Wednesday, February 17, 2010

The Principal of the Thing

No, I did not use the wrong homonym...read on:

I was reading this story on CNN, which has many facets that I will not explore. The facet I would like to explore is from this quote:
Bayer [the school principal] also removed her from Advanced Placement classes and assigned her to regular classes.

That's right...this student was punished by banning her from learning!

As someone who was yanked out of AP classes as punishment ("If you aren't going to get good grades in advanced classes, you will have to go back to regular ones!"--which then caused me to be bored out of my skull until I finally dropped out, and which really didn't address the root of the issue as I learned what they wanted me to learn but simply refused to perform the way they wanted me to perform--seriously, can you tell yet why I homeschool?), I am appalled. Ninety percent of the students in school feel like knowledge is being shoved down their throats (I made that statistic up) and you take on of the tiny fraction who are hungry for knowledge and take it away? That should seriously be illegal. Clearly this principal doesn't actually have her students' education at the top of her list of priorities. Oh, no, it's all about conformity of thought...and here I could digress into areas that are best left untouched today.

1 comment:

Cynthia said...

They severely punished the girl. She was dropped from AP classes, which could significantly alter her life. It would take her longer to get through college and would increase the cost of going to college. I hope the school is required to compensate her for her time and money.