Education American Style

RE: high school student threatened with expulsion for handing out stickers for a demonstration.

Surprise, surprise. Someone decides to exercise their freedom of speech rights, and the principal finds it threatening and disruptive. Why threatening, why disruptive, such that the punishment for handing out stickers is expulsion from school?

Because the job of education, as this principal sees it, is to turn out thoughtless yes-men and women, highly trained yet highly uneducated, automatons who will lend their support and their lives to whatever the system requires of them. The student's actions were certainly disruptive of this effort, so certainly (some bloggers argue) she should be expelled.

Another telling example of this mentality, as it is applied under our nation's auspices in Latin America: Kevin Danaher was talking to a Guatemalan woman whose husband was dragged from their home and hacked to death with machetes by the military in front of her and the children. "Why, why did they do this" Kevin asked.

Because he was teaching his neighbors how to raise rabbits. "You have to understand the structure of society and the rules of power here" she explained. The people have been driven off the best farmland, and so are a captive labor force for the large plantation owners, who grow for export. "So if we do things like teaching each other how to raise rabbits so we can feed ourselves, without being forced to go and sell our labor for a dollar a day, that is subversive, given the structure of this system."
["10 Reasons to Abolish the IMF and the World Bank" Kevin Danaher, 2001, Seven Stories Press, p.17-18.]

Power resides in the people, but only if we use it. In our nation now many people don't know what freedom is. They are frightened of freedom, either having it or seeing it used. They think if someone uses their freedom of speech it might threaten their ability to afford cheap gas for over-priced, unnecessarily over-sized, useless (in terms of how they're actually used) sport utility vehicles, or buy what they want at the mall.

This is not freedom but arrogant stupidity, and it will destroy our nation and the Earth, if we let it.

True freedom entails the responsibility to recognize the rights of others. Lacking this I am a despot or fascist thug, more enslaved than ever to fear and hatred.

True education entails encouraging others' critical thinking, not punishing them for it.

As Thomas Jefferson said,
"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all.
I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere."

It is a lesson we should all take to heart.