FOXNews reports on a high school student who is suing over a zero grade he received because he incorporated religious text into a landscape.
...assistant principal Cale Jackson told the boy his religious expression infringed on other students' rights.
Jackson told the boy, his stepfather and his pastor at a meeting a week later that religious expression could be legally censored in class assignments. Millin stated at the meeting the cross in the drawing also infringed on other students' rights.
I can somewhat identify with both sides of this debate. As a teacher, I've often been confronted with students who challenge my authority and supposedly liberal ideology by seeing how far they can push an evangelical agenda. You often have to resist an urge to shut down the student since they generally (note the generalization folks) don't seem to be understanding the actual point of what you are trying to do in class and are, for the most part, simply derailing pedagogy.
Don't be that student.
On the other hand, I can't really see giving a student a zero grade just for making a Christological argument...especially in an art class. I can see docking points for a student not following instructions (the students were assigned a landscape, and this particular fellow decided to add free-floating Bible citations in the air). The teacher also explicitly stated not to incorporate religious views, so the teacher is arguing that the student violated the terms of the syllabus.
I suspect the real issue is going to boil down to whether or not a teacher is legally permitted to strip a student of their right to religious expression. According to the law, does the expression of a religious viewpoint actually constitute an "infringement" on other students' rights, and therefore warrant a ban in a classroom.
I'm not exactly sure what rights these are. They sound an awful lot like rights to not have to tolerate other people's views. I didn't realize that my right to not have to listen to someone else's belief equated to a right to punish that person for expressing those beliefs. Here, I just thought it meant I had a right to plug my ears, to not believe it what I was told, or to speak to the contrary. Now that I know I can punish others for saying things that disagree with me, I imagine I will have much more interesting conversations in the future.
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