Punished for Participating?

Shame on you, Downer's Grove North. Feel free to wear a paper bag over your head, Downer's Grove South. Ditto the other high schools who acted to punish students for participating in a nationwide walk-out to protest our wanton gun violence.

As educational institutions, isn't it part of your job to introduce students to various aspects of adult life? To teach them and simultaneously encourage them so that they might be better-informed and consequently better-enabled to make good choices?

Then why are you punishing students for taking part in what is still more or less a participatory democracy? Isn't encouraging involvement in one's community a good thing?

Please tell me that entrusted with the gigantic responsibility of shaping young minds, you don't side with Florida Representative Elizabeth Porter, who sneered at and patronized these students for their involvement in those very same protests.

In her remarkable address to the Florida state legislature, she asked “Do we allow the children to tell us that we should pass a law that says no homework, or do you finish high school at the age of twelve because they want it so? No, the adults make the laws because we has (sic) the age, we has (sic) the wisdom and we have the experience.”

In a perfect world, that last sentence certainly holds true. But we all know the sad reality of adults and politics, don't we?

Given today's social climate, I am positive you have your hands full meeting the demands of a wide-ranging student body and the expectations of their parents. I should add that as educators, you have my unflagging respect and support.

The majority of the time, anyway.

But when your students see a gigantic, festering sore in our culture and call out the adults in charge for letting it happen (or even perpetuating it), why do you punish them? Yes, kids do crazy things—they're kids. (I don't get the appeal of Manga, either.) 

But when they get concerned and act on that concern, should we really be stifling them?

As parents, we like to play the I'm-only-angry-because-I-care card. We use it when we act in a way we're concerned our children might not understand.

I'm pretty sure these kids care, too. Let them.