Via Ace –
This is that story you’ve heard: a student was silently reading a book called Notre Dame vs. the Klan, a book about Notre Dame’s efforts, um, versus the Klan. You know, the Klan being defeated.
A black student saw him reading it during their Spanish CLEP test practice class, and told him she didn’t like the Klan. The student agreed — the Klan is bad. She reported him anyway. And, incredibly, the university took action against the student for racial harassment.
Video here, but it makes a couple of notable mistakes – it seems to think that the fact that the student was reading a “good” book is what makes this such a tragedy. Last I checked, this is America. The student could be reading Mein Kampf or the Little Red Book for all the university should care, as there is no harm done to anyone by reading the book. To the contrary – this student might actually learn something! At a university, of all places! On the other hand, maybe that’s why they have such a problem with it. We can’t have the student learning anything that is outside of the standard doctrine, can we?
It’s an all-too-typical example of the decline and fall of American education into insanity and closed-mindedness. Some of you who frequent the geekier blogs may recall the incident reported by the HeliOS project, in which a teacher confiscated Linux discs from a student who was showing people his Linux install on his personal computer and then threatened the person who gave the student the Linux discs with legal action because “no software is free” and “Microsoft is the only legal software.” That case was another case of schools overstepping their boundaries and forcing a narrow – and decidedly incorrect – view onto students for no other reason than that The School Says So.
Now it may seem that this case is radically different than the one above because it’s talking about software instead of books, and about Linux instead of the Klan – but again, I remind you that in both cases the school was not addressing anything that was directly affecting the school, nor was it addressing something that was covered by any sort of law or institutional rule, but rather it was enforcing some sort of arbitrary standard onto these students who broke the mold that the teachers had set. It’s a nasty sight to see, coming from these places lauded as bastions of education and free-thinking.