Our schools have the opportunity and the responsibility to teach so much more than traditional academic subjects. Let’s not get in their way as they promote standards of respect and decency. All students deserve this.

Swift’s famous piece exposes, through its carefully crafted hyperbole, the callous indifference of those in charge to the predicament of the poor and hungry. This student piece doesn’t really have a stable target, one easily discerned by the vast majority of readers despite its “serious” presentation. It’s simply practicing being provocative and at times even seems to agree with some of its outlandish assertions.

I’d sidestep the free speech debate by confiscating the paper on aesthetic/rhetorical grounds. You have to be very careful with satire in a climate where the cognitively disabled are regularly mistreated — and historically have been brutalized.

Imagine, though, if the writer had responded, say, to the “pillow angel” controversy with more controlled and directed hyperbole; in that case an immodest proposal might really have done some rhetorical good.

Remember that satire is used to re-establish a moral norm in the face of farcical “common sense’ (the “common sense” of removing a disabled girl’s womb).

Ralph Savarese