With my daughter in high school, I read this post from Thomas Sowell with some interest. Never mind the ideology - what interests me here is the contrast: universities in the US - for good or ill - are fairly unbounded for students. The contrast is in what I see in high school - my daughter could get suspended or expelled for bringing cough drops to school, and I see stories like this one - police called on account of a steak knife at lunch - more often than I can count.

Things weren't wide open when I was in high school (late 70's), but you could bring cough drops and cold medicine to school without any fear that you were going to get tossed out on your ear. The thing I find odd is this: students go from the lockdown that is the modern high school into the complete freedom that is the modern university. I'm not sure what the right mix of control/freedom is at what level, but it seems to me that stepping directly from a straightjacket into free fall probably isn't it...

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