Last month, 16-year-old Bretton Barber wore a T-shirt to his Michigan high school bearing a picture of President Bush and the words “International Terrorist.”  A vice principal told him he could not wear clothing that “promotes terrorism.”  Turn the shirt inside out, the vice principal said, or go home.

Barber went home.

Suddenly, he’s everywhere.   After The Detroit News ran a story about Barber’s plight, newspapers around the world picked up on it.  Especially in France and Germany, where millions of people seem to share the anti-Bush sentiment, Barber became a cause celebre.  When Connie Chung grills you on CNN, you know that you’re really cooking.

I like Barber, too, and not just because he’s cool; he’s helping remind us how fragile our freedoms really are.  Especially as the country drifts toward war, public schools should solicit – not suppress – students’ political views.  But I wish Barber’s hip anti-war patrons would show the same solicitude for Bill Noyes.

Ever heard of Noyes?  I didn’t think so.  Two weeks before Barber was sent home, high school officials in suburban Cleveland gave Noyes Saturday detention for refusing to turn his sweatshirt inside out.  In bold block letters, Noyes’ sweatshirt declared:  “ABORTION IS HOMICIDE.”  On the back, it issued a challenge:  “You will not silence my message.” 

That’s precisely what Noyes’ school tried to do, of course.  To its credit, the school officials eventually revoked his detention.  But we didn’t hear a peep about Noyes from the folks who rallied around Barber.

And what about Ree Simpson?  Last fall, Simpson was one of 100 students who were told to change their T-shirts or leave their Georgia high School.  The shirts bore the insignia of the Confederate flag, which African-Americans at the school deemed offensive.

I find the flag offensive, too:  Although Simpson says it symbolizes “Southern heritage,” it means “white supremacy” to me.  Oh, and did I mention that I’m offended by the anti-abortion shirt?  In my view, it denigrates women who choose this procedure as well as the brave medical workers who provide it.

I’d also guess that Barber’s T-shirt would offend many of the relatives of the more than 225,000 Americans stationed in the Mideast right now.  All meaningful speech insults somebody.  That’s hardly a reason to ban it.

To America’s nervous school leaders, unfortunately, the T-shirt disputes aren’t about free speech at all.  Instead, they’re about school discipline.  In Michigan, officials said they sent Barber home to maintain an environment that was “conducive to learning.”

Likewise, Georgia administrators barred the Confederate T-shirts to prevent “disruption of the learning environment.”

But it’s the administrators who are disrupting learning here, not the students.  A full and free debate – whether about the war in Iraq or the War Between the States – will enhance education in our schools.  It’s illogical to invoke student learning in a plea for censorship.

It also may be illegal.  In its landmark 1969 decision, Tinker vs. Des Moines, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of three Iowa students who sued for the right to wear black armbands in protest of the Vietnam War.  Schools must respect students’ right to free speech, it said as long as this speech did not threaten “disorder or disturbance” in school.  In the Iowa case, the court said, anti-war armbands simply did not pose such a danger.

Does an anti-war T-shirt today?  Citing the 1999 shootings at Colorado’s Columbine High School as well as the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, some schools have argued that new threats require new rules.  You never know what’s going to trigger a violent outburst, so it’s best to err on the side of caution – or, more precisely, of censorship.

 “Columbine” and 9/11” have become the last refuges of the educational scoundrel.  Leave aside the facts that school violence has declined steadily since the early 1990s.  If you can censor any speech because it might cause violence – by somebody, sometime, somewhere – then you can censor anything.  That’s exactly the direction in which American schools are moving, despite Tinker’s admonition that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

Throughout our history, wars have provided an occasion to slam the gates on American dissent.  Everyone who cares about democracy and the Constitution should fight for the right of Barber to condemn President Bush.

But let’s hope that these same people defend Noyes and Simpson, too.  The real test of democracy is our willingness to protect speech that we loathe, not speech that we like.  Schools need to teach that lesson, and the rest of us need to learn it – over and over again, until we know it by heart.

-- Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University.  He is the author of  Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools.

© March 17, 2003, USA Today