BY A LOS ALAMOS HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT
Editor’s note: The following is one of a series of Op-Eds written by students in Adam Davis’s English 9 and 10 class at Los Alamos High School on free speech in schools. Some students have chosen to remain anonymous.
In the court case and article of Tinker v Des Moines, students were wearing black armbands protesting the war at the current time and a teacher saw their armbands and made them take them off and they were not allowed back to the school until they stopped wearing them after that day. After a week they came back wearing all black to protest. I think that the court made the right decision by ruling in favor of more free speech for the students and this quote I think represents my opinion “It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”
I think in today’s school we have more free speech than we did after this court case happened but we still do not have as much as we do outside of school so I think students have some free speech to speak somewhat of what they are thinking but still I do not think we have enough to create a movement or make a action off of what he says as this quote states “The classroom is peculiarly the ‘marketplace of ideas.” I agree with this quote because school is supposed to be where students share their ideas with other students. And with the court ruling of Tinker v Des Moines I do agree with all of it making us have the right to say what we need to an extent, I agree with what the court ruled in the case of the students for more freedom of speech giving the students more freedom with what they say. But as a counter argument I understand that in school some students use their free speech for bad uses making the school stricter making it reasonable that the school was strict but they shouldn’t have to enforce it enough to where the students can’t speak freely enough to talk to people normally.
Similar to some other cases like Guiles v. Marineau because there was a student wearing a shirt that said that they disapproved with someone being a president and also having drugs on the shirt and someone at the school was offended by this telling a teacher and the principal that he was wearing that shirt so he was suspended from school for a week because he was using his freedom of speech of speech in that shirt.
So in conclusion the students that fought and gave up some of their stuff for more freedom of speech for the students of today so they can speak freely and not be punished for it to an extent, so I agree with the ruling in the case of the students getting more freedom of speech in school after so many students fought for it giving the students of today freedom.