The Little Freedoms

I go to a school that had many strict rules that often seem gratuitous to the students. I have to obey rules such as asking a faculty member if I can be ride in our friend's car, even though I am technically an adult. I have to ask someone who is apparently more of an "adult" than I am if I can take my girlfriend of roughly two years up to my room (these supervisors are hardly ever in the dorm). Now, today my school received an email from our Dean of Students that was met with much wailing and much gnashing of teeth, as it introduced a new policy that covered a topic that most students considered a save haven: permission to go to a friend's house that is within walking distance.

According to the new policy, one must obtain permission from one's house counselors or cluster dean as well as have the friend's parent call to confirm that they will be present in order to make the five minute journey to visit that house. In my personal experience, when I go to a friend's house downtown, I am just visiting to say hello and to say hello to the parents of my friend. It is a different dynamic when you visit a friend at their home, and you interact with your friend's parents. These little visits build someone's relationship with his or her friend as well as her parents. These trips are also safe havens from the oppressive bubble that is my school.

I can understand that my school wants to protect itself from any potential litigation actions that a student's parents may take against the school because the student somehow got hurt or drank themselves into a stupor at the friend's house. It's understandable that my school as an institution wants to protect itself from these kinds of legal risks, but come on. I already have so many little aspects of my life that is managed and controlled that my school, though it professes as its mission to broaden the minds of its students, has limited my experiences. As a result, I feel I have not been as fully "educated" or experienced as many things as I could because I have nit-picking rules that hold me back. One may say, if the rules are so trifling, why don't you just take care of them? I'd love to. However, I as a person hate having my individual liberties being restricted by a bunch of individuals for reasons I think are stupid. Yeah, the school has to look after itself, so what if my parents (I think they would) wrote a letter that said "my technically adult son has the right to ride in whichever car he wants, and can go wherever he wants, whenever he wants."

Education is in the classroom and in life experiences. My school covers the first point, but tries to control the other. With such pedantic restrictions and almost petty threats of petty punishment, it is hard to be educated from the second source.