In the face of spiraling campus demands for trigger warnings, safe spaces, mandatory diversity training and sanctions against offensive words, some pundits are asking where today’s college students learned to be so “coddled,” so fearful of competing viewpoints. One answer that has escaped scrutiny could lie in our public schools, where principals and school boards too often fail to teach and respect the speech rights of students that the Constitution protects.
Writing in 1943, while the nation was at war, in a case where the court upheld the right of students to refuse to say the Pledge of Allegiance, Justice Robert Jackson proclaimed that individual rights must be respected even in grade schools “if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source.”
The court later reaffirmed that robust vision of students’ speech rights. In the 1969 seminal case of Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, it held that middle- and high-school students have the right to wear black armbands to school to protest the Vietnam War so long as their personal expression did not threaten to upend the school day.