Enshrining Authoritarian Education into Law: Justice Thomas's Opinion on Morse v. Frederick

Belief in teacher-centered education is strongly held by many, but there's a truly virulent strain of this meme: authoritarian education -- which, as I discovered recently, at least one US Supreme Court Justice has tried to enshrine into law. In his concurring opinion on Morse v. Frederick, Justice Clarence Thomas attempted to enshrine authoritarian education into law by ostensibly linking it with constitutional "first principles." Reading his opinion should make your blood chill.

Authoritarian education means slightly different things to different people, as a Google search on the term will reveal. To me, it is an extreme form (and arguably the predecessor) of teacher-centered education (TCE). But while TCE has been softened (some would say humanized) over the years in comparison, authoritarian education is all about indoctrination and obedience. If you think that the application of this form of education is limited to madrassas or re-education camps, think again. Reading Justice Thomas's opinion on Morse v. Frederick will make you realize that there are some powerful people who wouldn't mind seeing authoritarian education re-emerge as the norm in this country, as these quotes indicate:

"During the colonial era" teachers managed classrooms with an iron hand; early public schools were not places for freewheeling debates or exploration of competing ideas. Rather, teachers instilled "a core of common values" in students and taught them self-control....

"To meet their educational objectives, schools required absolute obedience" in the earliest public schools, teachers taught, and students listened. Teachers commanded, and students obeyed. Teachers relied on discipline to maintain order.

"Early public schools gave total control to teachers, who expected obedience and respect from students. And courts routinely deferred to schools' authority to make rules and to discipline students ..the in loco parentis doctrine imposed almost no limits on the types of rules that a school could set while students were in school¦schools and teachers had tremendous discretion in imposing punishments for violations of those rules."

Now, we get to the truly chilling part: Thomas's opinion uses educational practices from the 18th century to justify his conclusion that "as originally understood, the Constitution does not afford students a right to free speech in public schools." In the process, he approves of past decisions which upheld corporal punishment for a student who called a teacher "old", expulsion of a student who gave a public speech criticizing the safety of a school building, and upheld a policy which forbade the use of "quarreling." And his concurrence with Morse endorses the authority of public school officials to interpret ambiguous statements as a "serious and palpable danger" and to increase punishment for not snitching on co-collaborators.

The result is an attack not just on students' right to free speech in public schools, but on education itself. In effect, Thomas is attempting to use "first principles" to enforce his own ideological and thus political preferences. I won't go into detail here about the faultiness of Thomas's reasoning in this opinion, but let's just say that (in this layman's opinion) this opinion is a prime example of the intellectual bankruptcy of judicial originalism.

His reasoning seems to be as follows: educational practices at the time the Constitution was written in the 18th century were authoritarian; these practices were upheld through the application of in loco parentis in case law throughout the years; therefore local school systems have the right to maintain authoritarian control over free speech (and by extension education). The notion that current educational practice should be legally defined by past practice is outrageous, all the more so since Thomas justifies this approach as an attempt at historical understanding of "first principles." He completely dismisses past law which gave students additional rights (Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School Dist.; also see Wikipedia entry here) because that case extended student rights "well beyond traditional bounds." But Thomas's glowing approval of Black's dissent in Tinker is where he really tips his hand ideologically. Black's dissent ("it is the beginning of a new revolutionary era of permissiveness in this country fostered by the judiciary") echoes Thomas's real concern: the erosion of authority as he sees it.

The idea that students should be treated the same way that they were in the past is just nonsense. When a Supreme Court Justice renders a legal opinion which supports authoritarian education, it becomes dangerous nonsense. Enshrining authoritarian education as an extension of constitutional first principles is bad law which tries to support bad education.