Dissolution Of The Three Ds

Daniel Henninger, in his weekly Opinion Journal column (via Real Clear Politics) takes a last look at the US Supreme Court ruling in the Morse v. Frederick case. That's the one everyone will forever remember as the "Bong hits 4 Jesus" case. Henninger recommends reading the opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas which discusses the history of the decline and fall of American public education. Somewhere along the line we lost the "Three Ds" as Henninger calls them: decorum, decency and diligence.

What he's done is rummage back through school cases, mostly from 19th century state courts, to invoke the idea of a public school. His premise is that the schools' role was most certainly in loco parentis, in that they and parents broadly agreed on what made an adolescent grow into a good person; what schools need least is court interference in this hard job.

A North Carolina court in 1837 spoke of the need "to control stubbornness, to quicken diligence and to reform bad habits." In 1886, a Maine court said school leaders must "quicken the slothful, spur the indolent and restrain the impetuous." An 1859 Vermont court spoke of preserving "decency and decorum."

Missouri's court in 1885 found reasonable a rule that "forbade the use of profane language." Indiana's in 1888 ruled in favor of "good deportment." An 1843 manual for schoolmasters speaks of "a core of common values" and teaching the "power of self-control, and a habit of postponing present indulgence to a greater future good."

Antique words from a world long gone? Even Justice Thomas admits "the idea of treating children as though it were the 19th century would find little support today." I'm not so sure about that. How else can one explain the flight from the public schools–into home-schooling, parochial schools, private schools and even charter schools, which invest public principals with greater control? Parents are spending thousands to have what American schools had from 1859 to 1959–some basic measure of the Three Ds: decorum, decency and diligence. Self-control as a higher "common value" than out-of-control.

Justice Thomas argues that the 1969 Tinker case dragged the schools into a morass of arcane First Amendment jurisprudence. He's right.

Here's a final quotation from Monday's "Bong" decision to pass out on street corners: "Students will test the limits of acceptable behavior in myriad ways better known to schoolteachers than to judges; school officials need a degree of flexible authority to respond to disciplinary challenges; and the law has always considered the relationship between teachers and students special. Under these circumstances, the more detailed the Court's supervision becomes, the more likely its law will engender further disputes among teachers and students. Consequently, larger numbers of those disputes will likely make their way from the schoolhouse to the courthouse. Yet no one wishes to substitute courts for school boards, or to turn the judge's chambers into the principal's office." More right-wing rant from Clarence Thomas? Nope, that's liberal Justice Stephen Breyer's concurrence.

The loss of that set of common values is a real problem. It is not a liberal of conservative problem - it is a problem for all of this society. There is plenty of evidence that children need limits on what they do - and that they crave that definition of boundaries. We have somehow lost sight of that when it comes to our schools.