Our culture must be masochistic; why else would we suffocate ourselves with the deprivation of a freedom seemingly valued more than life?

I speak of that freedom, the one taught in schools, sanctified in history books and sworn aloud each morning, that is etherealized into nothingness before new minds can develop a dependency upon it. And when children do stop breathing the air of independence as great steps have apparently been taken to ensure they must they are attached to the artificial respirator of society, condemned to live their lives supported by a structure and bureaucracy tailored to contain them.

I hold myself to be an idealist, but the unyielding barrage of folly and irrationality that greets me every school day tests my conviction more than I appreciate.

And perhaps my present fury is nothing more than the advent of cynicism, and the revelation of society's purpose my rite of passage but I doubt this is the case, for after 13 years of attending public school, the concepts of ignorance and restriction are not unfamiliar. The backward crusade to preserve this unnatural naivete, however, never fails to appall me, and the occasions upon which I am directly affected by it leave me inexpressibly disheartened.

I would like to think that the thinly veiled oppression maintained by the administration at my school serves the best end, and while I concede that it is not oppression of a staggering degree, I cannot forgive its use. The lack of respect for personal integrity exhibited to nearly every student persists, I suspect, only because the majority of students fail to realize it.

I do not intend to shift the blame to my peers, but rather to point out that those with some measure of power unfairly take advantage of our youth: they hold our hands in grade school, drag us by our wrists in middle school and have us unwittingly manacled by high school. Certainly, the discrepancy between "administrator" and "educator" raises interesting questions; after all, what, exactly, is being "administered"?

As society becomes increasingly fearful of liability, it restructures itself to guard against the few by crippling the many. This sad regression would seem a necessity for schools in light of the escalating violence they must contend with, but where will the backward slide stop? When schools have become nothing more than militaristic safe houses and students stripped of every last freedom?

I hope not, but too many alarming signs exist to ignore. For instance, checking into school even three minutes late for an exam that has not even started earns students a day of in-school suspension. The logic here is beyond me; I suppose that allowing no exceptions is somehow different from forcing conformity. Moreover, a student who sees the irrationality for what it is and persists to take the exam receives two days of in-school suspension as punishment for that one day "skipped." As if submission, not knowledge, were the school's paramount lesson to teach.

I sincerely wish that I could think of no more examples to support my argument; the abundance of counterintuitive and patronizing rules, however, compels me to speak otherwise. We cannot enroll in a class "beneath" our current level of curriculum, even to reinforce weak areas in our studies; we can eat lunch outside, but only in a nominal sense, only within feet of the building; and most symbolic of all, the windows found in almost every classroom, which frame a very real, very enticing picture of freedom, do not open.

The school professes its purpose to usher adolescents into adulthood why, then, must we have a pass to use the restroom?

Of course, the rebuttal will be made that with ever-bolder insubordination, students have brought this stricture upon themselves.

Granted, this may be so, but I am loath to waste time wondering who threw the first punch; I would rather make some progress toward reparation.

The vituperative view of humanity I have expressed starkly contrasts with my idealism, but I remain firmly resolved to sustain that positive conviction. I hope, however, that the ignorance marshalled against it might be defeated.

In restricting, structuring and oppressing, the implicit end of conscious life falls forgotten in the very act the supposed act of perpetuating it. No one sees the irony, or else they deny it or, lamentably, become so disenchanted in realizing it that they care to make no advance.

Sir Thomas More invented the name Utopia from the Greek meaning "not a place": I agree that in the end society may never achieve perfection.

Hopefully, unlike More, I will not be beheaded for my criticism of it, but the lack of freedom allowed me being painfully apparent, I cannot help but object.