The Forced Choice (Or Our Lack of Freedom)

Much like new seasons of my favorite television shows (*cough* Lost *cough*), Pembroke Hill has an incredible ability to disappoint me with the changes made each new season that I return to. The changes this year, shockingly considering Pembroke’s historically pre-historic take on technology (I’m looking at you, Oregon Trail 2 in 5th grade!), center around increasing and, also surprisingly, decreasing our use of new-fangled technological devices. I know the question that you are jumping to ask, and yes, we finally upgraded from Word 2000 to Word 2003. I was just as excited as you are. But EVEN bigger changes were afoot this time around. *Gasp*

How wide Wi-Fi?

The largest of these big changes (other than that Cafe, of course, which refuses to accept my patronage because it refuses to accept my credit card) was the introduction of Wi-Fi internet access for all the students who desired to finally be able to turn on their laptops at school and log directly on to the World Wide Web. Well, except for people without laptops. Oh, and it’s only for people with Windows laptops (Seriously, it’s not like Apple’s market-share is growing faster than any other computer company. Oh wait, it is!). Oh, and it’s also only for people who spend their entire school day sitting inside the Commons. Jump for joy you sliding seniors! Everybody else… just wait. Well wait right there Brad, maybe Wi-Fi is just a gift for the hardest working of Pembroke’s illustrious students. Maybe, but I’ll wager that the hardest working upperclass(people) aren’t the ones with enough time to surf Facebook from their laptops in the Commons.

The Forced Choice

If you are anyone else (Well, I’ll be, that’s me!), you can justifiably raise your hand and say that you are just a little bit pissed-the-fuck-off. And rightly so, fine student, because this (is injustice too strong?) injustice is exemplary of a theme that I’ve noticed has become more and more pronounced with every year that I get closer to leaving this institution of higher (or, since it’s not University, as a French fellow might say, lower) learning: “Freedom with responsibility” is a lie. Well, no. That’s not exactly right. As Slovenian psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek said:

What is this famous “freedom with responsibility” if not a new version of the good old paradox of forced choice: you are given a freedom of choice – on condition that you make the right choice; you are given freedom – on condition that you will not really use it.

That, I think, is exactly what “freedom with responsibility” is becoming: we have all the freedom we could ever want, so long as we only make the choice forced upon us. More bluntly, we are only free so long as we accept the freedom that the school decides we deserve. “You have the freedom to gain access to Wi-Fi, so long as you only use it in the Commons and don’t ask for more.”

The Gift

Indeed, while this originally seems an expansion of freedom, the “gift” of Wi-Fi is, as Marcel Mauss describes it in his famous book, The Gift, part of a larger reciprocal exchange, i.e. we accept the gift of Wi-Fi but give up our ability to fully use it everywhere. Under this framework, we can view every “expansion” of our freedom at school as an attempt to nullify, pacify, even eliminate, our anger at our real lack of freedoms. Is it not very peculiar that the “gift” of Wi-Fi comes at the same time that dress codes are strengthened, at the same time that cell phone penalties are increased, at the same time that iPods are banned?

I view the strengthening of the punishments for use of cellphones and iPods as a direct contradiction of the motto that is supposed to govern activities throughout Pembroke Hill, not just for the students, but also for the faculty and administration. We do not have any real “freedom” to have our cellphones. Our freedom exists only to legitimate other freedoms being taken away. In other words, our choice of freedom denotes how inherently not free we are. With this in mind, it is not surprising to realize that the school is not responsible in the wake of our irresponsibility: a detention should not correspond to one student forgetting to turn off their ringer before biology. Warnings, lunch duties, detentions, all of these attempts to rehabilitate merely refine and encourage so-called “criminal” activity. Nearly all who frequently get detentions no longer view it as punishment (just ask Carlton).

The iPod policies (specifically the section that bans the use of iPods even in the library) does not even hide behind some image of improving discipline. It is a direct violation of our freedom. Why should the motto not be violated both ways? Are we really to hold ourselves to a lower ground than the administration? Now certainly, as we are students at a private school, the administration certainly possesses the ability to drastically reduce our in-school rights, but they should do so openly, so that our parents, our students, our clubs and organizations might also be able to openly address these issues. We do not have freedom with responsibility, inversely, we have responsibility with the limited freedoms that we are given. We are stuck in a limbo where each violation of our freedom must be addressed by some new “gift” to pacify any nature of rebellious tendencies.

Every year, Mr. Bellis gives me a speech on the first day of school, usually proposing some ideal by which I ought to hold myself to throughout the year. If we were to ask for the inverse of this (what we students give to the faculty and administration as our “ideal” of how they ought to act in the school year) we would find nothing. I think now is the time for that “ideal.” I certainly do not claim to speak for everyone, but, at the same time, I claim that as just another student of the mass, my word is, in a way, the word of every student. The ideal that we ought to hold the faculty to: you maintain our freedom if we maintain our responsibility. Give us back our iPods, as long as we do not listen to them while a teacher is lecturing. Give us internet in every room in the building and for every type of computer. Sure, these seem like pitiful requests, but as someone who gives up five days of every week towards “school” I think the few freedoms we do have ought to be respected. That, or drop any pretenses of this motto and state simply that, “This school deprives every student who enters its doors of certain freedoms, and that you, as students, may never hope to get these freedoms back.” Perhaps we might laugh and say that that motto is ridiculous! Perhaps, even unfair! But, in reality, the Golden Rule is a poor diversion for an increasingly harsh disciplinary society at Pembroke.

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