When I was in college, liberals, not conservatives, were more zealous in defending free speech, when it came to issues like whether pornography ought to be constitutionally protected. In 1990, when I was in law school, and my first-year constitutional law class discussed Texas v. Johnson, the famous flag burning case, only the more conservative students thought that what Gregory Johnson did should not be constitutionally protected expressive conduct. At that time, a decade before I took Professor Volokh's free speech class when I was a graduate student in the political science department at UCLA, I hoped that someday, free speech would be a principle that would transcend partisanship. After all, it can be hard to predict what political party will control your school board, city council, state legislature, or Congress. If you give lawmakers the authority to censor an idea that you despise at one moment, whether you realize it, you also are giving them the authority to censor ideas that you find valuable in the future. No doubt, it can be very hard to stomach ideas that you find repulsive but inevitability, others will feel the same way about your ideas. In a society committed to free speech, the government must be neutral; it may not discriminate against viewpoints, including deeply offensive and even racist, sexist, and homophobic ones. No real human government will be able to censor "bad" viewpoints competently or fairly, even if we agreed which ones were bad most of the time. Equally importantly, the people who live in that society must be willing to allow others to speak their minds. The quality of their arguments ought to be beside the point.
These days in this country, it seems like a bad situation is becoming worse. On both the left and the right, of the American political spectrum, the natural tendency to censor disagreeable ideas seems increasingly more difficult to resist, including young adults. As someone who teaches at an undergraduate institution and has been doing so for more than twenty years, my impression is that college students are not nearly willing to countenance the expression of ideas, which they despise, as they used to be. Unlike concerns about censorship on college campuses, which have received a lot of media attention, when guest speakers are disinvited or shouted down, few people care much about the extent to which school authorities may suppress student speech in a public junior high or high school. The assumption is that due to their age and relative immaturity, most of what they contribute to the marketplace of ideas at their school will have little, if any, value. Furthermore, the primary mission of a school is to educate its students, and student speech can be disruptive or distracting.
As such, it may appear to be obvious that teenagers should not be able to exercise the same free speech rights that college students may exercise. However, position strikes me as harder to defend than most people acknowledge. After all, it is almost self-evident that if tweens and teenagers, who are impressionable, go to schools that are hostile to free speech, will absorb the wrong lessons, regardless of what they might read in their civics class. They can be punished for saying this, writing that, or wearing a tee short that expresses a view about abortion, guns, same-sex sex, or whatever, they could get detention, be suspended, or even expelled. Sooner rather than later, they will learn how to self-censor.
My new book, Democracy in Education: The Importance of Free Speech in American Public Schools, is about the importance of the free speech of junior high school and high school students in a country like our own; it calls into question the double standard as well, where public schools are treated so differently than colleges for free speech purposes. There are many ways to defend free speech, and my focus is on how educational the experience can be, when students not only are challenged to formulate their own views but are exposed to those of their classmates. Indeed, an important part of becoming a citizen in a democracy calls for learning how to deal with difference and disagreement in political life.
