Article: Free speech - Is it a Right that Should Extend to School Students?
Originally published on Teach Wire 4.11.2022
Last month, I offered a lift to a good friend of mine who needed to get her two kids from Bermondsey to Tottenham on a Saturday afternoon for a family visit.
She’d been ill, and there was a rail strike on, so my offer was gratefully received. But her eldest son, Hugo – a bright 12-year-old – had other ideas.
“I did not consent to this,” Hugo declared defiantly, as we drove past the fabulous exterior of the Seamans’ Mission Building on the East India Dock Road. We sailed serenely on. As we approached a leafy South Woodford, the mutiny within my battered Kia was starting to subside.
By the time we started to tack through the crowded streets of Tottenham, all that could be heard from the back was an occasional oppressed sigh. We did pity the poor galley slave.
Systematic dialogue
All of this got me thinking about the rights of young people, and in particular their right to free speech. This has long been an issue that’s bothered me, since I am, by principle and personality, a libertarian. Yet as a teacher, my instincts have always told me that it would be wrong to extend this principle to education.
Systematic dialogue between the young and the old over concepts and knowledge seems to be the defining feature of education. The vitality of this dialogue depends on there being a degree of intellectual freedom and openness, but only within the context of pedagogic boundaries set by the teacher.
Bringing some clarity to the issue of free speech within education seems to me especially important today, because young people increasingly see themselves as being in the possession of rights. The principal driver for this is probably the decline of traditional sources of external authority, but whatever the cause, long gone are the days when adults could simply assert control over the young.
At the same time, government is encouraging teachers to inform the young that they have rights similar to those of adults – from lessons on ‘British values’, through to the recently introduced RSE and health education curriculum. The message in schools and colleges is both consistent and constant: your voice counts, you must consent, you have rights.
Self-interest
And yet, it appears we somehow expect young people to defer on the question of speech without explaining why. Educational institutions claim to embody reason, and to represent the interests of the young. They can therefore expect – indeed, they perhaps ought to hope – that students will challenge them over speaking rights, both positively in terms of their right to speak, and negatively in terms of preventing others from speaking. So we need to get our arguments straight.
My instinct on this matter is possibly no more than professional self-interest. The world would certainly be an easier place if students simply did what they were told. Rights, from the perspective of those with power, are a chore, as it takes effort to get people to agree to things voluntarily. It might also be old age. Perhaps my reservations about student free speech are just due to my inner conservative emerging as I rapidly hurtle towards 50.
Advocates for free speech for students within education could perhaps point to the USA to support their case, seeing as it came down on the side of student freedom some time ago. In 1969, the country’s Supreme Court ruled on a case brought by a brave group of youthful anti-Vietnam protestors headed by siblings John and Mary Beth Tinker. The group believed that it had a right to express its views on America’s terrible war of aggression, and in its judgement, the Supreme Court agreed – the Tinkers did indeed have a First Amendment right to free speech within the classroom.
However, in making its judgement the Supreme Court added a sensible proviso. The so-called ‘Tinker Test’ stated that whilst all American students did have a constitutional right to free speech, that right didn’t extend to speech that causes ‘substantial disruption’. In the years since then, American education didn’t subsequently collapse.
Government oversight
More recently, England’s then Secretary of State for Schools, Nick Gibb, was pressed on the matter in Parliament on 6th July 2021, when he was asked what steps the DfE were taking to promote free speech in schools. Gibb stated that schools have a responsibility to “Actively promote the fundamental British values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of those of different faiths and beliefs,” concluding that, “Freedom of speech is relevant to, and could be considered in, the context of all these values.”
Gibb was referring to DfE guidance issued by the Coalition government in 2014 – but as Rania Hafez, an associate professor at the University of Greenwich, acutely observed at the time, the values listed within said guidance didn’t include the foundational freedom of free speech.
Was this simply an oversight from a government otherwise committed to liberal values within education? A government which, at least where higher education was concerned, actively sought to challenge those seeking to shut down, boycott and cancel debates?
Open discussion
It could be that the government has remained ambiguous on the status of free speech within education because it shares my reticence about its applicability, while simultaneously fearing to appear authoritarian and not wanting to contradict its overall message on rights. Whatever the explanation, it seems unlikely that we’ll be getting government-led clarity on the matter any time soon.
Here, then, is my attempt at explaining why students shouldn’t have a right to free speech within education. There’s no contradiction between being an advocate of liberal freedoms for adults, while being against free speech within education. Schools and colleges are specialised institutions with distinct pedagogic goals. Above all else, the principles governing educational institutions should facilitate the successful realisation of their internal objectives.
At the same time, however, there are important educational reasons for teachers to promote open classroom discussion, since intellectual diversity supports the development of student understanding. Maximising the diversity of viewpoints in this type of scenario is critical – up to and including views that are wrong and offensive.
As John Stuart Mill reminds us, truth benefits from the collision with error. To fully appreciate truth, we must engage with untruth.
It seems to me that the value best suited to this context is that of tolerance. It’s a concept that includes a recognition and valuing of difference, while also retaining the sense that there must be a judicious agent – the teacher – who remains in overall control.
Temporary freedoms
But why should teachers have the exclusive right to judge classroom discussions? I’d suggest that it’s because they’re uniquely expert in the methods by which subject knowledge is acquired. In this respect, the relationships between teachers and the taught are fundamentally unequal, which is why an individual student doesn’t have the absolute right to speak, or any right to restrict the speech of others.
I propose that teachers be allowed to rightfully exercise their pedagogic control and judgement during classroom discussions. They should be the ones to select the topics, shape the structure of the arguments and provoke the discussion itself.
They should use their expertise to establish the necessary boundaries of any discussion while making live judgments about what’s relevant; irrelevant; offensive but relevant; gratuitously offensive; or simply irrational. It’s the expert teacher who takes responsibility for judging what is and isn’t useful in relation to the subject of instruction.
The next time I see Young Hugo the Defiant, I may well explain to him that what he might be losing in temporary freedoms, he will more than make up for in future wisdom when he enters that benign dictatorship that is the modern classroom. Well – on a good day, at least…
https://www.teachwire.net/news/free-speech-human-rights-extend-school-students/