Silencing in Schools from 10 Things

I've been thinking a lot about silencing techniques recently. This post is about a specific instance of silencing a feminist on TV. It happens a lot, but there is a specific recent occurrence that I want to discuss.

I started watching 10 Things I Hate About You on ABC Family because the movie was such an integral part of my early teen years, so I wanted to see how ABC Family handled turning it into a television show. While there are many things about the show that I don't like (which I'm not going to go into now), there is one thing that I really like: Kat. She was my favorite character in the movie and is very easily my favorite in the TV show too.

Kat's discussions on the show often revolve around feminism and environmentalism and she isn't afraid to call people out on their privilege (but doesn't usually reflect on her own, which is a shame) and their hateful language. This is why she's my favorite character. But I feel like her main purpose in being a feminist on the show is to provide a couterpoint for her shallow sister, not just for the purpose of promoting feminism in a the ABC Family viewing population.

I was shocked (ok, maybe not shocked, but it really stuck out to me) while watching this weeks episode. For an assignment that involved writing a paper on a moment that changed your life, Kat wrote about the day that she first started reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and became a feminist. I think that's a great paper topic. But her teacher told her it was unoriginal and that people in the space station could see she was a feminist so Kat should write about something else. Wow. Yes, people can see that she's a feminist, but being a feminist is a large part of her life, so it would make sense that she wrote about becoming a feminist as a moment that changed her life. To call that unoriginal is insulting, especially considering that a lot of the other people in the class did not write about such insightful things and are not feminists. Kat rewrote the paper about the first day that her dad bought her tampons. Her teacher was pleased and said it was good as long as it didn't end with "and then I became a feminist."

While silencing feminists is not a big surprise in television, this scene made me think about silencing in schools. In college, I can't think of any instances when I felt silenced. But I thinkt hat mainly had to do with the school that I went to and the classes that I took. I went to a very liberal, small school and I took classes mainly in Women's and Gender Studies and Sociology. People there had open minds and were open to other's opinions. So I started to think about my experiences in high school, which were very different that those of college.

I went to high school in a conservative, Christian, white, upper middle class suburb. I definitely fit in in some ways. I'm white, heterosexual, fall into the middle class spectrum (although compared to my high school class mates, I was very very low middle class, even though that's not true in wider society). But I am very liberal and not that religious, so it was hard for me to fit in in that way. So I was usually the one with the differing opinion in classes during high school. But I didn't usually voice that differing opinion because I knew that it would not be respected by some teachers and fellow students.

Silencing people's opinions (not just those of feminists) in a school setting, especially high school, can be very damaging. Schools should be a safe setting for people to express and form their opinions, but that is often not the case for a lot of people. High schoolers can be cruel, but when the silencing comes from the teachers, I think it can be even worse. Like in 10 Things I Hate About You, if teachers make you change papers or shut down voicing opinions in class because "everyone already knows you're a feminist," students might have an even harder time learning how to express their opinions.