Teach kids civility on the Internet

By Jonathan Zimmerman

Let’s suppose that a student walks through the halls of her high school, carrying a big banner that denounces one of her teachers. I’d be OK with the school confiscating the banner, and I bet you would be too.

So should we let her post similar remarks on the Internet?

This month, a Florida judge said yes. And unlike most of my fellow liberals, I think he was wrong. If we really care about protecting free speech, we need to teach our kids some basic principles of civility.

And that means we sometimes have to restrict their speech — even on the Net.

The Florida case began in 2007, when a high school principal suspended senior Katherine Evans for creating a Facebook page that vilified her English teacher. “Ms Sarah Phelps is the worst teacher I’ve ever met!” Evans wrote. “To those select students who have had the displeasure of having Ms Sarah Phelps, or simply knowing her and her insane antics: Here is the place to express your feelings of hatred.”

Evans eventually sued her principal, arguing that her comments were protected under the First Amendment. She asked for nominal monetary damages, legal fees and the removal of the suspension from her academic record. The principal, of course, asked that the case be dismissed.

And last week, federal magistrate Barry Garber ruled that it could go forward. “Evans’ speech falls under the wide umbrella of protected speech,” Garber wrote. “It was an opinion of a student about a teacher that was published off-campus ... and was not lewd, vulgar, threatening, or advocating illegal or dangerous behavior.”

Instead, it was rude, boorish and ill-mannered. It showed just how little Evans has learned about civil discourse, which requires a set of shared values: reason, tolerance and decency. And when we forsake these ground rules, we lose our ability to communicate — literally, to “make common” — with each other.

Turn on your television this evening, and you’ll see what I mean.

Angry talking heads talk straight past each other on the so-called news shows, bellowing insults and invective into the night. On another channel, featuring music or dance contests, judges compete for the nastiest put-downs of sad-sack performers. And on a third, “reality” characters exchange slurs and slights in a grim quest for sex and celebrity.

The Internet is even worse, of course, because it cloaks much of this abuse in anonymity. At least Katherine Evans had the courage to sign her own name to the Facebook page she created. She also took the page down two days later, after several other students posted messages in support of her teacher.

And Evans’ actions seem downright tame next to two recent cases here in Pennsylvania, where students created fake MySpace profiles to ridicule their principals. On one of the fake pages, a student depicted his principal boasting of steroid and marijuana use; on the other, the principal was cast as a pedophile and sex addict.

In each case, the students behind the fake profiles were suspended; like Katherine Evans, they later sued their schools on First Amendment grounds. And earlier this month, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued conflicting rulings on the fake pages: The first one was protected speech, but the second was not.

All of these decisions rested on the Supreme Court’s landmark 1969 ruling, Tinker v. Des Moines, which allowed students to wear black armbands to school in protest of the Vietnam War. As the court famously pronounced, students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” To suppress student speech, the court added, officials must show that it would “disrupt the work and discipline of the school.” And the black armbands didn’t do that.

Did these various Internet remarks? I doubt it. Posted far beyond the schoolhouse gate, it’s hard to imagine that they disrupted anything inside of it. Gamely, school officials in Pennsylvania argued that the fake MySpace pages could have caused trouble if they hadn’t been discovered and deleted. But nobody could make such a claim about Katherine Evans’ Facebook page, which came down almost as soon as she put it up.

So why not let the kids have their fun? The answer lies elsewhere in the Tinker decision, which insisted that public schools must promote “a robust exchange of ideas.” So they also must show kids how to engage in this dialogue — with clarity, patience and respect for one’s adversary.

Otherwise, our much-vaunted “exchange of ideas” devolves into a crude shouting match. And that’s why we should punish student Internet attacks on school employees, which echo the worst aspects of our debased popular culture. Isn’t it time that we taught children a better way to talk? Their very freedom depends on it.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University and lives in Narberth, Pa. He is the author, most recently, of “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory.”