Student Government – Valiant Protection of Student Free Speech or Ridiculous Charade?
A Brief History of Student Government
In the beginning, there was only the principal. For nigh on 6,000 years it was so; a monopoly of educational governance by an administration. Then, the principle chose students in His own form – those that would later go on and continue in His way and His words. Finding that this really didn't work, the principle decided to relegate the whole thing to the Activities Director and have them plan parties – henceforth to be called pep rallies.
Student Government – How can we govern? Why do we govern? Where shall we have the parties?
Being the astute readers of Foliage that you are, you of course recall that our entire school was recently called to an assembly. It was actually less of an assembly – such a word denotes actual organization and order – rather, a pep rally. In a school where pep and school spirit are firmly concentrated in the morning meetings of a pseudo-autonomous student body, our leaders are appointed to due little else than complete the Herculean tasks of reading homeroom announcements and planning pep rallies.
Perhaps it's for the best that we let the supposed “Student Government” revel in completely nongovernmental activities. After all, we wouldn't like them to implement any of the propositions explained in previous issues of Foliage (zombie preparedness, safer sex, freedom of speech), now would we? Of course not. Then again, it is conceivable that pep rallies aid the Student Government in some way (we at Foliage are hard at work researching this possibility). Perhaps Albuquerque High School’s massive amount of brainwave activity is captured on a gymnasium-size Electroencephalograph machine and used to measure student support for a proposed schedule change. Then again, perhaps not.
Why would we want our student representatives to do anything other than plan big parties? Isn't that what every high school student wants—to skip class and party with black lights, scantily-clad cheerleaders, while athletes walk mutely onstage, huddle, and then anticlimactically amble off, everything set to the grating soundtrack of a hip-hop DJ’s cacophonous voice? Doesn't this propagate a horrible stereotype? Couldn't the money spent on a pep rally be better spent buying new computers or paying for track to go to Santa Fe? What would we have learned had we not spent a whole day reflecting on how pretty the black lights were? No, no, that is preposterous. Pep rallies are the ultimate instrument of high school education. Everybody knows that.
We at Foliage believe that Student Government could be used to prevent large-scale fights by providing a safe and responsive forum, and to propose improvements to the school to the principle and the rest of the administration. If a Student Government has no authority or even regular meetings with the principle of a school to discuss matters of concern, what use is it? Shouldn't it be reorganized, reformed, or even disbanded?
No way. It’s too much fun to party.
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