Dept. of Our Collapsing Schools

I don't know where the hell I was while this was going on, but it seems that Cathy Siepp's daughter Cecile, 14, caught some flak from a teacher at her high school for daring to espouse right-wing opinions in a paper. She was denigrated and called racist by the teacher not only in the class in which Cecile presented the paper, but in other, later classes. In the past, as Cathy says in this National Review Online piece, humiliation by the teacher (and then the students) would have been the end of it.

Not so anymore.

Cecile has a blog of her own, and she blogged about the incident. Apparently Cecile has been visiting and commenting at right-wing blogs for quite a while, and one of those blogs is the libertarian-oriented Samizdata, based out of England. (Highly recommended, by the way.) Brian Mickelthwait, one of Samizdata's contributors, started a "Support Cecile" effort, and the next day Cecile got an Instalanche from Glenn Reynolds.

As Cathy writes in her NRO piece:

(E)ven if she hadn't received such an outpouring of support, I think Cecile's regular stops in the blogosphere would have served as an antidote to what happened at school this past Friday. Certainly if a teacher implies a student is a racist idiot one day, and by the next some 200 smart and articulate adults have said she's not and here's why, that rather counteracts the original lesson plan. Now that so many teens have blogs, concerns about doctrinaire teachers may be passé. Our sons and our daughters are beyond their control.

One can but hope.

Read the whole thing.