2 Winona High students put free speech to the test

Two high school students from Minnesota are in trouble because they are publicly presenting the idea that they are comfortable with their own bodies.

In a nutshell, the girls have started a rudimentary fashion trend of people wearing shirts and buttons proclaiming "I [heart] My Vagina" for the girls and "I Support Your Vagina" for the boys.

I won't argue if this act is free speech, a political statement protected by the U.S. Constitution, or anything else about what they are actually doing.

Instead, I'd like to point out that I read a dozen or more of these types of stories every year. A student or two at Podunkia High gets suspended for expressing his opinion. I seem to recall a recent debacle where an openly gay student was expelled because he wore a T-shirt that read something along the lines of "Too Gay to Function". Teenagers are opinionated. Who'da thunk it?

I think it's important to realize a little-known fact about the American school system. I think it's pretty obvious that the U.S. educational institution is not designed to educate. We are all led to believe this and for a great time I did, too. But schools are not meant to teach. They are meant to centralize the minors among a population to prevent disturbances in the society that would exist were they not contained.

Think about it. While you were in school, K through 12, 8 AM to 3 PM (or even 7:30 to 2:30) what were your parents doing? They were probably out working. And do you think your parents could have functioned, doing their jobs, if they had to find some way to care for you all day, too? Unless your parent ran a daycare center, the answer is probably no. Children are a burden: there's no two ways about it. The state provides a public means by which you can get rid of your children for seven or eight hours a day and try to get some work done. Education may be the guise, but the effect is to isolate the adults of society from the parental responsibilities of teaching thine own so that they in turn may benefit the society.

In many ways, public schools are prisons. Some schools are even largely indistinguishable from prisons: entrants walk through metal detectors and uniformed guards make routine sweeps through halls and lockers. My point is that prisons aren't places of open and free speech. As a prisoner, any act of nonconformity is a problem for the guards and for the warden. (I regard a warden as a single person, but the reality is that a warden is just the head of a large administrative staff that maintains the premises. I will continue to make this abstraction if that's OK with you.) The warden is only interested in keeping the status quo: prisoners stay docile, do their time, and then get out of his jail. In the meantime, he must find a way to keep the place running on increasingly smaller amounts of money year after year: food, water, heat, electricity, salaries, laundry, and so forth. A prison is a microcosm in and of itself. And so, too, is a school. A principal must pay teachers, aides, buy food, and keep the nurse up to her elbows in cold compresses and tongue depressers. The idea is the same.

And one thing that neither wardens nor principals want to have to face is the unbalanced equation brought about by independent thought. Prisoners have to be kept safe from themselves and each other; students have to pass statewide aptitude tests. And whenever an individual takes it upon himself to stir the pot, he is presenting a problem that the warden has not budgeted and is not well-equipped to handle. Conformity is cheap, which is why principals and wardens both hate troublemakers, even it that troublemaker is expressing a harmless and benign idea such as "I [heart] My Vagina". It's not that the principal hates vaginas. He might even wear such a button himself if the circumstances were different. But the fact is that an idea such as this is bound to stir up controversy among some Bible-thumping do-gooder who is ready and willing to sue the school for some asinine reason because everyone knows that vaginas are a sin and blah blah Jesus blah blah 6.8 million dollars.

I know it's crazy, but schools get sued for shit like this all the time and courts rule against 'em. So it comes as no surprise to me that vagina buttons are putting these two girls in hot water. It's not that the school doesn't believe in free speech (it doesn't), it's that provocative actions cause trouble. Jails are not a good place for expressing your political beliefs (ask Nelson Mandela), and neither are public schools. I wish there was a better way to give teenagers a voice for their opinions, but so long as you are spending your days on a state-financed, legally-authoritative campus of any sort, you are screwed. Free speech does not exist there.

I like these girls. I really do. If they wore their vagina buttons and shirts after school, there wouldn't be a problem. But in the United States, schools are meant to detain children and occupy their time, not actually empower them as citizens. It's sad that it's come to this, but there is no two ways about it: these girls are fighting a battle they've already lost. Prisoners can't hope to win a fight against the ideas that structure the prison. Students can't hope to win a fight against the ideas that structure the school. In a few months, some other student elsewhere will try something just as sensational, and I will see this story repeated again and again.

It's a good thing that nothing you do in high school really affects the rest of your life. I'd argue that they should fight the good fight, but there's just no point. It's high school. You do your four years and then you move onto reality and no one gives a fuck what you have to say about anything.