Yer…
Please share your views on the matter.
Do students have the right to resist being searched?
Completely reasonable IMO.
Students are minors in the care of the school; the school has a duty of care towards the other students & staff.
If searching students is necessary to execute that duty of care, all power to them.
If searching the students is that necessary then it should require consent from parents and multiple school staff , this is not a prison its an area for teaching them.
My daughter is a UK teacher, I hear all sorts of horror stories.
There was 2 stabbings at my school for the whole 4 years I was there. It may as well be a prison.
The UK education system is a joke anyway, soon as you grind through and get secondary school qualifications you go to a “real school” called a university, a place where tutors are paid money and not crack cocaine and what they teach you is current and relevent to the actual course.
Minors are minors. When I hand my kids over to other grown ups, they’re the boss. End of. What they say goes and my kids don’t have any say so in the matter. I wouldn’t like to send them to a school where teachers found the need to routinely search children for dangerous things but when I was a lad teachers didn’t think twice about forcing you to turn out your pockets to find contraband sweets or fags. And we wouldn’t have thought to complain about it, being against the school rules and all.
Cas 
I think they have every right to request you to do that but have no right to force you to or frisk you without consent.
Depends on the circumstances. Frisking is possibly a little beyond the pale, at least in the civilised bits of England where I grew up.
Cas
Well there’s 2 sides to the matter. Obviously it’s great if the student has something illegal/dangerous or has information on their phone that, if acquired, could stop something terrible happening. On the flip side I could certainly see teachers taking advantage of this. There are many teachers at my current school (in the US) that would take this opportunity and have a great time pulling all sorts of bulls**t. The majority of the teachers there are great but you’re always going to have a few that hate their job and will pull stunts like they were a young student themselves. I hate to put it like that, but unfortunately it’s how things can play out. Give someone power and they’re going to abuse it if that’s their personality.
They should have some sort of rule where the teacher needs to at least call into the main office and provide ample reason for the search and get a ‘yes’ from someone before being able to do anything. Not too much effort to the point of where the teacher would just ignore small things but enough to where they won’t be able to search a kid just because they’re having a crappy day or don’t like the kid.
Again, don’t take this as me saying all teachers are power abusive freaks; I love most of my teachers.
I did not know they were so rigid in England, really terrible :o :persecutioncomplex:. In Italy professors can hardly ask us what we have under our desk (and in fact we usually have sweets there, hehe ;D 8), the Wednesday we buy like 10-20 sweets that we give to our mates )!
However, by my mind students must be considered as persons and not stupids, after 11-12 years they are considerable conscious. About this I have some ideas on how school must be. It must be a place to study and compare with others, totally not a prison, homeworks must be optional(considered as a training) and unsatisfactory remarks(idk how it works in other o) must be used to say a thing to parents like “Mario have problems in the test and he doesn’t his homeworks everytime, can you help him study?” and not “Mario didn’t his homeworks”(like in Italy, again, idk in other countries).
Returning to the initial argument, law is very bad in some cases, I totally disagree with that law.
In your country how is the school, how it works?
Neglete the terrible English 
and my lack of ability to write lyrics that are longer than 5 lines and aren’t source code (and the stupidity of Google translator) :cranky:
Matth.
Things like this make me cringe for one reason: the lack of standardization, in terms of enforcement and “who gets searched” vs who is left alone.
That lack of standardization turns things like this into an excuse, or at least an opportunity, for unfair treatment of certain groups.
“I saw that white kid with a cell phone earlier, but I’m going to let it slide because I don’t want to be an overbearing teacher.”
“Uh-oh, that black kid looks shady and is probably using that cell phone to deal drugs, better search him.”
(I’m realizing now that I’m showing my age by assuming cell phones are still disallowed in schools, substitute whatever is currently disallowed, maybe pogs or something?)
I’m not saying every teacher is an evil racist, but when you leave something like this up to “gut instinct”, personal prejudice quickly becomes institutionalized prejudice.
On the other hand, student’s rights are a pretty funny concept. You’re at an age where you’re not quite children anymore, so you buck against the rules that apply to children, but from society’s perspective, you’re still a bunch of kids. So “movements” like this don’t last very long, especially because in a couple years when you graduate, you won’t care anymore either.
My daughter was 14 when we moved to Austria. In Austria your almost legally an adult. As in that is the age of consent (assuming both parties are only like 1 or 2 years apart in age) and its when you can get permanent criminal record. There are even rules about if i can even see her report. Once she is 16 she has to sign to give permission for us to see it! So searches by teachers was simply not allowed anymore than any other random person is allowed to do that.
I can see both sides of the argument, but i must ultimately come up on the side of individual rights. How does searching a students phone make for a better school for anyone? It doesn’t.
Just remember, in the US (and probably also UK), student rights == no rights. Here in the US, when a student walks into a school, the administration becomes the student’s “parents,” and the administrators absolutely have the right to search them.
Another way to look at it is , even if you searched them will tht change them as an adult , if they are the kind of person who will do those crimes anyway you are not changing the smallest thing.
I can see where you’re coming from in your dislike of this system, and like I said above it makes me cringe as well.
But I think your logic here is flawed. That’s like saying “well, if somebody is going to steal when they’re an adult anyway, you might as well not punish a child for stealing another kid’s toys.”
We punish children so that they learn there are consequences to their actions, and take that lesson to adulthood. Your logic is a bit like saying “well, people get into car accidents all the time, so what’s the point of requiring a driving test to get a driver’s license?”
You can make arguments against teachers being able to search students, but I don’t think this is one of them.
Not the best arguments actually…
Children get punished because in their age every single little experience can have significant impact on their later personality.
After a certain age, and normally at last with puberty this effect wears mostly off and you will most likely reach not much with it.
And tests are something to check whether they are able to do something they actually want, so how does this even compare to being searched?
[quote=“Drenius,post:17,topic:53371”]
Okay. So police should stop pulling over people who drive too fast, since the laws against speeding didn’t stop them?
I just think this is an entirely different argument. “We shouldn’t search students because it won’t stop them from doing anything illegal” is a bit of a mu argument, since that’s not really how reality works. We don’t say “oh well, we can’t prevent 100% of murders, might as well not make it illegal for anybody.”
I’m pointing out the flaw in the logic that says “XYZ won’t fix 100% of the problems, so we might as well not even bother with it”.
Again, I think there are valid criticisms of these searches, but “students will do bad things no matter what” is not one of them.
To be totally honest, I am not following the conversation.
Your points just seemed not to fit onto the post they were directed at to me, so I’m glad this caused you to do some clarification.
And I’m glad this caused you to actually read the conversation? Not quite sure how to reply to “I didn’t read this but I disagree with you”, haha.