[Joseph] Frederick filed suit, saying his First Amendment rights were infringed. A federal appeals court in San Francisco agreed, concluding the school could not show Frederick had disrupted the schools educational mission by showing a banner off campus.<\/p>\n
Former independent counsel Kenneth Starr argued for the principal that a school “must be able to fashion its educational mission” without undue hindsight from the courts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Now, let’s get this straight; the “incident” happened six years ago, <\/em> and the kid won (albeit at the Ninth Circuit, which is sort of like a group of Phyllis Kahns in robes) – and the school district took it to the Supremes?<\/p>\nThat brought swift skepticism from some justices.<\/p>\n
“There was no classroom here,” said Kennedy.<\/p>\n
“This was education outside a classroom,” replied Starr of the torch relay observation.<\/p>\n
“What did it disrupt on the sidewalk?” asked Souter of Fredericks banner.<\/p>\n
“The educational mission of the school,” was Starrs answer.<\/p>\n
“The school can make any rule that it wants on any subject restrictive of speech, and if anyone violates it, its disruptive?” asked Souter.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Ding ding ding. Give a cigar to David Souter.<\/p>\n
Welcome to life in a public school – where a parent, in addition to chauffeur, short order cook, taskmaster and sales manager, needs to be a lawyer to boot.<\/p>\n
Justice Samuel Alito, alone among his conservative bench mates, appeared sharply critical of the schools position<\/p>\n
“I find that a very, very disturbing argument,” he said, “because schools have and they can define their educational mission so broadly that they can suppress all sorts of political speech and speech expressing fundamental values of the students, under the banner of getting rid of speech thats inconsistent with educational missions.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I’m tempted to get my daughter to make a sign – “Christians 4 Reagan” – and see what happens.<\/p>\n
Let me leave aside my well-established cynicism about the public schools’ “educational mission” (and I do suspect that an awful lot of kids learned much more about American civics and government through this case than they ever did in class. Indeed, if my daughter’s last public school history teacher is any indication, they’d probably learn more American history watching soap operas. But I digress). And don’t bother that the “war on drugs” is a quagmire in a way that Vietnam never was and Iraq never will be, which has killed more Americans than both wars put together, for a moment.<\/p>\n
The answer, on the part of the school (an arm of government) in response to this frankly dumb, sophomoric provocation is not to throw yet another draconian, anti-“educational” rule at it (although it’s more than likely the kid learned more in ten days <\/em>out of school than he’d have learned sitting on his butt in a classroom). The answer to “bad” speech – or “dumb” speech, like this kid’s doltish sign, is to explain to him and the other students why <\/em>this is dumb, wrong and sophomoric.<\/p>\nThere are so many ways to do this; have the students talk about what is sophomoric versus useful speech; learn a bit of logic, and critical thinking; expose them to humor predating John Stewart, maybe.<\/p>\n
Of course, if public schools taught critical thinking (to other than kids on the debate team), they’d grow up into parents that questioned whether jamming kids into huge schools run on an assembly-line model – possibly the system least <\/em>conducive to actually learning things <\/em>ever devised – is a good idea.<\/p>\nAnd then all hell would break loose.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s the same old story: Boy unfurls giggly, pseudo-provocative sign at a school event. Principal suspends boy. Boy and his lawyers spend six years pursuing the case all the way to the Supreme Court. Let’s join them, shall we? [Joseph] Frederick filed suit, saying his First Amendment rights were infringed. A federal appeals court in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-war","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}