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You can’t talk about that in a high school!
By Ned | March 25, 2007
A few people have brought this to my attention: at Wilton High in my very own state of Connecticut, the principal has intervened to prevent kids from putting on a self-written play about Iraq. from the article:
For the spring semester, students in the advanced theater class took on a bigger challenge: creating an original play about the war in Iraq. They compiled reflections of soldiers and others involved, including a heartbreaking letter from a 2005 Wilton High graduate killed in Iraq last September at age 19, and quickly found their largely sheltered lives somewhat transformed.
…
But even as 15 student actors were polishing the script and perfecting their accents for a planned April performance, the school principal last week canceled the play, titled “Voices in Conflict,” citing questions of political balance and context.
The principal, Timothy H. Canty, who has tangled with students before over free speech, said in an interview he was worried the play might hurt Wilton families “who had lost loved ones or who had individuals serving as we speak,” and that there was not enough classroom and rehearsal time to ensure it would provide “a legitimate instructional experience for our students.”
“It would be easy to look at this case on first glance and decide this is a question of censorship or academic freedom,” said Mr. Canty, who attended Wilton High himself in the 1970s and has been its principal for three years. “In some minds, I can see how they would react this way. But quite frankly, it’s a false argument.”
It’s kind of disturbing to me that the concept of “balance” has become so fetishized. How on earth could art possibly be balanced? The article mentions that in previous years the school had staged productions of plays like The Crucible. Maybe the principal should have blocked that one for being overly sympathetic towards witches.
On the other hand, if this is an explicitly school-sponsored or school-funded activity, it seems like there’s little the kids can do to reverse this decision. It might not have been school-sponsored, though; I’m not exactly sure how even my own high school drama club operates on that score, so it’s certainly possible that this was a completely independent production. It doesn’t really say in the article. But the fact that, as the article says, the kids were discouraged from putting on the play even off-campus, means that this whole case stinks of censorship.
Oh, and then there’s this:
The current issue of the student newspaper, The Forum, includes an article criticizing the administration for requiring that yearbook quotations come from well-known sources for fear of coded messages. After the Gay Straight Alliance wallpapered stairwells with posters a few years ago, the administration, citing public safety hazards, began insisting that all student posters be approved in advance.
Around the same time, the administration tried to ban bandanas because they could be associated with gangs, prompting hundreds of students to turn up wearing them until officials relented.
This is an interesting case to me, as a member of the NCAC’s Youth Advisory Board, a high school student, and a CT resident. Expect some more on this story here as more information comes out.
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