This was a very interesting article. I am extremely surprised that the school took the stance that it did on using the word "redskins." It is my experience that schools tend to error on the side of conservative when dealing with touchy subjects such as gender, race, and religion. The fact that the school said outright that they "required" the students to use the word that some would consider racist is laughable. Someone was not thinking when they made that claim. I think that situations like this do somewhat neuter speech within schools. That being said, if a student does not want to use a particular word or language, they probably should note use force or punishment to ensure that the word IS used. This is bizarre to me. The only reason I could think they would have taken the road they did, was because they feared a snowball effect of language being deferred do to political agenda. But, on the other hand, that's what high schools make a habit of. This is a very unique situation. I would be curious to whether or not this has been addressed at other schools, you know, past the 1950's.
Dan,
ReplyDeleteAfter taking our Education Law class stories like this really peek my interest. I would like to know if there was more to this or a back story, because for a school to make the editor use the word redskins seems odd. If this was a story about sports then the editor should have been able to use Washington instead if they were uncomfortable with redskins.
Casey