Author:
RR
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Date Posted: 21:02:24 05/25/01 Fri
Student rights are important, but it is difficult to make rules pertaining to them. One major problem is a lack of parental guidance and discipline of children. When poorly controlled children enter the school system, the parents essentially leave it up to the teachers to keep order in the classroom. Parents with badly behaved children often are unaware of the problems with their children because there is poor parent-child communication or because the children lie to the parents. When such children become problems in the classroom, the teachers must keep order and protect the other students from bullying. Teachers also want to make their classrooms pleasant learning environments where students feel safe. However, when a few students act up (ie: specific types of misconduct happen in the classroom), other students lose privileges as well, and sometimes so many privileges are lost (for instance, in schools where students have to use clear plastic backpacks so that they cannot conceal weapons in their backpacks) it begins to feel like a loss of rights to the students. The problem is that the teachers are between a rock and a hard place: the parents will complain that their students are being maltreated or are losing their rights, and yet, the school has to enforce some rules to fulfill teaching goals.
There is also something to be said about "fairness" and "rights." People often confound the ideas of what is "fair" with what is "right" (I know I do it myself!). Therefore, an issue of fairness becomes something bigger. For instance, an excellent teacher I know used to discourage talking out of turn in his class by assigning all students more homework after a series of "strikes"-3 strikes, and you get more homework. As a relatively quiet student, it was an extremely frustrating thing to have this happen to me! However, it was relatively effective. Now, the school will no longer allow this incredible teacher to do his job as he sees fit. Too many parents complained about how it was "wrong" to assign more homework to the students. When I was in his class, this teacher's methods seemed very cruel to me, but I now realize that I learned a great deal from him.
The question is, how far do we go with student rights and keep the classroom from becoming a zoo? Now that children are killing other children and teachers and getting away with murder (quite literally), student rights are quickly changing. Schools must be more rigid and enforce rules that seem to go against the student right to privacy as societal values change. The problem is that parents (justifiably) don't want teachers disciplining their kids (it's not the teachers' job to discipline the kids, either!), but some parents don't do that job properly themselves. How does society prevent future problems while not violating the rights of the students?
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