But “this school has no lesbians” is not an okay image to want to project.
Statistically, the school is going to have some lesbians in it. I’m no sure if you’ve ever known someone who was closeted in high school, but it’s really fucking heartbreaking. My best friend got to stand by watching while the parents at his school boycotted a GLBT group that was going to hold an assembly. He just bit his tongue as it was reinforced to him once again that he was a freak, had a shameful secret, would never live a normal life, was unwanted in his community and should probably go curl up and die somewhere. It took four long years (full of bitter dances and proms, awkward attempts to date girls, lots of being afraid someone would find out) to get him to college. When he walked on campus there was a GLBT reception. From that day on, being gay never caused him another moment of pain.
And oddly, learning and education still managed to go on in that college- perhaps at even a greater rate than at his well-regulated high school.
And I bet there wasn’t school standard headwear that you could wear either?
Welcome to private college. In my old town there was a school that didn’t allow make-up or anything non-uniform right down to the socks. That included keeping a natural hair colour. Do I think that’s wrong? No. I don’t believe it’s “opression”. You’re a kid, it’s school. You’re there to learn. Why the hell would I feel the need to make some sort of political or social statement there? Why can’t I make it elsewhere? Does it have something to do with a captive audience?
What about “this school doesn’t like shirts with social or politiical slogans on them on photo day”? It’s unprofessional, regardless of what the shirt says.
I don’t think you quite understand that Australia is a country where enforced uniforms are the norm. We don’t feel that wearing a uniform “oppresses” us. School is a standardised system. It is not about “individuality” or “freedom of speech”. It is about education.
If the school had that policy, they could go ahead and enforce it. But unless it just got left out of the story, they had no such policy and singled out this girl not because of their policy, but because they were concerned about how parents would react when they saw the yearbook. I think school uniforms are ridiculous anyway, but setting that aside, the real problem here is that the girl was singled out, and what she was singled out for.
I don’t believe she was singled out for being a lesbian. Rather, wearing a stupid slogan shirt.
I don’t believe school uniforms are ridiculous, and I also don’t believe it is ridiculous to enforce some sort of standard on photo day. The parents are their customers. They are a business. If a business told an employee that no, they couldn’t wear their Che Guevera “Fight the resistance!” shirt on inspection day, would you be so worried?
Under US law you could. Dunno about Australian law.
What does their opportunity later in life to exercise their rights have do do with their desire to exercise their rights now?
Except they must act within the bounds of the law.
Not under US law as I understand it.
Not the same thing. In most cases, one’s employer is a private entity which is allowed much greater latitude in setting policy on such things as dress and conduct than the school, legally an arm of the government, has. AFAIK the US standard in school speech cases is still Tinker, in which SCOTUS ruled that absent evidence that a dress restriction is necessary to avoid substantial interference with school discipline or the rights of others, the dress restriction is illegal.
Nor do I. But if they want to enforce a standard, they need to spell it out. That’s not asking very much. If they had a policy, be it “everybody wears uniforms on picture day,” “no shirts with writing on picture day,” or what have you, they could enforce that and avoid this whole mess. Instead, they singled out a student. You can say this wasn’t arbitrary, and perhaps other students were told their shirts weren’t okay. But at the moment, there’s no evidence for that. All we know is what happened to this one student.
No, I wouldn’t. A school isn’t just a business, and unless this particular one is a private school, I’m not sure it’s a business at all.
And all we know is from a press article. I cannot find any other articles that aren’t based off this article. And from going through the school’s newsletters, photo day was on the 9th, and the article wasn’t published until the 18th. So all we have is one person’s interpretation of what happened, a week after it happened.
I don’t know about how it works over there, but the number of students has a lot to do with how much funding a school gets.
In US public schools, you are generally assigned a school based on where you live. It is possible to transfer to a different school, but in most districts it’s a complicated process and it’s relatively rare.
Oh. Here, you can go to school almost anywhere you want (At least in my state). For example, my partner’s sister and brother attend/(ed) a school 30 minutes away, bypassing maybe 50 schools in between there and here. Why? The school has a great reputation.
And on preview Marley23, school’s like to stay open. They also don’t like using Pentium II’s in their labs and using 10 year old science equipment. I went to a very underfunded school. So underfunded, that we had to raise money so we could put a shade cloth up over an area outside of the cafeteria.