The Magazine

Talk Isn't Cheap

When 'free speech' undermines the First Amendment.

Sep 28, 2009, Vol. 15, No. 02 • By MARY GRABAR
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Speaking Up

The Unintended Costs of Free Speech in Public Schools

by Anne Proffitt Dupre

Harvard, 304 pp., $29.95

"A teacher in [a democratic] community," said Plato, "is afraid of his students and flatters them, while the students despise their teachers or tutors."

Among the fears besetting public school teachers today is the lawsuit from a student--a development not anticipated by Plato. But since the 1965 case of Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, the threat of lawsuits has become a fact of life in our public schools. In Speaking Up, Anne Proffitt Dupre presents a compelling narrative, from that watershed case to the infamous Morse v. Frederick (2007), where high school student Joseph Frederick sued his principal for ordering him to take down his 14-foot banner advertising "Bong Hits 4 Jesus." The sheer fact that a student would provoke school administrators and then sue over his (light) punishment tells how far down the road to Plato's anarchic state we have come--at least in our public schools.

A law professor and former schoolteacher, Dupre understands the motivation behind (and consequences of) such lawsuits in schools that were instituted for, as Thomas Jefferson envisioned, the "common people." Jefferson's concern for an educated and principled citizenry required, as Dupre points out, a set of "core values."

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