If you’re looking for a reason to despair over the state of American education, there are many places you could start. You could, for example, worry about the all-consuming phones—or the gambling and TikTok addictions that come with them. You could worry about the free fall in literacy, the decline in math fluency, the rise of AI, the insanity of college-obsessed parents, the sharp increase in truancy, the teen mental-health crisis, and on and on.
Yet something that deserves more attention is damage to free expression—not in the classroom but in the public sphere of high school: the realms of student newspapers, student government, and other aspects of everyday life. School is meant to prepare students for the real world, but too many institutions are training kids to be silent.
The three of us are the editors of our high-school student newspaper in Washington, D.C., with a staff of about 60 student journalists. We ask a lot of questions. We want to know when and why things happened. We cover big policy changes (a ban on phones) and small schedule changes (an earlier start date to the school year). We cover all kinds of controversies—among them, senior pranks, changes in faculty, and debates about assemblies and theatrical productions. Writers argue in our opinion section about calculator theft, the cure for teenage sleep deprivation, grade inflation, AI policies, and more.
[Christopher L. Eisgruber: The myth of the campus snowflake]
Although many teachers at our school agree to interviews, some consistently decline them. They tell us they’re afraid that saying the wrong thing will result in a stern lecture from a boss or come up in a future job interview. They say they do not want their views at a specific moment in time to be permanently findable on the internet. That’s their right, of course. And we could use more people in society who know that they don’t have to opine on everything just because they can. But we ask teachers for interviews because they are experts who often have more information about the inner workings of the school than we do. We want our publication to be like a small-town newspaper, one that gives its readers a comprehensive view of how our community thinks and feels, and one that advances the cause of seeking the truth and reporting it. But our readers cannot get a full view of the community when people are too afraid to talk.
And people are definitely afraid. This problem, as we see it, is much bigger than our school newspaper. The era of social media came with the promise of hyper-democratization—no longer do you need to be an established pundit to get your message out. (All of us, born in the 2000s, struggle to imagine it any other way.) Although there is much to celebrate about the ways in which the internet has connected us, the permanence of the internet has given rise to censorship pressures—both individually and institutionally. People are so nervous about saying the wrong thing that they choose to say nothing.
Taken to the extreme, a culture of silence can be extraordinarily harmful. As a society, we have to accept that people’s opinions change over time. We can start by treating high school as a time for students to take intellectual risks. In this phase of life, students discover their interests and form their opinions. They try out for sports teams and join clubs and meet new people. And through that experimentation, they come into themselves and grow more independent. The adults who care about students—parents, teachers, school administrators, prospective employers—should encourage them to speak up, to debate, and, yes, even to fail. And they should do so without stepping in to intervene at every turn.
Recently, the Montgomery County, Maryland, school district made local headlines after officials required administrators to review student newspapers prior to publication and outright censor certain reports based on vague standards. School officials tend to approach such matters with varying degrees of subtlety: One administrator at our school floated the idea of a prior-review system for our articles and instructed us on how we should contact sources, while another told us our decision to publish an article about them was reprehensible.
Administrators owe it to their students to support a culture of free expression, and high schoolers need to keep contributing to that culture by saying what they think. Free expression is a principle that seems easy to uphold in theory, but requires some degree of courage in practice. To start, we must reaffirm that our individual and collective right to free expression transcends the substance of anything that any one of us might say. A robust—and sometimes messy—marketplace of ideas is in the best interest of all of us.
[Read: In praise of ‘difficult’ kids]
In Des Moines, Iowa, in 1965, five students wore black armbands emblazoned with peace symbols to school in protest of the U.S.’s escalating involvement in the Vietnam War. Local high-school administrators suspended three of the five students. The school district soon found itself justifying the suspensions in a three-year legal battle that ended with a Supreme Court victory for the students in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District.
The Des Moines administrators said they blocked the armbands because of the possibility that the silent protest could create a disruption, even though no disruption occurred. If a police officer were to prohibit a person on the street from wearing a black armband because that person could hypothetically incite a large protest, any reasonable American would rightly see the officer’s actions as a violation of the First Amendment. The same logic should apply across society.
Of course, creating a culture of openness and respectful debate requires more than staving off government interference. If large groups of people decide that silence is safer than risking disagreement, and if they instruct children to be silent in turn, our fundamental right to free expression will crumble from within.