On a regular basis, students face the suppression of ideas through book bans or Internet monitoring and blocking of web pages. When an idea is suppressed, it is forgotten or becomes a taboo topic. In either case, teenagers no longer have the ability to learn from that idea. Instead, teenagers only have access to ideas supported by the school board, which in turn conditions students to accept the terrible idea that ideas can be suppressed. John Simmons finds that school boards “consider nonconforming ideas dangerous to young, impressionable minds” in his article School Censorship: No Respite in Site. Simmons' belief is formed based on material that is often suppressed, which are usually ideas that go against society and conformity. Apparently, when conformity is threatened, schools reduce material and establish in students the belief that anti-conformist ideas are bad. Of course, there are many other reasons why books and other materials are banned, but when reading materials are banned, students lose the benefit of “thinking critically about literacy texts” and, by extension, the ideas in the material (Simmons ). Then there are First Amendment watchers who firmly believe that free speech is under attack by schools when they punish students for commenting online. They also believe that if the problem reached public attention, the censorship problem would be solved, but unfortunately it has not become widely known. This conditions students to accept that the loss of free speech is normal. Some courts have also sided with schools, giving them the power to “censor and punish students for words… even if the words were written off campus, after school” (Richey). Whether or not these acts of repression are deliberate attempts to censor schools or the...