Comments Elsewhere

Irfan: “Don’t quite see how schoolchildren have carte blanche to say what they want on school time while receiving an important guest.”

I don’t quite see how schools have carte blanche to use institutionalized force to compel students to attend “visits” from “important guests” that they’re not interested in. Since the schools have men with guns to back up their rudeness and the students generally don’t, I tend to find the former a lot more worrisome than the latter, and am also a lot less inclined to find fault with the latter when it’s in response to the former.

I also don’t see what any of this has to do with the “importance” (to whom?) of the guest. If shouting down a speaker is inappropriate in a given context I can’t for the life of me imagine any reasons that would make it more inappropriate just because the speaker is “important.” In a republican polity government functionaries are people just like you and me. They are not owed special courtesies that aren’t owed to other ordinary people.

Irfan: “A school is not a municipality, its rules are not laws, and one would think that the school has some standards of decorum, which ought to be upheld.”

This would be more convincing if both attendence and funding of government schools were not compulsory. But it is. So what difference have their edicts got from laws, other than the point of origin?

Irfan: “Don’t quite see how schoolchildren have carte blanche to say what they want on school time while receiving an important guest.”

I don’t quite see how schools have carte blanche to use institutionalized force to compel students to attend “visits” from “important guests” that they’re not interested in. Since the schools have men with guns to back up their rudeness and the students generally don’t, I tend to find the former a lot more worrisome than the latter, and am also a lot less inclined to find fault with the latter when it’s in response to the former.

I also don’t see what any of this has to do with the “importance” (to whom?) of the guest. If shouting down a speaker is inappropriate in a given context I can’t for the life of me imagine any reasons that would make it more inappropriate just because the speaker is “important.” In a republican polity government functionaries are people just like you and me. They are not owed special courtesies that aren’t owed to other ordinary people.

Irfan: “A school is not a municipality, its rules are not laws, and one would think that the school has some standards of decorum, which ought to be upheld.”

This would be more convincing if both attendence and funding of government schools were not compulsory. But it is. So what difference have their edicts got from laws, other than the point of origin?