FURTHER COMMENT
Conniff, Ruth
FURTHER COMMENT Ruth Conniff Let's Have Fewer Rules My alma mater, Madison East High School, made the national news recently. Perhaps you saw the story. It was about a painting in the school art...
...Not only did she get her article on the "Madonna with Rat" published, she is now helping to organize a forum at East on youth and civil liberties, and she's inviting a representative from the ACLU...
...Anna's article came out in the Tower Times—a carefully researched, excruciatingly well-balanced story, in which she explored the legal history and philosophy behind policies affecting free speech in the public schools...
...We consider the schools to be acting in place of parents," Aquine Jackson, director of the division of parent/student services for the Milwaukee public schools explained...
...There's nothing like overbearing institutional authority to bring out the defiant adolescent in people—even parents...
...But I tried to argue on the panel that too many authoritarian rules have a negative effect...
...There are so manv risks...
...It's a slippery slope, apparently, from Advil to the hard stuff...
...That's a lot more than can be said for the Stale Journal, which, after pumping up the "Madonna with Rat" story in the news section, printed a rabid editorial excoriating the school for displaying "this derisive, satiric, age-inappropriate painting in the first place...
...And they create an oppressive environment...
...Is there absolutely no common-sense limit on the ever-more-restrictive trend in the schools...
...It's heartening to see parents and students refuse to be cowed...
...They make kids jaded and resentful...
...Since those words were published, gangs and increased violence in the schools—kids getting shot for wearing the wrong colors, or turning their hats the wrong way—have made free expression a trickier issue...
...But Milwaukee public-schools administrator Robert Nelson explained that he has seen snap-shots of whole families standing around holding automatic weapons, with kids as young as six months old wearing gang paraphernalia...
...Despite the best efforts of school officials and the Morality in Media committee to suppress it, the "Madonna with Rat" story spread like a prairie fire...
...The painting caused a lot of controversy...
...I just don't want a rat nursing on a woman," she explained...
...Then there was the eleven-year-old in South Carolina who was suspended for carrying a dull-edged knife in her lunch box to cut a piece of chicken...
...USA Today ran it, then Newsweek picked it up...
...One absurd story after another has been appearing around the nation lately about school administrators cracking down on kids...
...School officials nabbed the girl by using drug-sniffing dogs to check lockers during gym class...
...What with all the news about gangs and drugs and "predatory" crimes, it's easy to get the impression that if there's one thing teenagers need it's less freedom and more reining in...
...The editors denied that they were advocating censorship: "Censorship is when the powers-that-be tell artists what they can or cannot create," the editors wrote...
...It practically gives one hope...
...You want these kids lo know they're not supposed to have anv of this...
...It often seems as though there is absolutely no limit on the number of rules and regulations we're willing to impose on kids...
...Surely this was an overreaction...
...It was about a painting in the school art gallery called "Madonna with Rat...
...They telegraph the message that we don't trust students...
...The difference was driven home by a couple of actual parents in the audience who got up to leave early...
...The local police showed up and arrested her at the schoolhouse door...
...Madonna as in the Blessed Mother, that is...
...Free expression, when you get right down to it, is a radically optimistic principle...
...The principal in that case...
...The Advil violated a zero-tolerance drug policy...
...There are rules against hats, against wearing certain colors, against having one pant leg rolled up, or one overall strap hanging loose over your shoulder...
...In Illinois, an African-American seventh-grader was sent home from Rickover Junior High for wearing her hair in braids...
...As a nation, we are increasingly tolerant of repression these days, especially in the schools...
...Busch said...
...The ACLU issued its policy directive on free speech for secondary-school students in 1968—in many ways a considerably more optimistic era...
...Think twice next time before you smile at a six-month-old baby wearing a cap...
...That's a pretty pitiful standard of free speech for a newspaper to promote...
...We shouldn't trivialize this...
...A week later, teenagers around the country got to see "Madonna with Rat" featured on the "Weekend Update" segment of Saturday Night Live...
...Steve Busch of Riverwood High, told The Washington Post that the girl's suspension was a moderate punishment considering the gravity of her crime...
...It must have been a slow news day when the State Journal piece went out over the wires, because "Madonna with Rat" began showing up everywhere...
...Anna had a long time to think about that—the student paper doesn't come out very often—and it weighed heavily on her...
...The Stare Journal quoted outraged citizens, as well as the artist, who, it turns out, is an ardent animal-rights activist and a rat-lover...
...And particularly when it comes to teenagers, the country is not in a very optimistic mood...
...The painting, by local artist Valerie Mangione, showed the Madonna suckling a large white rat...
...The public schools have become more and more restrictive over the last decade, thanks to a series of court decisions that give school officials broad powers to search lockers, control the content of student newspapers, and generally curtail students' rights...
...But I just don't like it...
...The painting may not have cleared up any misunderstandings, but it certainly caught on...
...Take Anna...
...There was the girl in Texas, an honor student, who was suspended for carrying a bottle of Advil in her backpack...
...Another member of the audience, a forty-seven-year-old man, announced to the administrators that he would have been the kid who wore one of his overalls straps unbuckled (in violation of the "no-gang-signs" rule) just to take them to court over it...
...Before she headed out the door, one mother told Jackson that she was going to tell her daughter to carry a bottle of Midol to school when she had her period, and not hand it over to the school nurse, in flagrant violation of the Milwaukee public schools' zero-tolerance drug policy...
...not the pop star...
...Helen Nicholson, chairwoman of the ominous-sounding Morality in Media committee of the Madison Catholic Women's Club, called the school to complain...
...All of this provided an entertaining study of art and free expression for the students at East High School...
...She had to overcome a lot of opposition to do what schools ought to encourage— thinking hard about an issue that's fundamental to our system of government, researching it, developing an opinion, debating it...
...But, of course, schools are not parents...
...The common thread in these stories, besides their outright silliness, is the seemingly unlimited, unreasonable power of school authorities...
...It so happened that one of the girls I coach on the East cross-country team, Anna Shelton, was writing a story about the art gallery for the school paper when the "Madonna with Rat" issue erupted...
...The two school officials folded their arms and frowned...
...It's also up to the schools to transmit the basic tenets of democracy, one of which is free expression...
...I felt for them...
...But it turned out that she didn't have to take full responsibility for the controversy...
...Finally...
...Persuaded by the vehemence—if not the logical force—of that argument, and under pressure from other members of the community who said the painting was "offensive to Catholics and women...
...Censorship is when those powers threaten artists with official punishment—fines or imprisonment, for example—if the artists violate the guidelines...
...They're bureaucratic institutions...
...school officials said the braids were a gang sign...
...Kids are always testing the limits of authority, and it's up to the schools to impose some kind of structure and order...
...Ruth Conniff is the Managing Editor of The Progressive...
...But it seems to be a sign of the times...
...Maybe I relate to them so much because I feel misunderstood," she said...
...Censorship is what happened during the bad old days of the Soviet Union, for instance, when artists could be sent to the gulag for producing anti-Soviet works...
...So while some rules might seem silly, he said, the situation is graver than you might imagine...
...First the Wisconsin State Journal ran a feature on the front page of the local news section, along with a large color photo of the painting...
...East principal Milton McPike took it down...
...Iparticipated in a panel discussion in Milwaukee recently, sponsored by the ACLU, on civil liberties in the schools...
...If secondary-school students are to become citizens trained in the democratic process, they must be given every opportunity to participate in the school and in the community with rights broadly analogous to those of adult citizens," the policy guide states...
...In the Milwaukee schools, administrators are preoccupied with gangs—hence a proliferation of rules regulating student dress to stamp out gang signs...
...Anna said some of her teachers warned her that if her story was too controversial, the school might close down the whole art gallery once and for all...
...Eunice Edgar, former director of the ACLU of Wisconsin, pointed out one extreme case in Milwaukee: A teacher confiscated a six-year-old's painter's cap at school, because she said it was a gang sign...
...When she asked her teacher if she could use the knife, the teacher turned her in...
...Just look at the kind of rebelliousness they have to put up with...
...If that artist wanted to do that, that's her business...
...The dangers cited are so dire, it's hard to argue on the side of restraining the authoritarian impulse and protecting freedom for teenagers...
...Her mission, she said, is to elevate the status of rats...
Vol. 60 • December 1996 • No. 12
