Abstract
Understanding Student Rights in Schools makes a case for thinking educationally about the constraints on student rights in schools. The book takes its bearings from the Tinker v. Des Moines School District ruling, which established that ‘free speech rights, applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment, are available to teachers and students’ (Tinker v. Des Moines School District, 1969: 1). The point of the Tinker case was to protect the rights of students in schools within certain parameters, namely, that the exercise of the right to speech neither violates the speech rights of others nor disrupts the educational environment. Although Warnick concedes that schools have a legitimate right to limit student’s liberty rights in certain situations, he is concerned that subsequent student rights cases have granted schools discretion to constrict student liberty rights beyond what is either legally necessary or educationally desirable. Based on his reading of court cases and his understanding of the philosophy and politics of education, Warnick has generated seven special characteristics of schools. He examines each in relation to both the broad purposes of education and the specific liberty right that is of educational concern: speech, religious expression, and privacy. Navigating the complexity of the school context is part of the point of the book, but Warnick goes beyond this critical function by offering school leaders and policy makers principled guidance for thinking about when, why, and how student rights can be limited in schools without undermining the political and social value of the right in question.
Warnick is aware of the ways in which ‘rights talk’ in relation to young people might be seen to be problematic. Young people do not have the same constitutional rights as adults, although they clearly have an interest in developing the capacities to exercise the rights they will have as adults. Students’ liberty rights also have to be balanced against their welfare interests. In a brief but helpful introductory chapter that less philosophically minded readers are invited to skip over, Warnick considers some fundamental objections to ‘rights talk’. Warnick takes issue with the notion that rights talk is at odds with the idea of a school as a community of care, asserting that a community of rights bearers is still a community (p. 13). Following Brighouse, he notes that in certain contexts, rights-thinking is as much about the willingness to waive a rights claim as it is to assert a claim (p. 16). Rights claims are thus not the trump card one might think. They have to take their place among other strong moral claims. Subsequent chapters – which readers are rightly not invited to avoid – make a case for thinking of student liberties as ‘rights in practice’ rather than ‘rights-in-trust’. This gives Warnick scope for thinking about the school’s role in helping students to develop the capacity to exercise their liberty rights rather than thinking of these rights as absolute givens that are beyond the purview of the school’s educational mission.
The key to determining where a rights claim fits alongside other educational values is whether it supports or undermines the school’s educational mission. Warnick construes the purpose of schools to be twofold: autonomy-facilitation and the cultivation of civic-mindedness. In an interesting discussion of parent rights in relation to the interests of children, Warnick considers various arguments for giving parents the sole right to determine the content of a child’s education and concludes that while parents have the right to raise their children in a particular way of life, this right is best construed as a ‘right to invite’ rather than a right to impose. On this view, parents do not have the right to seek to constrain their child’s exposure to ideas and ways of life that are at odds with their beliefs, and schools need to stand firm in their defense of educational programming that broadens student perspectives about life possibilities for themselves and others. This principle is not meant to alienate evangelical parents and others with strong religious views. Warnick’s chapter on religious expression, which advocates for a policy of strong disassociation of the school in relation to religious expression (in keeping with the disestablishment clause) alongside positive accommodations for student religious expression (in keeping with the expression clause), opens space for religious students provided that they are mindful of the range of beliefs within the school community. This is in keeping with the other purpose of schools: the civic mission. Civic education is construed along Rawlsian lines as a fairly robust endeavor that goes beyond respect for the rule of law and includes the cultivation of the capacity for assuming ‘the burdens of judgment’. On this view, democratic citizens need to be able to recognize differences in perspective and be willing to take these into account when formulating a point of view on an issue or course of action. This requires the cultivation of a particular kind of educational environment in which students are exposed to a diverse array of viewpoints and ways of life.
Warnick examines each of the special characteristics of schools with this broadly liberal conception of the school’s educational purposes in mind. To the degree that student rights cohere with the twofold mission of public schools, they are to be valued and protected, but ‘if a set of rights impedes schools from accomplishing their educational mission, then that set of rights must be transformed’ (p. 59). The reasons for doing so must be made clear to students and other interested parties, and they must be guided by the broad educational purposes of the school and not simply by the pragmatic need to establish an orderly learning environment. Warnick calls this the ‘educational criterion’, and explains that its application is not limited to determining whether a right ought to be protected or constrained but extends also to the way in which this decision is conveyed to students. The school must be careful to give sound educational reasons for the decision to limit student expression or privacy, and the school must also attend to the ‘moral residue’ that accrues in these instances. For example, if a student speech or piece of writing is deemed to be inappropriate at a school convocation or another school sponsored forum, the school should provide the student with opportunities to bring their work in line with the school’s educational mission. If such a transformation is not possible (or if the student objects), an alternative venue for the expression in question should be made available to the student, not for the purposes of shielding the controversial speech from the broader community, but to generate a conversation within the school about why the ideas or form of expression might be construed as counter to the educational purposes of the school. As Warnick puts it, ‘speech restrictions, when implemented, should themselves become real learning opportunities for students’ (p. 95).
This book is carefully structured, accessible, and helpful. It is successfully pitched to educational policy makers at many levels – legislators, school board members, school administrators, and teachers – without sacrificing nuanced and principled philosophical argument along the way.