An amazingly informative post, Prudence. Thanks. I'm not surprised at all that crap, really. sigh :(

Unfortunantly, at my school, it seems that both the students and the teachers agree with cutting our first amendment rights. I have a few friends on the newspaper staff, and they are always telling my how their teacher (who also is my English teacher) is silencing their opnions. Recently, for instance, they had an article that was slightly negative of how the school treated the band (which was written by someone in our band whos also on the staff). She spent a long time writing it, but as soon as the teacher saw it, he had her delete the parts which were negative, only leaving the stuff which said our accomplishments.


Its pretty sad :(

That's nothing new for school publications. It's a sticky combination of "minors don't have full rights" and "it represents the school, therefore the school gets final say." The same way a business would have the right to restrict what their employees published when representing the company. Of course, it gets muddy when you factor in that a public school is a government entity, however this isn't a law or legal enforcement, it's a policy issue that impacts the running of what's essentially a government business entity. It's not really the same thing as legislated or police-enforced 1st ammendment restrictions.

My history teachers were all so dry and boring. I recall the one guy who would wear short sleeved polyester suits in light blue (yes, really) and class always consisted of him copying the chapter word for word on the many chalkboards leaving blanks which we would then copy and fill in the blanks. That was it. Every day until test day which would be the same thing. Fill in the blanks... slightly different blanks but still. There was NO discussion at all. No understanding. Just copy and paste. Most boring class ever. Man did I dread it. With that sort of teaching by some teachers, it's no wonder that our youth isn't interested in history. Reading C.P.'s account of her history class, I know that I really missed out. It's a shame that all teachers aren't of that caliber.