The Day of Silence began in 1997 as a way to highlight the harassment that gay and lesbian students have endured over the years at the hands of their classmates. The concept is pretty simple. Students spend the day completely silent. They refuse to speak. Many students will adorn their mouths with makeup or tape to indicate that they are participating.

While I understand that gay and lesbian students have been harassed over the years, the Day of Silence is completely inappropriate in our schools. Furthermore, the administration and staff should be admonished for condoning it.

In the pure abstract, the Day of Silence is a relatively benign event. The problem is that it is not an abstract event. It is very real and it has very real consequences.

The most obvious problem with the Day of Silence is that it wastes an entire day of classroom instruction. The students do not speak. They can’t participate in classroom discussions or ask questions about their assignments.

Teachers have limited choices. They can accommodate the students who are protesting and accept the wasted day. This has to be a hard pill to swallow for teachers who care about providing a quality education.

The teachers’ other choice is to treat the protesting students as they would any other student who refuses to complete required schoolwork and fail them. To do so, however, would undoubtedly subject the teacher to baseless charges of discrimination and harassment. This is why most, if not all, teachers choose the easy route and either tolerate or encourage the students to be silent.

The fact that the students who participate in the Day of Silence waste classroom time is no small matter, because they are not just wasting their own time. They are also wasting the time of the other students who are there to learn.

Furthermore, what about those students whose faith or moral foundation teaches them that homosexuality is wrong? High school students are highly impressionable and are susceptible to peer pressure. It is unjust to put those students in a position of being forced to either accept a lifestyle that they consider to be immoral or face ridicule, ostracism, or worse. While it is a noble effort to combat the harassment that homosexual kids have faced over the years, it is repulsive to do so by putting other kids in a position to be harassed.

Finally, the fact that the administration and the faculty either implicitly or explicitly support the Day of Silence is unacceptable. Our schools are incredibly valuable to our society, but they do have a finite responsibility. They exist to educate our children to prepare them to be responsible members of our Republic and useful in our economy so that they can be gainfully employed. They do not exist to advocate or protest particular lifestyles, sexual orientations, or moral codes.

As a society, we accept this principle on some issues. For example, we would not accept our public schools holding a day to support the message of Jesus Christ and educate the children on His teachings. Nor would we tolerate our public schools spending a day teaching our children the virtues of euthanasia. These are not issues about which we either empower or entrust our public school teachers to instruct our children.

Our public schools should have no role in either supporting or opposing homosexuality. There is a time and a place for almost everything and the classrooms of our public schools should be reserved for education.

(Owen B. Robinson, a West Bend resident, is a blogger who publishes at www.bootsandsabers.com. His column usually runs Tuesdays in the Daily News.)