, and the case went to the Supreme Court, who ruled in favor of the school’s ability to limit student speech when it advocates drug use. In my opinion, a terrible call.
Now the boundaries are being blurred by the ubiquity of social networking, although this time the US 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the students. In the current case, two students created MySpace profiles that mocked a school official. And this time, the students win because their speech was not substantially disruptive to the school atmosphere.
What do you think? Should students be censored or disciplined for activities or speech that occur outside school?
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