LAW SLAMS 4 FREE SPEECH

Joseph Frederick waited for the cameras chronicling the Winter Olympics
Torch Relay as it passed near his school to pass before he unfurled a
14-foot banner reading "BONG HITS 4 JESUS" across the street from his high
school.

Did he intend to fire off a controversy, or just to make a joke? Who knows?
The case would have been a non-issue had the principal of his high school,
Deborah Morse, let it slide.

Instead she suspended him for violating the Juneau School District's drug
policy. As an ultimate consequence, the case has moved all the way up to
the Supreme Court.

"BONG HITS 4 JESUS" -- the message grates. I get an image of high school
students thinking they're edgy for alluding to drugs, as if the young
haven't been verily obsessed with drugs for generations.

But that's irrelevant to the larger consideration at work. I don't like the
overuse of the term "censorship": the phrase means official restrictions on
speech -- not, say, the action of a private publisher deciding not to put
out a particular work.

But Morse's punishment of Frederick does count as censorship. While the kid
probably deserved a talking-to about how there's a time and place for
self-expression, Morse's suspension of Frederick lacked foresight and
perspective.

The message on the banner itself arguably isn't pro-drug at all. "BONG HITS
4 JESUS" even lacks a verb: the message carries no real endorsement of
anything. It's an absurd, meaningless phrase.

But the political content of the message aside, argument have been made in
court -- and sensibly so -- that punishing students for acts of
self-expression sets a dangerous precedent.

In the future, conservative school administrations bent on suppressing
schools' political life could punish liberal students for political
statements, or liberal administrations could do the same to conservative
students.

Some might argue that schools are no place for political expression at all.
I'd counter that the boundaries between pure politics and issues relevant
to students in the process of education are thin indeed.

For instance, I attended the middle school in Colorado that infamously made
the news back in the '90s for putting its principal on leave after he
allowed students to try sips of wine at a dinner party during a
school-sponsored trip to France.

The district's attempt to punish the principal in that case was dumb, and
we knew it.

Students protested at board meetings and wore signs on our backpacks while
the controversy was taking place.

When the principal was reinstated, we figured our protests had had
something to do with the decision. Regardless of whether that was true, it
was a thrilling and educational lesson in the effectiveness of making
statements.

And while the "statement" at issue in the Frederick/Morse case seems a
little more trivial, the same principle applies.

Public schools that teach the theory of democracy and then contradict lofty
principles with their own actions send pretty poor messages to their students.

Ultimately, the simple truth is that students required to attend public
schools, alternately pummelled and appeased by a system that makes few
allowances for individuality, ought to be permitted whatever kind of
harmless self-expression they want.

The only remotely defensible reason to curb students' freedom of speech
like this is one of logistics: it's hard to exert necessary control over
students in an educational environment of such a chaotic nature.

On the other hand, granting the freedom to make statements, even ones as
dumb as "BONG HITS 4 JESUS," will diminish the chances of students acting
out merely to get a rise out of "the system."

The choice facing public schools is simple. Schools can try to repress
students' freedom, and it's inevitable that as a consequence, students will
act out all the more.

Or else schools can give students the chance to get attention-whoring out
of their system and watch them get bored with it. Then the legitimate,
earnest statements that dedicated students might have to make will gain
ground where they'll actually do some good, teaching democracy by example.