Students Right to Free Speech

As we talked about students rights to free speech, it made me think a lot about what students should be allowed to say and what they should not. There are so many things in this world that can offend someone and people need to learn about that, which is why schools cannot restrict everything that may offend someone. Students need to learn about what goes on in the real world and what may happen. On the other hand, there are certain topics that need to be restricted because some issues may offend people to the point where it disrupts their learning and the point of school is to learn. In a case that we read during class, kids were wearing black armbands to school to protest the Vietnam War. The school stated a policy saying that if kids wore the armband, they would be suspended. The case went to court and they agreed that it was unconstitutional. Students should be allowed to express their opinion and they were not disrupting other students when wearing these armbands. They were merely stating their opinion and part of learning in school is that kids should learn about other opinions in their school and in the world. I agreed with the courts decision because I believe that there are so many opinions in this world that may offend someone but people should get used to that. This was not disrupting learning and if it was offending someone, they need to lean to ignore it and find a way to deal with it.