A Historic Research On The Freedom Of Speech Of Students In American Public K-12Schools

Freedom of Speech has always been a hot topic among the academic circles. The K-12students, as a special group, also bear relationship with this topic. The following problems have triggered discussion time and again, such as whether they have right to freedom of speech, to what extent, and how the government and schools should handle with it, and so on. The author focus on the freedom of speech of students in American public K-12school. The basic standpoint is liberalistic, that is, uphold the students should have this right. The mainly methodology is case study and comparative study. Through descriptive and analytic research, the dissertation try to make use of American experiences on this practice field as a source of reference to facilitate those who work for Chinese middle schools and primary shools.This thesis is divided into five parts. Chapter one give a brief introduction about the origin, purpose, value, methodology and core concepts of the research. It also includes a literature review on this issue. Chapter two elaborates the intrinsic and extrinsic values of freedom of speech, including promoting self-realization, cognitive development(what follow the next is propitious to discover the truth), democracy, and socialization. Chapter three contains a history of the freedom of speech of students in American public K-12school, presenting detailedly four cases by Supreme Courts—Tinker, Fraser, Hazelwood and Morse. This part divide the development of students speech rights into four periods, one is the "No-rights Ages" before1960s’, one is the "Golden Ages" with the acknowledge of students speech rights in Tinker between1960s’and early1970s’, one is the "Retraction Ages" between1970s’and1990s’, the last one is the "New Century Age", which although the students free speech rights can’t come up to the1960s’, the courts treat each speech case more and more prudently. Chapter four is the key part of this paper, there are three findings after straightening out77published cases from the federal lower courts. One is almost all the lower courts case follow the four precedent Supreme Court jurisprudence. When the court is supporting the students, it cited Tinker as a legal analysis. Secondly, the courts can impose restrictions on students speech rights out of other principles such as Time-Place-Manner and True Threats in addition to the four Supreme Courts principles. Thirdly, there have been two counterwork force behind the students speech rights, one thinks "we must not hand over the controlling power to the students", the other is "Students Do Leave Their First Amendment Rights at Schoolhouse Gates".There are a lot of factors the courts should consider when make a judgment. This part classified these factors into two category by dichotomous approach, subjective factors and objective factors. The former contains the age of students and the location of the speech. The latter consists of effect on the schools of the speech, to what extent the speech it related to the schools, and the characteristics of the speech content. This paper finds out five facts:a) the younger the students is, the more restrictions; b) Outside school speech bears less constrains; c) The speech stands up more censorship when it it bound with the schools closely; d) when the speech cause actual or material disruptions to the school process, it usually get prevention. e) political speech gets the highest protection, violence speech, obscene speech, speech promoting illegal drug-use get zero-tolerance regularly. It’s worth noting that the courts only make decisions after digging through all the factors comprehensively. The final chapter illustrates three principles after some simple thoughts about the localization of American experiences: a)absence of legal prohibition means freedom; b) distinguishing private speech and school-related speech; c) non-repressive and non-discriminative. Then, the following section discuss two factors which is often brought forth when dealing with students speech freedom, age and safety. The author propose we should take age and safety into consideration, they never should be the skeleton key to curtail students speech freedom.