1. When the young men and women of Hazelwood East High School registered for Journalism II, they expected a civics lesson. Spectrum, the newspaper they were to publish, was not just a class exercise in which students learned to prepare papers and hone writing skills, it was a . . . forum established to give students an opportunity to express their views while gaining an appreciation of their rights and responsibilities under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. . . .795 F.2d 1368, 1373 (CA8 1986). "[A]t the beginning of each school year," id. at 1372, the student journalists published a Statement of Policy — tacitly approved each year by school authorities — announcing their expectation that Spectrum , as a student-press publication, accepts all rights implied by the First Amendment. . . . Only speech that "materially and substantially interferes with the requirements of appropriate discipline" can be found unacceptable and therefore prohibited. App. 26 (quoting Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School Dist., 393 U.S. 503 , 513 (1969)). [n1] The school board itself affirmatively guaranteed the students of Journalism II an atmosphere conducive to fostering such an appreciation and exercising the full panoply of rights associated with a free student press. "School-sponsored student publications," it vowed, "will not restrict free expression or diverse viewpoints within the rules of responsible journalism." App. 22 (Board Policy 348.51). [p*278]

2. This case arose when the Hazelwood East administration breached its own promise, dashing its students’ expectations. The school principal, without prior consultation or explanation, excised six articles — comprising two full pages — of the May 13, 1983, issue of Spectrum. He did so not because any of the articles would "materially and substantially interfere with the requirements of appropriate discipline," but simply because he considered two of the six "inappropriate, personal, sensitive, and unsuitable" for student consumption. 795 F.2d at 1371.

In my view, the principal broke more than just a promise. He violated the First Amendment’s prohibitions against censorship of any student expression that neither disrupts classwork nor invades the rights of others, and against any censorship that is not narrowly tailored to serve its purpose.

 

3. Public education serves vital national interests in preparing the Nation’s youth for life in our increasingly complex society and for the duties of citizenship in our democratic Republic. See Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 493 (1954). The public school conveys to our young the information and tools required not merely to survive in, but to contribute to, civilized society. It also inculcates in tomorrow’s leaders the "fundamental values necessary to the maintenance of a democratic political system. . . ." Ambach v. Norwick, 441 U.S. 68, 77 (1979). All the while, the public educator nurtures students’ social and moral development by transmitting to them an official dogma of "`community values.’" Board of Education v. Pico, 57 U.S. 853, 864 (1982) (plurality opinion) (citation omitted).

4. The public educator’s task is weighty and delicate indeed. It demands particularized and supremely subjective choices among diverse curricula, moral values, and political stances to teach or inculcate in students, and among various methodologies for doing so. Accordingly, we have traditionally reserved [p*279] the "daily operation of school systems" to the States and their local school boards. Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97, 104 (1968); see Board of Education v. Pico, supra, at 863-864. We have not, however, hesitated to intervene where their decisions run afoul of the Constitution. See e.g., Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987) (striking state statute that forbade teaching of evolution in public school unless accompanied by instruction on theory of "creation science"); Board of Education v. Pico, supra, (school board may not remove books from library shelves merely because it disapproves of ideas they express); Epperson v. Arkansas, supra, (striking state law prohibition against teaching Darwinian theory of evolution in public school); West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943) (public school may not compel student to salute flag); Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923) (state law prohibiting the teaching of foreign languages in public or private schools is unconstitutional).

5. Free student expression undoubtedly sometimes interferes with the effectiveness of the school’s pedagogical functions. Some brands of student expression do so by directly preventing the school from pursuing its pedagogical mission: the young polemic who stands on a soapbox during calculus class to deliver an eloquent political diatribe interferes with the legitimate teaching of calculus. And the student who delivers a lewd endorsement of a student government candidate might so extremely distract an impressionable high school audience as to interfere with the orderly operation of the school. See Bethel School Dist. No. 403 v. Fraser, 478 U.S. 675 (1986). Other student speech, however, frustrates the school’s legitimate pedagogical purposes merely by expressing a message that conflicts with the school’s, without directly interfering with the school’s expression of its message: a student who responds to a political science teacher’s question with the retort, "socialism is good," subverts the school’s inculcation of the message that capitalism is better. [p*280] Even the maverick who sits in class passively sporting a symbol of protest against a government policy, cf. Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School Dist., 393 U.S. 503 (1969), or the gossip who sits in the student commons swapping stories of sexual escapade could readily muddle a clear official message condoning the government policy or condemning teenage sex. Likewise, the student newspaper that, like Spectrum, conveys a moral position at odds with the school’s official stance might subvert the administration’s legitimate inculcation of its own perception of community values.

6. If mere incompatibility with the school’s pedagogical message were a constitutionally sufficient justification for the suppression of student speech, school officials could censor each of the students or student organizations in the foregoing hypotheticals, converting our public schools into "enclaves of totalitarianism," id. at 511, that "strangle the free mind at its source," West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, supra, at 637 The First Amendment permits no such blanket censorship authority. While the "constitutional rights of students in public school are not automatically coextensive with the rights of adults in other settings,"Fraser, supra, at 682, students in the public schools do not "shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate," Tinker, supra, at 506. Just as the public on the street corner must, in the interest of fostering "enlightened opinion," Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296, 310 (1940), tolerate speech that "tempt[s] [the listener] to throw [the speaker] off the street," id. At 309, public educators must accommodate some student expression even if it offends them or offers views or values that contradict those the school wishes to inculcate.

7. In Tinker, this Court struck the balance. We held that official censorship of student expression — there the suspension of several students until they removed their armbands protesting the Vietnam war — is unconstitutional unless the [p*281] speech "materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others. . . . " 393 U.S. at 513. School officials may not suppress "silent, passive expression of opinion, unaccompanied by any disorder or disturbance on the part of" the speaker. Id. at 508. The "mere desire to avoid the discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint," id. at 509, or an unsavory subject, Fraser, supra, at 688-689 (BRENNAN, J., concurring in judgment), does not justify official suppression of student speech in the high school.

8. This Court applied the Tinker test just a Term ago in Fraser, supra, upholding an official decision to discipline a student for delivering a lewd speech in support of a student government candidate. The Court today casts no doubt on Tinker’s vitality. Instead, it erects a taxonomy of school censorship, concluding that Tinker applies to one category, and not another. On the one hand is censorship "to silence a student’s personal expression that happens to occur on the school premises." Ante at 271. On the other hand is censorship of expression that arises in the context of "school-sponsored . . . expressive activities that students, parents, and members of the public might reasonably perceive to bear the imprimatur of the school."Ibid.

9. The Court does not, for it cannot, purport to discern from our precedents the distinction it creates. One could, I suppose, readily characterize the students’ symbolic speech in Tinker as "personal expression that happens to [have] occur[red] on school premises," although Tinker did not even hint that the personal nature of the speech was of any (much less dispositive) relevance. But that same description could not, by any stretch of the imagination, fit Fraser’s speech. He did not just "happen" to deliver his lewd speech to an ad hoc gathering on the playground. As the second paragraph of Fraser evinces, if ever a forum for student expression was "school-sponsored," Fraser’s was: [p*282]

Yet, from the first sentence of its analysis, see id. at 680, Fraser faithfully applied Tinker.

10. Nor has this Court ever intimated a distinction between personal and school-sponsored speech in any other context. Particularly telling is this Court’s heavy reliance on Tinker in two cases of First Amendment infringement on state college campuses. See Papish v. University of Missouri Board of Curators, 410 U.S. 667, 671, n. 6 (1973) (per curiam); Healy v. James, 408 U.S. 169, 180, 189, and n. 18, 191 (1972). One involved the expulsion of a student for lewd expression in a newspaper that she sold on campus pursuant to university authorization, see Papish, supra, at 667-668, and the other involved the denial of university recognition and concomitant benefits to a political student organization, see Healy, supra, at 174, 176, 181-182. Tracking Tinker’s analysis, the Court found each act of suppression unconstitutional. In neither case did this Court suggest the distinction, which the Court today finds dispositive, between school-sponsored and incidental student expression.