Ben Cacace
March 3, 1998

                        Learning Freedom

     My school is not an open campus.  All students are expected to be accounted for at all
times during the day.  As well as being very inconvenient, this system does not fulfil one of the
main objectives of high school.  It is supposed to be preparing students for further education in
college or for employment.  Making the campus open to the students would be helpful to the
development of the students.
     The current system of student tracking is inconvenient and a waste of time for the teachers
and the students.  The teachers are forced to spend time on passes and careful attendance checks.
Students must spend part of their precious four minutes between classes getting the passes from
teachers just so they can go to the library or other studious activities.  The situation can be
complicated easily by one of many other situations.  The rules say that once a student has signed
into the library they must stay there the entire period.  What if the student also needed to get
help in a class?  If a student wants to make effective use of a free period, they often need to
bend the definition of a rule.  This is certainly not the message that should be taught.
     High school is supposed to prepare students to go into a world where people are not
constantly checking on them, but are holding them responsible to be present when it is important. 
In the work place the responsibility translates into expecting people to be on time and accomplish
their assigned task.  A company does not monitor what workers do during their breaks.  In
college, even more freedom is offered because attendance is not mandatory for most classes. 
Obviously, in able to succeed the student must make good attendance decisions.  To prepare the
students for these decisions, the school should offer a degree of freedom.  One might argue that
the students are not mature enough yet to make these decisions for themselves.  In the case of
seniors, that is a poor argument because it is their time to mature so that they will be able to
deal with the greater freedom soon to come.
     A compromise could be reached where seniors could have the freedom to go where they
need during any free time and still have mandatory class attendance.  For the seniors and their
teachers, this would eliminate the hassles of the current system and better prepare them for the
rest of their life.