Self-expression is an essential part of growing – growing as a person and simply growing up. Even in places like school self-expression is essential.
English, a subject taught in every school is a class that helps student’s expression nourish. Students can use opinion pieces, narratives, and expository essays as outlets to express themselves.
Along with English, classes like journalism supply a conduit for students’ views and passions. However, no matter where you go censorship will be rampant. All students are still developing their likes and dislikes and limiting them from certain information is essentially harmful.
Naite Tan, a student at Santa Rosa shared her opinion on censorship in a school setting. “I don’t think students’ work should really be censored unless it was doing something really bad – like preaching about Hitler.” Tan said “It’s a really gray area, censorship can be good and bad.”
Censorship itself is a gray area. There’s no definitive good or bad to it, it could be beneficial but by the same coin, it could be detrimental. Censorship of certain groups or topics could lead to mass propaganda. A good example of this could be the censorship of sexual education in some schools. This could lead to detrimental mistakes in the future.
Another example of this is the censorship of Ethnic and Queer struggles in the media. Censorship of these groups halts encouragement of seeing things from a different perspective; one that the audience may not deal with or consider.
School is a kirk of learning, everyone has the ability to learn about whatever they wish. Along with this, Students have the right to share their opinions at school, especially freedom of speech.
“It’s important to keep the unfiltered truth,” student Tiffany Nguyen says. “There’s a lot of fake news nowadays. There’s always new information circulating and it’s all too fast to follow.”
The news and articles should always have the unfiltered truth, even if it’s from an opinion standpoint. Opinion articles are always from the author’s own truth whether it be actual or not. Nobody must comply to take down or revise a huge portion of their truth to satisfy someone else.
At the end of the day, a student’s opinion is not the end all be all. It should definitely be taken into account but should also be examined critically. Students’ voices and expressions are important to help them flourish and grow as people.
