High School Students: 'Too Young' to be Free

...But the indictment of schools for the denial of rights is justified...

...Then, in April, 1970, mirabile dictu, the appeals court reversed itself on rehearing, acknowledging that, in fact, the school had failed to hold the required evidentiary hearing and therefore could not suspend the students...

...This stage of school too often inoculates its captive audiences with the rote and plasticity of patriotic catechism, training students how to adjust, not how to think...

...Judge Doyle wrote: "So far as education of young people in obedience is concerned, it is important for them to appreciate the present vitality of our proud tradition that although we respect government in the exercise of its constitutional powers, we jealously guard our freedoms from its attempts to exercise unconstitutional powers . . . It is time to broaden the constitutional community by including within its protections younger people whose claim to dignity matches that of their elders...

...Many of the students, it turned out, had not been absent more than thirty days, had justifiable reasons for absences, and had satisfactory academic records...

...they comprised a singing group called "The Sounds Unlimited...

...For example, School Board Chairman William Freienmuth of Montgomery County, Maryland, forbade the distribution in the county's high schools of the Washington Free Press, the capital's underground newspaper for readers of all ages...

...White forms of dress, not black, were required...

...While the actual reason for the purge, later disclosed by interested attorneys, was to reduce enrollment and put the crowded school back on a single session, the stated reason was that all the students expelled had missed more than thirty days of school and had maintained unsatisfactory academic records during the fall semester...

...One piece described the senior dean of the high school as having a "sick mind" and called compulsory attendance laws "idiotic and asinine...

...It is an arbitrary act, unrelated to any provably valid state purpose...

...The resolution of the issue of student rights remains in doubt...

...Judge Wyzanski emphasized that high school students had a right "to look like themselves...

...Although the U.S...

...But the ideas of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness [include], of course, freedom of expression and a wide zone of privacy...

...A 1970 graduate of the Harvard law School, Mr...

...Teachers and administrators have failed to protect pupils' rights both as citizens and as clients of the education industry...

...However valuable an education is to the student—as the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board decision stated— it is also clear that the local school administrator can control the conditions under which the education is provided...

...Supreme Court reversed the lower courts, saying that a school could prohibit such protest only if it materially and substantially interfered with school operations...

...Fortunately, the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union was informed of the Crump and Franklin Lane cases and filed successful suits to reinstate the students...

...What is the student trying to express...

...What Tinker and its progeny emphasize, reiterating the views of John Dewey, is that the process of education in a democracy must be democratic...

...For example, a 1969 Court of Appeals decision, Scoville v. Board of Education, upheld the expulsion of two seventeen-year-old Illinois students for "gross disobedience and conduct" because of certain articles in their publication, Grass High...

...In its decision the Supreme Court held the Connecticut anti-contraception statute unconstitutional because it violated the right of marital privacy, a right "lying within the zone of privacy created by several fundamental constitutional guarantees...

...Some administrators cooperate with these vanguard efforts in education, efforts which prove that students may have learned more than they have been taught...

...It advocates revolution," he said, "and makes disparaging remarks about the CIA and the police...

...Their non-white counterpart was the Committee of the Black and Puerto Rican Coalition, which presented fifteen non-negotiable demands to the New York City School Board, including removal of police from the schools and purging of racist literature from their curricula...

...and, without being present, was found guilty of an unstated offense...

...They are wildly funny, irreverent, biased, opinionated, and, occasionally, obscene...

...In one of these decisions, a Chicago judge asserted...

...School boards are public authorities which operate under a legislative delegation of authority...

...A 1967 decision in Federal District Court in Louisiana upheld the suspension of a bushy-headed high schooler by a principal who asserted, "I am very concerned with preventive discipline...

...Today it is long hair that bothers school administrators...

...It would be illogical to allow symbolic speech on specific issues, such as the Vietnam War in Tinker, but not on a more general controversy over competing ideologies—those of the old versus those of the young, a conflict with traditional political and social implications...

...Nothing, really...

...To order a student to change his appearance so as to conform to an officially accepted style epitomizes the state intrusion of a personal right, the ultimate insult that an official body can level at a student...

...The schools assumed the burden of upholding stylistic conformity under such guides as the California Administrative Code, which points out: "All pupils who go to school without proper attention having been given to personal cleanliness, or neatness of dress, may be sent home to be properly prepared for school...

...Some day those school authorities who are openly non-oppressive may acknowledge: If the faculty participates in determinations over student codes, the students should have a voice in any faculty codes, or hirings, or course-creations or disciplinary hearings...

...The district and appellate courts upheld the action of the school officials, but the U.S...

...Which direction will the high schools take on the rights of students...

...The National Association of Secondary School Principals has estimated that of those schools it has surveyed, one-half had attempted to suppress non-sanctioned publications...

...paper, containing original poetry, essays, short stories, and graffiti, reflected a refreshing creativity, and should not have been banned because of the discomfort it caused some readers...

...And a system of law whose ethic left control of the student to the principal and teacher is being pushed to the constitutional wall...

...In 1966, the principal of Oyster Bay High School on Long Island confined five long-haired students to a special room during school hours because they refused to get haircuts...

...Right to Privacy—The case of Griswold v. Connecticut gave form to Justice Louis Brandeis's phrase, "the right to be left alone...

...It is now estimated that more than 500 of these publications exist, with 150 of them subscribing to the High School Independent Press Service...

...They received no advance notice, nor were they given any opportunity to contest the action against them...

...Society expects public education to concern itself with building young citizens as well as teaching the '3 R's'," Judge William Taylor stated...

...School officials, according to The New York Times, "view the proposal as part of a new campaign by high school and college militants to sow discord in the schools...

...The non-recognition or suppression of student activities, aside from escalating the reactions, raise difficult legal issues...

...And such coercion conflicts with a new ethic among students, what one sociologist has called "privatism," which insists that the state and school leave the student alone in his exercise of personal, non-harmful rights...

...Green was editor of the Harvard Civil Rights law Review...

...We can't mold people who are going to run the world in the 1980s into the shapes of the 1920s . . ." In another in Boston, the well-respected Judge Charles Wyzanski permanently enjoined the principal of Marlboro High from suspending a student whose hair met with his disapproval...

...These grievances are finally working their way into the judiciary, a branch of the government historically quiescent toward high school student rights...

...Sideburns are not to extend beyond the midpoint of the ears...

...Supreme Court wrote no opinion for its refusal to review the decision, there are these compelling grounds to do so, in addition to those quoted from the Doyle and Court of Appeals opinions: First Amendment—It was naive for a Louisiana court to state, "But just what does the wearing of long hair symbolize...

...Although fellow students picketed on their behalf, carrying signs reading, "Better flowing locks than throwing rocks," the quarantined offenders submitted themselves to a selected "hair stylist...

...Most instances of official illegality by school administrations are not unearthed by an attentive ACLU lawyer, organized into a lawsuit, and favorably resolved before a sympathetic judge...

...In a third case, Breen v. Kahl, Federal District Judge James E. Doyle held that the action of a school board at Williams Bay, Wisconsin, in expelling two students in the fall of 1968 for wearing their hair below the collar line, violated the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment...

...Many protests go beyond "unrest" into the arena of political struggle as students organize themselves to protect their rights...

...they function as parent surrogates under in loco parentis, being given wide discretion to formulate policy and exact punishments—up to a limit...

...Among other improvements, it liberalized publishing restrictions and punishment proceedings...

...In 1968, fifty-nine per cent of all high schools and fifty-six per cent of all junior high schools, according to the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP), experienced student protest...

...After all, everyone had a little trouble with conformity sometime...

...It is a truth that must be practiced for the schools if education is to produce the free men and women required to build a free, and just, society...

...Hence "student unrest" should not surprise high school authorities...

...This latter goal can be attempted only when students are freed from the countless trivial coercions which impede their development...

...Yet when courts deal with student rights, they are often uncharacteristically indifferent to precedent—unable to comprehend that students are also citizens with rights rather than merely undisciplined spirits in need of paternal control...

...They also demanded the abolition of tracking systems, which institutionalized inferior education for minority groups, the end of illegal use of the police in the schools, and the end of penalties, including possible expulsion, for exercising their freedom of speech and press, whether by expressing anti-war views in school newspapers or counseling on the draft, drugs, or contraception...

...In a note to the parents of the students, the principal said: "Hair must be kept away from the collar bone...

...However, three 1969 court opinions—one a Federal Court of Appeals ruling—have upheld long-haired students because the school systems can offer no valid justification for the attempt at militaristic control over their pupils...

...Another species of stylistic control was the disciplining of black students for wearing dashikis in a Boston high school...

...A year later, another Federal District Court, this time in Texas, affirmed the suspensions of some boys for wearing their hair long...

...Justice William O. Douglas, iconoclast-on-the-mount, pinpointed the situation best in one of his Supreme Court dissenting views: "I suppose that a nation bent on turning out robots might insist that every male wear a crewcut and every female wear pigtails...

...They were suspended for violating a school regulation forbidding the wearing of arm bands, a rule created after the principal learned of the protest plan...

...Largely a post-Beatle phenomenon, it is also something of a traditional American heresy, blurring gender lines by its transexual implications and overlapping a hip style with a Left political ideology...

...denied representation in violation of a state law allowing counsel for suspension of more than five days...

...MARK TWAIN I N 1969, a few weeks before he was to graduate, Walter Crump became involved in a minor argument with a stern teacher...

...Besides these unofficial efforts the elected representatives of all New York City's high school students, in February, 1970, sought to restructure student-administration relations by proposing that Committees of Twenty— ten students and ten administrators— govern each school...

...The U.S...

...The early hair cases were one-sided contests, with schools controlling their students without the threat of court actions...

...The judge observed that there had been no showing of any danger of disease or disruption, and he took judicial notice that "Samson, the Founding Fathers, and the English singers called 'the Beatles'" all had long hair...

...But with the Vietnam War, students' interests turned outward, and school newspapers began to reflect the new orientation...

...And another District Court held that a New Rochelle, New York, principal had no right to censor an anti-war advertisement in the school newspaper on the grounds that it did not relate to a school activity...

...Yet the hair issue is but one example of a larger student-rights theme: the extent to which the state can compel uniformity among its pupils...

...In the early 1920s an eighteen-year-old girl was expelled from an Arkansas high school for wearing excessive talcum powder on her cheeks, thereby violating a rule which stated: "The wearing of transparent hosiery, low-necked dresses, or any style of clothing tending toward immodesty in dress, or the use of face paint or cosmetics is prohibited...

...Significantly, in upholding Doyle, the U.S...

...In today's McLuhanesque world, style is substance...

...When some hair cases finally got into the courts, the early decisions paid the usual deference to school rules "necessary for the maintenance of an orderly system...

...Clearly, a student's longhaired style says something, since schools get sufficiently exercised to ban it...

...The most prominent high school rights decision to date is a free speech case, Tinker v. Des Moines Board of Education...

...A Federal District Court in Michigan said that a school principal overstepped permissible discretion in expelling students caught with an "obscene" publication, since the offending word in the periodical also appeared in the school's own library—in Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and in Harper's...

...It is of critical importance that high school students be permitted outlets for their dissenting views...

...An intense, intelligent, black high school senior in New York City, Walter was then: suspended summarily, despite a New York City Board of Education rule that a parent be notified prior to suspension...

...In 1968, there was a massive purge in a Connecticut high school, as fifty-three boys were suspended after class-by-class inspections...

...By this time the culprits were safely in col- lege anyway, but the decision is still a significant one, telling school rulers that they had to heed the Constitution and would be watched over by an increasingly alert judiciary...

...One of these limits is the First Amendment guarantee of free speech and free press...

...Such legal insensitivity has gone hand in hand with a simonizing, not humanizing, learning process, one in which you "prepare" the student by keeping him innocent of corrupting influences rather than one in which you "educate" him by encouraging exploration and responsibility...

...He has contributed to Commonweal, The Village Voice, and The Nation and is co-editor of a forthcoming book, "With Justice for Some...

...What were formerly bastions of cultural indoctrination become microcosms of society, with its loves, hates, prejudices, wars, gooks, and warts...

...Encouraging free speech and press, considered "preferred rights" in our constitutional galaxy, can break up the boredom found in many secondary schools, expose administrative inept-ness and illegality, and release student hostilities...

...The Court's opinion called long hair on males a "gross deviation" which could lead to "dysfunction in the social adjustment of children...

...Style," defined differently in different times, has long been a sensitive issue in the schools...

...The school had not attempted to prevent students from wearing Nazi Iron Crosses...

...informed twelve days later that a hearing would be held (a Board rule permitted a maximum of five days between the suspension and hearing...

...Two other 1969 high school press cases advanced the First Amendment rights of students...

...In January, 1969, 670 students, mostly black and Puerto Rican, were summarily expelled from the Franklin Lane High School in New York City...

...The Tinker test of "material and substantial interference" also would seem applicable to the high school newspaper cases, unless it could be proven that the written word was, in fact, a trigger to disruptive action...

...Part of our job is to teach students to live within the law...

...Court of Appeals upheld his ruling, and the Supreme Court refused to review that judicial conclusion...

...Y6t those who sow the wind are not outside agitators but school personnel themselves, and as students come to perceive this reality, the high schools reap the bitter harvest...

...a beat-hippie gestalt has clear anti-establishment denotations, and the long-haired male student or short-skirted female student may indeed be communicating ideas...

...The PROGRESSIVE Madisen, Wisconsin 53703 pant in our country...

...more than three-fourths of these protests involved conflicts over school rules...

...If teachers strike for due process rights for themselves, their students should have those rights too...

...For example, 200 students formed the New York High School MARK J. GREEN is legal consultant to the Center .for the Study of Responsive law, the research organization established by Ralph Nader...

...Union in an attempt to organize the 275,000 secondary school students and to "heighten their radical consciousnesses...

...Yet, usually, Walter Crump-and the thousands like him-would simply disappear into the shadows of the city, lacking both a diploma and a respect for law...

...Thus, as criminal law is, initially, what the cop on the beat says it is, school law, in the first instance, is what the local school board says it is...

...The only lasting remedy is for those who daily rule the students to do so with a democratic, not tyrannical, hand...

...By teaching the young our constitutional guarantees and then by denying these rights to them, students will acquire the degree of cynicism and contempt for adult hypocrisy now so ram- moving...

...Yet the court considered no evidence on the actual likelihood of disruption, as Tinker commands...

...In New York State, hair codes have been essentially eliminated by Superintendent of Schools Ewald Nyquist (after his son had been suspended for having long hair), and the Board of Education in New York City adopted, in Oc- tober, 1969, and in revised form in June, 1970, a significant "High School Bill of Rights...

...Hair must be neat (not bushy) around the ears and must not overlap the ears...

...Three students wore black arm bands to school in 1965 as a silent protest against the Vietnam War...

...Censorship, on the other hand, can be educationally disastrous...

...In 1969, the Mississippi state supreme court held that public officials had the right to keep students' hair cut just above the eyebrows...

...The telling point in both these cases is not that constitutional wrongs were righted, but that school autocrats felt free to ignore the law while inflicting arbitrary punishment...

...If they did not, competing underground newspapers often appeared...

...High School Students 'Too Young' to be Free by MARK J. GREEN In the first place, God made idiots...

...The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil," said Ralph Waldo Emerson...

...The "right" to personal style, while not presenting as dramatic a context as invasion of the marital bed, is an analogous situation...

...be sure to give us your old address as well as the new —and please include both ZIP Codes...

...Even the law, in its pristine application, cannot—alone—achieve student freedom, since cases filed one year and resolved years later cannot hope to rec- ". . . the indictment of schools for the denial of rights is justified/1 tify most, or even a few, of the consistent violations of student rights...

...In fact, this form of expression may be one of the only ways a student can publicly communicate his point of view, for whatever it is worth, given his lack of access to the adult media...

...As long as high school newspapers reported the team scores and the election of class officers, this amendment had little relevance...

...These protectionist decisions simply assumed their conclusion, that ill-grooming was disruptive to the schools, a point asserted but not proven...

...Court of Appeals spoke of the "judiciary's role of final arbiter of the validity of all laws, and protector of the people, young and old, from the governmental exercise of unconstitutional power...

...they range in title from The Finger to The South Dakota Seditionist Monthly to The Neo-Dwarf...

...Other officials adopt a more Agnevian view...

...The sixteen-page news- ". . . school law, in the first instance, is what the local school board says it is...