Blog 4: Strip Searches in School

This is one of those moments where I reflect upon my own thoughts and realize that some of the ways that teaching has changed me are profoundly negative.  Reading about the current Supreme Court case on schools pressing for the right to conduct strip searches, I feel terrible that there is a part of me that sees it as reasonable.  While the case is concerned with drugs, which I see no reason to conduct a strip search for, I can relate to the paranoia felt by teachers when it comes to students hiding razor blades and other dangerous items in their clothes.  While it does not seem to be a problem at our school, I know it is at many and I can not imagine how one could deal with that kind of fear of one's students on top of the other difficulties of teaching.  However, the concerns of teachers should not determine what rights someone may or may not have.  The concept of rights exist to defend human dignity from concerns of convenience and even security.  To me, it is appalling to think of principals and vice principals having the right to decide whether or not there is probable cause to invade the privacy of a teenage boy or girl.  Schools will never be completely secure and even if they were, ti would not justify making students an even lower class of citizen than they already are considered.

 For that reason, the majority of my thinking falls on the inside that such a development would be truly awful.  Beyond ethical concerns, it does not make pedagogical sense either.  Schools and classrooms, at the best though certainly not at present, are supposed to model for children the kind of society that we would like them to perpetuate.  What message are we sending if we tell them that their privacy can be invaded by the people in charge of their education?  Also, I cannot speak for my students, but how do we expect children to obtain a meaningful education in a place that is essentially a minimum security prison?  As it is, I think we are seeing the effect of public schools causing students to feel antagonized by academics and it seems like we are only making it worse by the year and, like I said, there are times where I can't help but feel a part of it.  While I am still ideologically opposed to corporal punishment and authoritarian approaches to education more generally, I am on a daily basis engaged in a system that does it, without being disgusted, and am often pleased when a student is paddled or when I succeed in putting a trouble making student in his or her "place".  Of course, these schools are in such conditions that I'm not sure there are many other approaches to take to it, but I remain unhappy with the system I am complicit with and this article only makes it worse.