Advantage from SIRS

To Teach Students the Value of Free Speech, Sometimes We Must Restrict It

By Jonathan Zimmerman

Let's suppose a student walks through the halls of her high school carrying a big banner denouncing one of her teachers. I'd be OK with the school confiscating the banner, and I bet you would be, too.

So should we let her post similar remarks on the Internet?

Last week, a Florida judge said yes. And unlike most of my fellow liberals, I think he was wrong. If we really care about protecting free speech, we need to teach our kids some basic principles of civility. And that means we sometimes have to restrict their speech--even on the Web.

The Florida case began in 2007, when a high school principal suspended senior Katherine Evans for creating a Facebook page that vilified her English teacher. "Ms. Sarah Phelps is the worst teacher I've ever met!" Evans wrote. "To those select students who have had the displeasure of having Ms. Sarah Phelps, or simply knowing her and her insane antics: Here is the place to express your feelings of hatred."

Evans eventually sued her principal, arguing that her comments were protected under the First Amendment. She asked for nominal monetary damages, legal fees and the removal of the suspension from her academic record. The principal, of course, asked that the case be dismissed.

Earlier this month, federal magistrate Barry Garber ruled that it could go forward. "Evans' speech falls under the wide umbrella of protected speech," he wrote. "It was an opinion of a student about a teacher, that was published off-campus...and was not lewd, vulgar, threatening, or advocating illegal or dangerous behavior."

Instead, it was rude, boorish, and ill-mannered. It showed just how little Evans has learned about civil discourse, which requires a set of shared values: reason, tolerance and decency. And when we forsake these ground rules, we lose our ability to communicate--literally, to "make common"--with each other.

Turn on your television to see what I mean. Angry pundits talk straight past each other, bellowing insults and invective into the night. Judges of music and dance contests compete for the nastiest put-downs. "Reality" characters exchange slurs in a grim quest for celebrity.

The Internet is worse, of course, because it gives this abuse a cloak of anonymity. At least Katherine Evans had the courage to sign her own name to the Facebook page she created. She also took the page down two days after it went up, after several other students posted messages in support of the teacher.

Evans' actions seem downright tame next to two cases in Pennsylvania, where students created fake MySpace profiles to ridicule their principals. On one page, a student depicted his principal boasting of steroid and marijuana use; on the other, he was cast as a pedophile and sex addict.

In each case, the students behind the fake profiles were suspended, and like Evans, they sued their schools on First Amendment grounds. Earlier this month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued conflicting rulings on the fake pages: The first was protected speech; the second wasn't.

All of these decisions rested on the Supreme Court's landmark 1969 ruling, Tinker v. Des Moines, which allowed students to wear black armbands to school in protest of the Vietnam War. As the court famously pronounced, students do not "shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." To suppress student speech, the court added, officials must show that it would "disrupt the work and discipline of the school." And the black armbands didn't do that.

Did these various Internet remarks? I doubt it. Since they were posted far beyond the schoolhouse gate, it's hard to imagine that they disrupted anything inside of it. School officials in Pennsylvania tried to make the argument, saying that the fake MySpace profiles could have caused trouble if they hadn't been discovered and deleted. But nobody could make such a claim about Evans' Facebook page, which came down almost as soon as she put it up.

So why not let the kids have their fun?

The answer lies elsewhere in the Tinker decision, which insisted that public schools must promote "a robust exchange of ideas." That means they also must show kids how to engage in this dialogue: with clarity, patience and respect for one's adversary.

If Evans had posted a clear list of specific objections to her teacher--and had invited others to do the same--I'd strongly support her lawsuit. But she delivered a rant, not an argument. It's up to schools to teach the difference.

How? Schools should make cases like this one into a focus of classroom discussion, modeling precisely the kind of civil discourse that Evans failed to exhibit. In the absence of real sanctions, however, nothing will change. Kids like to push limits, as everyone knows. But they won't recognize or understand those limits unless we punish the people who transgress them.

Most of all, we need to teach our students what kinds of speech really contribute to our much-vaunted "exchange of ideas"--and which kinds inhibit it. Like the student who hoisted the "Bong Hits for Jesus" sign outside an Alaska high school--earning a suspension from his principal that was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2007--Evans' antics added nothing to public discourse. Instead, she echoed the worst aspects of our debased popular culture. Isn't it time that we taught children a better way to talk?

Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of history and education at New York University.


Zimmerman, Jonathan. "To Teach Students the Value of Free Speech, Sometimes We Must..." Newsday (Long Island, NY). 28 Feb 2010: A.34. SIRS Researcher. Web. 10 Nov 2010.

The advantage here is that schools disciplining students could quickly teach them the value of good behavior and kind behavior toward others.