Education is becoming militarized. Teachers and administrators give orders, and students are expected to follow them. The Louisiana legislature recently passed a law treating elementary school children like little army recruits. The desire to regiment students is sometimes quite overt. Soldiers don't generally enjoy much autonomy, even off duty, and neither do students these days.
School administrators take an expansive, totalitarian view of their own jurisdiction.
Numerous suspensions of students for the things they say in Internet chat rooms and other instances of cyberspeech exemplify this disturbing trend, but administrators have also targeted more traditional forms of childhood play. In Houston, officers wearing bulletproof vests, trained in assault tactics, and equipped with dogs as well as guns, are patrolling middle schools, high schools, and school neighborhoods. Students in the Houston schools will soon be subject to random, bimonthly searches for drugs and weapons. It's Giuliani time in many public schools. Adults fear the sexuality of teens, or envy their youth, or worry about their judgment, or, like Dr. Frankenstein, they want to mold their little monsters instead of allowing them their freedom to develop.