Fast Times at Roseville High

Two separate events at Roseville High School are worth a look.

1. A male student is in custody for blackmailing a younger female student. The male student apparently had videotaped the younger student performing a "sex act" and had threatened to post her exploits on the Internet. In order to forestall that, the male student had demanded that the female student perform "sex acts" on him and, apparently, one or more of his friends. He then expanded his demands that she provide him with gas money. Police have apparently confiscated several tapes from the male student.
2. Meanwhile, an ever-popular pedagogical chestnut went wrong during a "dramatization" for "Banned Books Week." Apparently a RHS librarian, attempting to show what happens when books are banned, began tossing copies of books into a box that was decorated with flames. The books included perennials such as "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "A Catcher in the Rye." But then the librarian went too far. He tossed a copy of the Koran into the box, then a Bible. Among the students attending the spectacle was a Muslim student, who apparently felt that tossing a Koran into a box decorated with flames represented desecration of the Sacred Koran. She went to an outside Muslim advocacy group, which demanded, and got, a public apology from the school district for the librarian's heinous crime. He has also been ordered by the school district not to comment further on the matter and apparently has some cultural sensitivity training on tap.

So what do these two events have in common? I've been trying to figure it out, but I think the common thread is coercion. It's obvious in the first case - teenagers are awash in a culture of sex and apparently it's quite difficult these days to avoid getting involved with sexuality at a very young age. It's easy to blame all this on the usual bad example suspects (Bill Clinton, Britney Spears, various Minnesota Vikings, etc.), but ultimately the issue is not bad behavior by public people as much as it is confusing freedom with license and, in the end, entitlement. I've always had misgivings about the sexual revolution. While I understand that young people are going to experiment and that a "just say no" approach won't stop kids, I think the freedom to explore sexuality has become a license and potentially a requirement. It's not cool to say no and it would be easy to imagine that the young female student felt coercion to perform well before she was caught on tape and then faced the overt coercion of a blackmailer. You can call this atmosphere a lot of things, but it's not freedom.

Then there's the matter of the Koran incident. It's evident that the librarian was trumpeting free speech in his own tendentious way, but he ends up getting silenced. Free speech certainly includes the right to complain, so I don't have an issue with the Muslim student complaining about the demonstration per se. What concerns me is that the school district felt compelled to publicly apologize for the librarian's actions. Why should anyone apologize? And why announce the show trial results for the librarian? If the argument is that people should be more sensitive, again, the question is, why? The unsubtle point the librarian was making is that there are those who would censor books because their goal is to censor thought. And as the riots and violence surrounding the publication of cartoons depicting Mohammed amply demonstrate, there's pressure on the larger Western society to accept Islamic strictures on speech and behavior. If we are serious about free speech, that means we can't have educators apologizing for championing free speech. And we need to remain vigilant. Kids quickly understand the distinction between the lessons that are taught, and the lessons that are learned. And Roseville High School seems to be teaching a lesson here. It's one that blackmailers implicitly understand.