The provisions of the First Amendment do not halt at the schoolhouse gate, the US Supreme Court ruled in Tinker vs. DesMoines Independent Community School District (1969).
Practically, that isn't always the case.
After Tinker, the Hazelwood vs. Kuhlmeier School district (1988), harshly curtailed student press rights.
High school and college students and their instructors have been fighting to get those rights back ever since.
Even with Tinker, not all the concurring justices believed students shared the same rights as adults. Justice Potter Stewart wrote a separate concurring opinion saying children are captive audiences without full capacity tomake individual choices.
And this became the basis for later decisions giving administrator authority to protect students from themselves.
Stewart's "captive" comment provided the name for a 1974 survey of high school journalism teachers and advisers, "Captive Voices." Nearly 40 years later, the Society of Professional Journalists Journalism Education Committee went back to that survey, expanded upon it and created Still Captive, a definitive book on "History, Law and the Teaching of High School Journalsim" as its subtitle reads.
The book recaps survey results and profiles successful journalism teachers, but its main impact is in the chapters that discuss the importance of journalism classes to students regardless of the career path they choose.
Journalism teaches skills needed in professionals with no obvious relationship to the media. Attention to detail (nursing), organization (engineering) critical thinking (pretty much everything). It fits in with many of the goals of the much-maligned Core Curriculum.
But, the most important role of journalism education, the book concludes, is providing diligent public watchdogs.
Two of the authors, Rebecca Tallent and Lee Anne Peck, point out "today's elementary and high school students have never seen a truly free press in action -- only a wartime press established in the 1990s that is hobbled by free press restrictions such as media pools and limited access to information -- and it is easy to see the need for incubating press-press, free-thinking people with strong, all-around communication shills and all levels of education."
This is what we need to do.
