A Foundation for the Future: Creating a System of Public Student Free Speech and Expression

Speech and expression are at the heart of our political process as well as American education. The extent to which that speech and expression should be free and unfettered has been a challenge not only for society in general, but also for our public school environments, especially as communication forums become more complex and technology moves faster than the law. While the courts have attempted to distinguish between protected and unprotected speech and expression in public educational environments, these precedents have more often confused instead of clarified the issue. The core problem, this dissertation asserts, is a lack of theoretical foundation to tie the diverse issues of public student speech together and offer a degree of consistency to the analysis of student speech. Using law, philosophy, history and educational theory, this dissertation presents a new foundation for student speech freedom analysis, starting with core rationale for protection and suggesting guidelines by which a student speech issue might be analyzed for its constitutionality. Ultimately, the goal of this dissertation is to provide strong guidance for schools and administrators as they create policy to proactively set guidelines for their student bodies that protect both the First Amendment freedom of speech as well as the integrity of the American educational environment to effectively advance education, knowledge and research.