Here you walk down white hallways with elephants. You will become unconscious all the time. You are going to learn what it means to learn what does not matter. You will not learn anything that matters here. No teacher can ever show anything that really matters. They can tell us what they think. The can tell us what they believe to be the truth. Yet it is not our truth. It doesnt really make any sense to us. Thus, belief in right and wrong is individual, and those that have the power will choose what is right and wrong only by what they think they know.
Every man, woman, and child has her rights to a free society. That may not be the entire truth. That commonly put phrase man, woman, and child still gives power to the man. It puts men before women and children below their elders. The child is the lowest form of life. Animals are given fewer rights than humans. Youth are given fewer rights than those who have only a few more years of experience in life. It may seem that as we age we become better. Maybe that is true. But you must also realize, that being true, this makes one person better than another. That does not concur with the idea that we are created equal.
High school is only what you make of it. The largest difference is the new building. That is all. Nothing else is different. The thing that really changes is the student. A young child may be fearful of authority. Teenagers generally try to destroy it. This begins an endless chain of disruption, which is the basic thing schools must attempt to stop. These high school years spent searching for an identity. Expressing what we are in whatever way we deem worthy. This will often cause problems. In the case of Tinker vs. Des Moines, students were suspended from school for protesting the presence of U.S. troops in Vietnam. They did this by the means of black armbands that the school deemed disruptive. Tinker eventually won. In Tinker the courts said, It can hardly be argued that either the students or the teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate. In other words, students do have rights. But it took over three years for them to figure that out. In the case of Hazelwood vs. Kuhlmeier the students were not so lucky. Articles were cut from a school newspaper that included references to students experiences with pregnancy and the effect of divorce on them. Hazelwood stated, School official are entitled to censor articles on the ground that they invade the rights of others. So now we have rights as long as we dont take away the rights of others.
We will always try to be able to do our taxes, but we will always still wait until April 15th to mail them. We will eat until we are fat and then complain about our weigh. We are the contradiction. Changing our minds as any new shiny toy comes along. The Supreme Court cases do support each other often. They also contradict each other just as often. Expression does matter, but possibly not as much as the act of rebellion. The attempt to make things better makes us more humane, just plain better people.
In the end nothing in the constitution prohibits the states from insisting that certain modes of expression are inappropriate and subject to sanctions (Bethel vs. Fraser). That is being stated now. Times will change. As will what are the rights of man. The Justices of today may find it difficult relating to a group of students when they have not been to school in 40 years. But when todays students become tomorrows Justices, they will still seem archaic to the students of that day and age.