I see that my highschool is still being draconian with its ideas on free speech. I suppose their policy is to do as they say, but not as they do. For me, there is a deeper story than what is currently taking place with this “Bible Club”.
One of the rights of passage at Downingtown High School in the years leading up to my graduation was experiencing spirit week. I’m sure that most schools have these weeks, where for some reason the student body is encouraged to show its pride in the school by participating in various strange school-hour activities, usually culminating in the homecoming parade, dance, bonfire, football game, etc.
Some of the activities included “Blue and Gold Day”, where you wear your school colors on your clothes or in body paint. There were also odd ones like “Pajama Day”. These days were voted on by student council and approved by the “spirit commissioner” and faculty.
My senior year included an day-long spirit event called “Rent an Underclassman Day”. The premise is basically this: You buy a ticket from the student council that has a blank for your name and that of an underclassman. With both names filled out and signed, the ticket is returned to student council, and you become registered. On Rent an Underclassman Day, the underclassman (who has agreed to all of this) can be ordered to perform some services for you, like carrying your books to class (which is a big deal in the quarter-mile long hallways of my high school, where you locker is at one end and your books weigh 80 lbs.) wearing humiliating costumes, all in the name of fun and, of course, school spirit.
In the years when my mom was in school, this day was not called “Rent an Underclassman Day”. In fact, only a year or two prior to my graduation, it was still known by the name that my mom called it in her day, “Slave Day”.
Sadly for everyone involved, I was an altruistic teenager, and also editor of my school newspaper.
I grant that the school newspaper, in times of my editorship, had been left to very squalid conditions. We had a single IBM-compatible PC (an 8086, no less), and during my Junior year, we laid out the whole paper using printouts, scissors, and Let Tape B. During my year, I requisitioned a new Mac, which we never really got efficient at using, and we didn’t have enough advertising in the paper to cover our printing costs. The bottom line - the whole effort was subsidized by the school.
This is as opposed to the yearbook, who earned every cent required for their production simply through the sales of ads to local business owners and sales of the yearbooks themselves. Being self-subsisting, they were mostly autonomous. As long as nothing bad was printed about the school, the school played a decent hands-off role.
Newspaper turned out a bit differently.
On the publication week for spirit week, I wrote a front page article for the paper that talked about each of the days and what the events entailed. Concerning Rent an Underclassman Day, I called it “Rent an Underclassman Day”, but also wrote “formerly known as ‘Slave Day’”, since that’s what every student already called it, I saw no sense in confusing them.
We printed some 2500 copies of the paper, which we distributed for free among the student body during my year. As I said, the paper over the years prior was left was poorly attended to support itself. This was not to be so for this issue.
Actually, we did print the copies with the wording as written. After the press run was complete, the principal (whose name I can’t recall now) reviewed the issue and found my use of the name “Slave Day” completely inappropriate. He ordered all copies of the paper reprinted without the word “Slave” included in it.
And so we did. Reluctantly. But only after I spoke with our principal and provided what I thought was a reasonable argument at the time, and still believe it so.
For one thing, nobody called it Rent an Underclassman Day. If they went to buy a ticket, they asked, “Can I have a Slave Day ticket?” It was pointless to change what was already a concensus in their minds.
But more importantly, the argument against using the word “slave”, that it could be construed as a derogatory term aimed at black students in our school, was simply bogus. I can’t believe that anyone thought that. The idea that “slave” was some throwback to pre-Civil War times was ludicrous. Moreso was the implication that all slaves ever were black, and that they would be the only offended parties. It was just silly.
If our school was doing such a good job teaching us what we needed to know about slavery, then would shouldn’t have been afraid to use the word in a time-honored display of spirit and pride in our school. All of our “slaves” were willing — not slaves at all. The school would not be endorsing slavery, it would be cherishing its traditions.
Worse yet, even if their claims that use of the word “slave” were inappropriate, which I still contest, I didn’t call it “Slave Day”. In fact, I said as much as, “It is no longer Slave Day, it has this other albeit stupid name, ‘Rent an Underclassman Day’, which we should now use because our school administration is a bunch of twits”. Maybe that’s the part that they didn’t like.
And finally, what lesson does this teach about freedom of the press? Apparently, the press is not free inside of a high school, where students must be sheltered from bigotry for the sake of learning. Nevermind that there was no bigotry in the use of the term. Apparently, we are not really in school to gain understanding and knowledge, but to be taught obedience and submission.
So we reprinted the outside page of 2500 copies of that paper. The originals were all destroyed (save a few that I kept for posterity, but never distributed under threat of suspension) in a casual waste of our natural resources.
Fast forward to the present, where the Bible Club at Downingtown East is suing the district for permission to practice their religious beliefs in school.
As an adult, I have more complex feelings about school now than I did when I was an altruistic teenager, but my underlying sentiment is basically the same: Do not infringe on the freedoms of others, and you should be granted your own freedoms.
These kids should be allowed to call their club whatever they like. They should be allowed to put the symbols of their religion on their posters around the school. Just like any school club, they need to follow certain guidelines to hang these posters, and one of those guidelines is that the poster should not interfere with the education of other students. It should also not characterize the school as supporting one religion or another.
For me, this line is reasonably easy to draw, and the school district needs to recognize that these people in high school are but a scant few months away from having none of the shielding afforded by school protection laws, and will need to make those harder decisions for themselves. It would be better to acclimate them to the change gradually, wouldn’t you think? It’s not like they don’t make those choices every day in the hours outside of their lessons, anyway.
On the other hand, suing the school to insist that they allow you time to pursue your beliefs may be a bit outside the warrant. Should the school be forced to include a prayer time during homeroom? No. Should the shool be forced to allow religious clubs to preach their beliefs to an administration-assembled student body? No. And even though they should have the same freedoms as any other organization under the school’s umbrella, they should have the same restrictions.
That it’s more difficult to evision the National Honor Society vamping around campus insulting the GPA of other students wouldn’t make it any less offensive if it happened. The Golf Club shouldn’t take an opportunity at school assemblies to belittle the audience who did not participate in last weeks tournament, or who chose to participate in some other sport instead. These strictures already exist on these other groups - there is no special rule that is applied to a Bible Club purely because they are religious. It’s just that it’s easier to slab yourself with a knife than a block of wood.
The school is simply taking too hard a line in saying that they should be careful that they don’t overstep their bounds as a club, since part of their mission seems to be to spread the word of the bible, and that would, by definition, be disruptive to the educational process. That the Bible Club (or it’s counsel) can’t see that their rhetoric could be damaging is typical of these blindered religious evangelists.
I think if all parties came to the table with a reasonable attitude, this issue could be peacefully and quickly resolved. Unfortunately, the administrators of the district are typically power-addled dictators that are socially out of touch and are afraid to make a decision based on reason rather than self-interest. And the people egging on the Bible Club actually are the piranha-like carrion-feeding lawyers and zealots that the school has a right to fear. Nobody is going to gain from this, and the outcome will have stupid and long-lasting repercussions.
Still, I can’t see how you can teach tolerance and yet be intolerant.
On the day my paper was finally released, I amused myself with the thought that the front page had a white-out gap where my words once were, and one could do naught but wonder what those words might have said.
