Hooray for the US Supreme Court.

The story is essentially that students were given suspensions from school for wearing ‘I love boobies’ bracelets sold by a US breast cancer charity. The school had determined the bracelets to be ‘lewd’.

So the two students took the school to court, and won their case.

In SL many groups, sims and individuals do much for breast cancer awareness, and donate cash from their various campaigns to real life cancer charities. I’ve given freely in the past to these events, paid for pink-hued T shirts and donated, because breast cancer can be a killer. It can also be readily survived with early detection and treatment. The word isn’t ‘lewd’, the cause isn’t ‘lewd’.

Educators have a responsibility to not only teach children the names of American Presidents, English Kings and Queens or whatever. They’ve a responsibility to teach history, English, math(s), science….and the development of a moral compass.

We have to teach our educators that facts and figures isn’t enough, but morality and social responsibility are equally important components of a proper, rounded education too. Young women need to be educated as much to do regular breast checks as they educated in chemistry or geography or art or music.

These girls have given to a charity (the Keep Abreast organisation) to buy the bracelets in the first place, so the charity has benefitted. Each one bought may just be the few cents required to save someone’s life.

Really, what those in charge of education in Pennsylvania need to be doing now is reading that organisation’s web pages, and then tackling the issue in its schools (and elsewhere around the globe). They need to be learning, from their students, that it’s an important issue and young people, male and female, need to be made as much aware of this issue as they do Newton’s Third Law of Motion (‘for every action there is an equal reaction’). Oh, maybe they learned that through the US Supreme Court! Maybe they learned that if they stopped burying their heads in the sand, stopped focusing on the apparently ‘lewd’ nature of a word, and got stuck in to saving women’s (and men’s, too) lives in Pennsylvania, the formal education they handed out to some women might just turn out to be a full life, rather than a life cut short by ignorance.

Ella.