Student Freedom and Responsibility

I was just reading a book about communism and thinking about high school students. How much freedom should we give them? At what point do we stop their destructive behavior and at what point do we let them govern themselves? To me there needs to be a balance but I am not sure where that balance is. At a high school level, it is a continuum because 12th grade students are ready to handle more freedom and responsibility than freshman. What are your thoughts about how much they can handle?

Changes in Education

As is usual after attending a conference (I attended UELMA today), I am wondering how we can implement sweeping changes in the way we educate students. It is a catch 22. We can see that things need to change, we talk about them, and then we return to the same system and keep on doing what we have always done. The problem is we are not given the opportunity to change the structure. We need time, a lot of time, to create a different system. It is like we are trying to repair the car whose engine needs overhauled while we are still driving it around. We aren't making much progress. Over the weekend or even over the summer we make minor repairs. As we start to make small amounts of headway we realize it is August and we have to throw things back together and start driving the old clunker around again.