do_While(True)

What. The. Fuck.

A bill approved by the U.S. House yesterday would require school districts around the country to establish policies making it easier for teachers and school officials to conduct wide scale searches of students. These searches could take the form of pat-downs, bag searches, or strip searches depending on how administrators interpret the law.

The Student Teacher Safety Act of 2006 (HR 5295) would require any school receiving federal funding--essentially every public school--to adopt policies allowing teachers and school officials to conduct random, warrantless searches of every student, at any time, on the flimsiest of pretexts. Saying they suspect that one student might have drugs could give officials the authority to search every student in the building.

I can not express how much this enrages me. And you know what's worse? They'd probably say some shit like "it's to protect the kids!" Protect the kids from what? Certainly not lecherous or bullying school staff. Certainly not from an invasion of privacy, or an attack on their human dignity. Certainly not from constant fear. "If you've done nothing wrong then you've nothing to fear" is always a load of crap, and especially when you're talking about arbitrarily-enforced searches for arbitrary or non-existant reasons. There're a lot of articles out there that compare public schools to prison, and this is getting disturbingly close.

There are no words.

And you know? People wonder why I'm so against schooling.
(Vector: amereternal)

"If you don't understand gender differences, you end up furthering gender stereotypes."

This is an interesting article because of the gender-issues it touches on. Though I'll have to read further on to decide what I think about the school system in question (I have a rather low opinion of education -- not to be confused with learning -- in general), I've always believed there are intrinsic hard-wired differences between boys and girls, and in light of that this seems to be a reasonable move. At the same time, though, I think one of the deficiencies in the current school system is the stratification of grades; that is, 12-year olds only ever interact with other 12-year olds, etc. One of the most beneficial experiences I had in homeschooling, in my opinion, was the regular interaction with people much older and much younger than myself. I hate the word 'diversity' because it's become so loaded, but there's something to be said, I think, for exposure to other people who think and act in ways and for reasons that are different from your own. Put another way, it may be the case that single-sex classes work and are a great improvement for learning, but even at that boys and girls should have significant enough exposure to each other.

I'll read this later and think on it more.