Rhetorical Reading Response: "War on HighSchool"

In this informative article, "The War on High Schools" by Wendy Kaminer (1999),  Kaminer claims that schools in during that time had a zero tolerance policy in schools that could poosibly be hurting instead of helping students. The author of this story supports her thesis by sharing her personal experiences and using that to strengthen her point. The purpose of this article was to share with others how the "zero tolerance policy" in schools was developed in order to help but instead it ended up causing a lot of new cases with high school students which in turn hurt them. This article's audience was anyone who wanted to know about the school system in that time period.

The assigned reading for this blog is called "The War on High Schools". It is essentially stating how as students our rights to free speech and individuality are monitored and or taken away. For example, in the reading there was a teenager who wore a pro-vegan t-shirt to school and was held under suspension by the federal courts because his shirt was a "gang symbol ". As a response to the t-shirt incident the Judge on that case stated that “Schools need to run, and administrators need to make rules,” and finished by saying “That’s the only reason they exist.” "The desire to regiment students is sometimes quite overt. Character First, a character education program for elementary school students, requires children to memorize this poem about attentiveness: “I will look at someone speaking / And I’ll listen all I can / I will sit or stand up straight / like a soldier on command.”" That poem alone is evident that students no longer have the right to openly express themselves and that their right to free speech is stripped away. That upsets me beyond any scale because not only does that affect their school life but their private lives as well. Due to their school's strict policy they will no longer feel comfortable expressing themselves and this will probably cause chaos for them growing up because they may always feel like everything they do is controlled. 

Wendy Kaminer uses her personal experiences and factual evidence from around the country to strengthen her information on high schools, and how the school systems are bigoted. Her remark “They’re suspending and expelling even grade school students for making what might be considered, at worst, inappropriate remarks, dressing oddly, or simply expressing political opinions” indicated that the administration would nitpick at every ounce of freedom the students tried to obtain (Kaminer paragraph3). They explained their reasoning as being “fearful of violence and drugs” (Kaminer paragraph 3). Although Kaminer described most of her high school staff to be unpleasant, she stated that “There were some very good teachers that encouraged curiosity” (Kaminer paragraph1). High schools in the mid-1960’s was similar to those of today, in the aspect of making students feel like they have no rights when it comes to discipline, “Americas public schools are becoming increasingly Kafkaesque”, Kaminer says (Kaminer paragraph3). She entails on the problems the students in different countries have with the school system to display that these outrageous punishments are not in only occurring in one area. Kaminer states that a 10^th grade boy in Virginia was suspended for “dying his hair blue” (Kaminer paragraph 4). School systems are taking unnecessary precautions, not realizing that they are making students feel like they are in a box. Questions that Kaminer asked accompanying those feelings were, “Why do we treat students like criminal subjects?”, “How will students learn about freedom when schools treat censorship and conformity as social goods?” (Kaminer paragraph12). Kaminer does a great job of using these examples and questions to get her point across to the readers.