Thought Crime

To hell with freedom of expression! That’s the message being sent by the thought police at Roswell High School who have expelled a girl for writing in her journal about DREAMING ABOUT killing a teacher. Call me crazy, but this seems a little extreme.

Certainly without seeing what she actually wrote it would be hard to make a well-informed decision, so I’ve developed an ill-informed one. Nevertheless, here we’re talking about a 14-year-old girl writing fictional stories in a JOURNAL. Now, we do have to question the brilliance of a girl who would bring this kind of thing to school, but I have to wonder where it’s going to stop.

After all, it’s not a big step to go from punishing the contents of a private journal brought to a public place to punishing the contents of a public journal (AKA blog). Because teens are taking to blogging at younger and younger ages (my little sister has one) it stands to reason that this could become a much more serious issue.

Consider this — pretend that a student in Roswell, GA had a blog and wrote the same things in that blog that this girl wrote in her personal journal. What would happen if one of her teachers stumbled across it whilst googling for something else? Is there a difference? Where does it stop? What if a teacher finds a student talking disparagingly about him/her and decides to go hunting through the rest of the blog for ammo?

It’s been pretty well known that you just shouldn’t blog about work (with identifying details) — should kids also, now, refrain from blogging about school for fear that the Thought Police will get them?

Maybe we should have a pool for how long it’ll take for the first high school kid to be suspended for blogging something. Thoughts?