Mandating Dissent
Reading Gerritt’s and Daryl’s sites a few weeks ago, I came across an interesting story on an incident at a high school in their home county in Maryland. Essentially, two girls jumped up onto a table during lunch and made out, so they got suspended for a couple of days.
In a move that might remind you of my steel-tariff article, I’m going to avoid moral discussion of the event itself (although this time it’s out of reluctance to fight the same old battle, rather than lack of knowledge as with tariffs). What I’d like to take issue with is what prompted the act in the first place:
Haaser, a junior, said she chose to make the statement as part of an English class assignment, which required that she engage in a nonconformist act in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Is it really a nonconformist act if an authority figure mandates that you do it? It seems to me that, y’know, doing your homework is a rather conformist act.
Now, since we’ve ruled out non-conformism as a defining factor for the desired act, let’s take a look at what we could call it. For that, we might as well look at Thoreau himself. His most famous work is, of course, On Civil Disobedience, in which he essentially rails on the State (and in passing equates the Church with the State) for quite a few things he views as offenses. In today’s political environment, I have an awfully tough time believing that a teachers’ union member would extol Thoreau’s actions as (at least superficial) proto-libertarianism. That leads me to the conclusion that this teacher was requiring an act of leftist socio-political protest as a homework assignment.
Explication of the many reasons to be upset at that I shall leave as an exercise to the reader. Perhaps refusing to carry out this assignment would have been the best “non-conformist” act of all.
10 December 2003 / 0 Comments / Tags: politics