In this post, I shall continue down the free speech as autonomy-enhancing path, contending that engagement in freedom of expression activities (and its effects) in public schools can be politically educational, helping to prepare students for the public deliberation that a democracy like ours requires. It is not unusual for commentators, including judges, to associate public schools with civic education and democracy. In his recent majority opinion in Mahanoy, Justice Stephen Breyer characterizes them as “nurseries of democracy.”
The relationship between free speech and civic education takes center-stage in what follows, with emphasis on the importance of trying to bring a certain kind of person into being, namely an autonomous one. A good democratic citizen will have adequate critical thinking skills, be open-minded, listen, and interact with those with whom they disagree in a manner that treats everyone as an equal member of the diverse political community.
The exercise of free speech rights by students, in public fora at their respective public schools, can make them more accustomed to the inevitably of disagreement. That way, they can learn how to disagree with others, who do not share their deepest political convictions, without necessarily concluding that they are stupid or evil. In conjunction with democratic education as part of the curriculum, they must be actively involved in educating themselves. No one can do it for them.
The practice of free speech can contribute to the development of critical thinking skills improve their ability to deliberate in the future. Long before they become adults, they should be able to take part in discursive activities so that they are familiar with how deliberation in a democracy is supposed to work. There is plenty of room for improvement. Like any other capacity, an intellectual capacity can be cultivated over time, with positive reinforcement and the appropriate educational experiences. There is no reason why some of those formative educational experiences cannot take place during junior high or high school when students interact with one another outside of class.
Americans suffer from high levels of political ignorance, coupled with poor critical thinking skills. Without competence, most people will end up making worse personal and political decisions. Democratic citizens must be able to evaluate evidence, judge the quality of political arguments and candidates for public office, assess public policy proposals, and not behave in ways that undermine the norms of their own democratic culture. For these reasons, students must practice dealing with such situations on their own, long before the stakes are much higher, without the expectation that adults constantly will intervene.
Students who begin to work on their critical thinking skills at an early age are more likely to develop a willingness to challenge authority and demand reasons from those who exercise it over them. They will not improve their critical thinking skills if they do not work on them continuously because they fear the consequences of trying to think more independently, making mistakes, or offending others. That process includes being more skeptical of authority figures, including teachers and administrators, and not caving into peer pressure (which is admittedly quite difficult during adolescence and even worse due to the ubiquity of social media). Reasons are not supposed to be good or compelling because they come from a teacher, administrator, or another authority figure in a hierarchical system.
It is a mistake to wait too long for students to have such an educational experience or believe that it will happen on its own. By college, they probably have picked up many bad habits. By age twelve or thirteen, most students are mature enough not to have school officials treat them so paternalistically when it comes to what they may say or write, thereby giving them the responsibility to decide whether they want to contribute to the marketplace of ideas at their school. Whatever else might be said about this educational approach, it is counterintuitive to assume that a regime of censorship would facilitate the development of critical thinking skills when so many learning opportunities are lost, coupled with the possibility that students are learning the wrong lessons about free speech.
Before they become adults, adolescents must learn that all of us are fallible and become more self-aware. After all, it is possible that they are wrong about this or that, irrespective of how sure they are or how strongly they feel that they are right. In the classroom, research shows that consideration of the question, “Could I be wrong?” has civic educational value. Less certainty about the correct answer (and less intellectual arrogance more generally) can prompt a student to question other beliefs and become curious about whether they, too, might be wrong or their beliefs lack evidentiary support. The first step towards being less dogmatic is to recognize how much you do not know.
Those who are exposed to speech, which they disagree with, may have their preconceptions called into question (which can be unsettling, of course, but ultimately for the best in the long run). Educationally, this experience supplements what students ought to be learning in the classroom. Exposure to all kinds of difference and disagreement must take place as soon as possible in a world where too many Americans live in echo chambers when it comes to news (and social media) and are vulnerable to confirmation bias. That does not imply that students who actually are wrong will immediately change their minds, see the error of their ways, or have sophisticated understandings of the views that they reject (yet that may come with time). That way, even amid intractable disagreement, people can become more inclined to see one another as fellow members of the political community whose autonomy must be respected, regardless of the merits of their views.
The approach of educators must be hands-off so that student speech is student-initiated, prompting students to become more actively engaged in the civic educational process. It is even more imperative for them to do so when lawmakers and school board officials have partisan agendas, trying to score points with their constituents by either making a school as woke or anti-woke as possible. The role of school authorities should be to facilitate such speech so that teenagers can begin to express their own ideas, learning to think for themselves and take responsibility for what they say or write. Above all, that objective means that students should not be pressured into remaining silent for fear of being punished when they are experimenting with the exercise of their free speech rights at school.
The threat of being punished for expression chills speech, condones indoctrination, and imparts the wrong lesson about free speech: it is permissible for those in power to stifle dissent, shut down criticism of the school, or squash unpopular ideas by suspending or expelling students for expressing themselves. In terms of the importance of free speech more generally, an enormous amount of damage can be done when students, who are young and impressionable, observe how adults, who exercise considerable authority over them at school, use that authority inappropriately.
Learning requires a certain sort of predisposition, one that makes room for the possibility that you may not be as informed as you think you are and thus, you might want to remain agnostic for the time being. The moment that you recognize that your judgment is much more fallible than you wish it were, you are more likely to be more charitable to others. A reasonable person can acknowledge that the evidentiary support for her view may turn out to be weaker than she initially thought it was. Many people have gone through the experience of looking back on their lives and wondering how they possibly could have believed something, with conviction, that they now know was obviously false or terribly wrong. For these reasons, the exercise of free speech rights can be educational.
Education is not supposed to be about intellectual comfort. Students should begin to have such experiences long before they are eighteen years old. By that time, many of them will have developed bad intellectual habits and attitudes. That is why it sooner rather than later junior high and high school students to be prompted to share their own views, no matter how underdeveloped they may be, long before some of them set foot on a college campus. This approach would also inculcate in them the idea that learning is not about memorization or having a teacher tell them what the right answers are. As Mill maintained, everyone must go through the mental exercise of figuring out for themselves what is true and what is false. The exercise of free speech in public schools is one way for students to become more intellectually independent over time, as both a person and a citizen in a democracy.
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