If nothing else, you have to admire the fact that 7th Circuit Judge Richard Posner isn’t afraid to express an opinion, notwithstanding the fact that cases are likely to come before him that might seem to have predetermined outcomes.  Still, at least you know where you stand.

At a speech given this week in Chicago, Posner had plenty to say.

“When I was a kid, the notion that children had rights against schools was unknown,” the 72-year-old Posner said in a Nov. 11 speech in Chicago at the national conference of the Education Law Association. The Education Week blog School Law has details.

Posner, a judge on the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, said some school litigation is a result of “hypersensitive” reactions by students, and school administrators deserve more deference. “It seems to me judges ought to be very cautious before they try to displace the authority of the school administrators,” he said.

Posner said students need to “learn to roll with the punches,” according to the blog account. “Modern American kids, it seems to me, have excessive self-esteem,” Posner said. “They’re spoiled and coddled. Many of them have very aggressive parents.”

Are students “spoiled and coddled?” D’uh.  Are their parents “very aggressive?”  It certainly seems that way.  Do “modern American kids” have “excessive self-esteem?” Does the pope kiss imams?  Okay, bad example, but yes, they’ve got self-esteem up the wazoo, even though they often do nothing to justify it. 

Does this mean that judges should abdicate their responsibility to “displace the authority of school administrators?”  What’s one thing got to do with the other?

I haven’t been shy about calling millennials the “slackoisie,” or noting how unwarranted (which I believe is more precise than excessive) self-esteem (as opposed to self-respect) has screwed up a generation of students.  But the fact that students have their flaws provides no logical basis for undue deference to school administrators.  Judge Posner’s leap across this logical chasm is inexplicable.

Just as students have changed since Richard Posner was a boy, so too have school administrators, not to mention the world in which both exist.  With zero tolerance policies and regulations covering everything from the punctuation on snarky t-shirts to thoughts shared in dimly lit bedrooms on brightly lit computer screens, administrators (who prefer to be called educators despite their only seeing a classroom while drug dogs scour hallways during fake drills) have their finger in student conduct that had historically left to the discretion of parents and students.

Lots has changed since Posner’s day.  While students don’t get their knuckles smacked by yardsticks, they also don’t carry their father’s pocket knife.  Whereas a student isn’t likely to be taken behind the woodshed for misbehaving, or have his mouth washed out with soap for uttering a bad word, the chances of a parent overhearing students shouting obscenities about their teachers (except Miss Crabtree) down by the creek was slim to none.  Today, it can’t be missed on Facebook.

There are crazy things happening in schools these days, and students, spoiled and coddled though they may be, are paying a price for them that was never exacted before.  The intrusiveness of school administrators in the lives of students was just as inconceivable in Posner’s day as the notion that kids had rights. 

Perhaps the problem is that there was far less need to concern oneself with the rights of students when teachers and administrators weren’t imposing the scholastic death penalty for students behaving like the children they are.  In the name of protecting every delicate teacup from any possibility of a knee being scraped or ego bruised, we’ve regulated their every move, their every waking moment, and likely have rules about how they have to sleep as well.

No matter how excessive (or unwarranted, as I would put it) their self-esteem, this is no reason to ignore the wholly unrelated question of the propriety of the actions, and frequently mindless harm, caused by school administrators in the exercise of their similarly excessive (and I would say unwarranted) authority.  More importantly, Richard Posner is a judge, and if his confusion over spoiled children influences him in the performance of his duty to protect the rights of all, including spoiled children, then he has no business sitting in judgment.

School administrators are hardly some super-breed of government grocery clerks immune from doing wrong.  They are entitled to no more, and no less, deference than anyone in a position of authority over another person, regardless of whether students have aggressive parents or aggressive parents coddle their children.  The two issues are wholly independent, and there should be no judicial confusion on the subject.