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‘Dereck Bok Piece’ Question 3

Bok in 13th paragraph of the ‘Dereck Bok Piece’, advice the campus officials and students to ignore the offensive and flags rather than prohibiting the communications and the resulting risks (Bok Pg. 77). I do agree with Bok that the best way to deal with the offensive words is to ignore them, as the students would then have little reason to develop such displays and therefore would soon abandon them. Most of the time, we find ourselves dealing with people who don’t respect us and therefore in the process of engaging, we get hurt through words that are offensive. It doesn’t make to respond to an offensive word with another as that would also be an act of indiscipline for the students. A student is expected to maintain a high level of discipline within or without the school compound, and therefore they should be polite. In the event of dealing with offensive words, it would be better to ignore them as this will reduce the chances of the student or the offended person being more affected as it will not stick in their minds.

Prohibiting offensive communications means that the students will be using them in secret and therefore, the intended purpose of maintaining discipline within the school population will be very hard. Rather than prohibiting and ignoring, I also agree that it would be wise for the student or the teacher to speak with the person committing the offence of uttering offensive words as well as the insensitive acts and then try to help them understand the effects of the offensive words to the rest of group. Talking to the offending party means that they will realize their mistake and therefore it will be easy to restrain the harmful behavior in future, but prohibiting will not instill sense to all the parties involved in the mix. It is, therefore, true that we ought to respond to the offensive misconduct either by ignoring them making expected impact seem useless and counselling the offender making them understand the effect of the offensive misconduct to others, making them refrain from the same behavior in future.