Some things just aren’t fair. As a high school student, I experience this concept all too often. Would I be completely wrong if I compared my amount of educational freedom to someone who’s locked in prison? I mean, we start class at exactly 7:20 AM with exactly six minutes- no more, no less- going to and from the same six subjects we aimlessly walk to everyday. We have exactly 30 minutes for lunch- no going off of the campus- and then we return to the same boring schedule until we finally go home at exactly 2:10 PM. This “exactness” makes school everything that it shouldn’t be. We are no longer excited to learn, we dread it. The question is: how can we change this?
We can stop this vicious cycle by letting our lives be a “counter friction” to “stopping the machine” (Thoreau 385) that is the school system. As Thoreau suggests, demonstrating civil disobedience is a great way to gain freedom. In the school system, we can do this in many different ways. For instance, refusing to show up at 7:20 AM, and instead coming at 8:30 AM. If everyone participated, eventually, the school would have to make a compromise.
Similarly, if all students decided to violate the dress code in protest of wearing hats, for example, eventually we might get our way. Through these demonstrations, we are successfully being civilly disobedient. No violence, just peace and protest. According to Thoreau, this is the “definition of a peaceable revolution” (Thoreau 387). If we really wanted to, we could make this happen. The school can’t possibly discipline everyone, can they?
