Puritanical, Tyrannical, Overreaching Public Schools
You may enjoy the discussion at Slashdot about an Eden Prairie, MN school attempting to punish students for pictures of the students drinking found on Facebook.
It is absolutely true that Facebooking one’s pictures is akin to posting personal Polaroids on a (searchable, indexed, cross-referenced) community bulletin board in an accessible space. However, no matter how public the incriminating evidence is, schools should have absolutely positively zero power to punish for actions taking place off of their premises.
Best comment from the Slashdot discussion involves the US drinking age:
21? What country is this? Iran?
Surely you’re not telling me the legal drinking age in the US is 21? Hell.. I the worst hangover of my life was the day of my 16th birthday when I could finally drink legally (everyone in this country drinks illegally from about 14). The second worst hangover was at the school party that year where they’d thoughtfully provided free drinks..
You’ll never learn to drink responsibly unless you’ve drunk irresponsibly a few times when you’re younger. OTOH I was drinking wine with meals at 7 years old, so was kinda used to it by then.”
The thrill of the forbidden exacerbates our youth’s problem with drinking. Though slightly tangential, it’s still helpful to bring up the forbidden toy study. This psychological experiment has shown that the harsher the punishment for an enjoyable activity, the stronger the draw to that activity when repercussions are removed. For example, the US defines adults as 18 years of age, yet punishes them severely for choosing to consume alcohol under the age of 21. When most legal repercussions are removed at 21, psychology reveals that there is a stronger draw to the formally forbidden activity of drinking.
While an interesting venture into the intersection between sociology and psychology, railing against America’s high drinking age won’t get us anywhere in this debate. Let’s start with a quote from the Star Tribune article:
“Everyone thinks it’s pretty weird,” [Kalaidis] said. “I think it’s a huge invasion of privacy.”
No. It’s not a huge invasion of privacy. Facebook is ostensibly… actually, by definition a public space. Hey kids, you are not posting pictures and sharing stories in a private virtual tree house club — Facebook is (I’ll repeat it) a public, searchable, indexed, cross referenced, tagged, linked, advertised, popular public space. This definition precludes student’s delusions about privacy. As far as I’m concerned, the Eden Prairie school district can troll Facebook all day long looking for pictures depicting underage drinking parties. What they can not do, and what infuriates me, is twofold:
- Accept photographs as incontrovertible records of events.
- Expand the scope of disciplinary action beyond school grounds to the surrounding community.
In this digital age of photo manipulation, you can just as easily insert a beer can as a gun into the hand of a person in a picture. What would a school, misled into unjust punishment while reacting to photo manipulation, say? And as for those students who signed “I will not drink” pledges for athletics and scholarships, the questionable evidence issue applies again: “prove it,” becomes a completely acceptable argument. I never drank anything before I was 21, yet I was still at parties in high school where there was underage drinking… and I’d say I was pretty responsible. It’s easy to imagine how the entire situation could get out of control in a hurry, with false accusations, overreactions, and the accompanying hysteria that can infect the small town atmosphere of a high school.
Finally, my second point about jurisdiction of the school should be mind-numbingly obvious. The famous high school cases that have gone to the Supreme Court are all about issues of discipline and control on school grounds. There’s Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District about going to school wearing black armbands in protest of war, Goss v. Lopez about due process in suspensions, and Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier about administration’s right to edit school-sponsored student newspapers.
But you see, all of these cases were rooted in events which took place on school grounds. I can’t find a Supreme Court ruling about high schools punishing students for actions taken outside of schools (which sets me up for the logical fallacy of appealing to ignorance — but I’m having trouble locating the resources to search for the appropriate court cases). Perhaps the lack of these court cases is because the following is abundantly obvious: when students are off of school property, their actions are patrolled, supervised, and regulated by many authorities, but the school is not one of them.
Comments
Mykala
I agree 100%. In fact, I’m confused as to how EP High School administration is even carrying out the punishments at all. How do they have this authority and why isn’t anyone standing up to them?
Justin Gehring
Personally, I think the press has this one all wrong…
As I understand it from the articles I’ve read, the kids were not suspended from school (at least not until the walk-out happened on campus). The way I read it, they were suspended from various after-school activities (such as football, basketball, etc.) The last time I checked, if your an athlete and test positive for any sort of substance abuse, 9 times out of 10 your kicked off the team.
In fact, hasn’t the U of M been doing this for years?
The more stupid thing is the fact that these kids put them online… People need to start realizing that the internet works in much the same way the “parent” network works… You know… you tell a friend, they tell their parent, who tells another parent, who tells your parent which results in trouble…
In any case, the press just needs some news… I think I’m going to copy this to rinsefirst… why not..
Mykala
I think it’s important to note, and is another point Alex made with regards to the credibility of the photos, that just because a student is pictured holding a can of beer doesn’t mean 1) that he was necessarily drinking it or 2) that it was even in his hand to begin with. Along with the new technology of these social networking sites also comes a greater knowledge of photo editing software.
Bottom line: A picture posted online does not equal a Breathalyzer or blood-alcohol test performed by police. And if school administrations start taking action as if online photos are credible sources, they’re going to get themselves into a heap of trouble.
Nils
Yeah, I agree with Alex and Mykala on this. Online pictures mean next to nothing. If schools want irrefutable evidence on which to take action, they need to catch the students red-handed, in the act. And, again like Alex said, how can a school take disciplinary action on events that happened outside of the school grounds? Dumb.