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Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

Although it's not strictly about age (kids who go to private/home school cannot have their speech regulated by the government in any special way), the fact is that the vast majority of kids in the US do go to public schools. These schools can regulate speech like employers can — but the difference is that no one is required to work for a specific employer for 12 years.

The Court was trying to find a balance that allows schools to prevent kids from going around spewing expletives all day long without consequence, while at the same time not treading too heavily on the legitimate free speech rights of students.

BTW, what do you mean when you say "nonviolent speech"? Are you referring to calls to violence, or the more recent concept (not recognized by the courts) that certain speech is itself violence?

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The power Americans attribute to bad words has always astounded me. This is such a non issue here (France), I can't even think of a case where anyone has been punished, scolded or otherwise criticized for swearing. (There's standards for broadcasting, but they don't apply to single words, and in fact you could run afoul of them without saying a single bad word, while George Carlin's seven words routine would be absolutely uncontroversial.)

At worst, swearing too much will paint you as uneducated or abrasive, but in fact if someone complained about it they would be more likely to be criticized.

I felt the same way too until I realized why. The words you use are used to signal what group you belong to, it is a type of tribal identification. Certain words in the English lexicon are associated with racism and racists and so by using them people believe it signals membership in a particular tribe.

The next step is simply that one tribal group will attempt to target anyone who uses certain words for punishment not because of the word itself but because you indicate you are part of a different tribe and therefore must be punished.

Ultimately it is an abandonment of the principle of governance by law and instead replaces society with a system of tribal warfare.

I've heard this is more due to the US's religious 'puritan' roots.

Back in the 70s, as an example, Canadian broadcast TV used to censor violence quite a bit, yet not nudity as much.

The US was the reverse, with violence on OTA TV more freely shown, compared to nudity.

Canadian vs US broadcast cuts of some movies had to be unique as a result, or US cuts only shown late at night.

I imagine the same logic may apply to "swearing", from a religious viewpoint.

When I was young, we used to joke that Canadians censor violent death, and Americans censor love...

Then you have Quebec French, where the curse words are Catholic references[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_French_profanity

> At worst, swearing too much will paint you as uneducated or abrasive,

This is the rationale for punishing children for saying the words. American parents often do not want their children participating in an environment where those words are socially normalized, and so, school staff prohibit the behavior.

Depending on the particular word and its usage, it may be language that inherently bullies other children too -- also not behavior that American parents want school staff to tolerate.

The most amusing thing about the puritanical approach of the Americans is that by doing this, they are giving these words real power. Cunts. :D

It is illegal in France to insult someone on the basis of their race, sex, etc., etc. Even non-public speech of that type. 500 Euro fine. Up to 3000 Euro for repeat offenses.

I believe a couple provinces of France still have blasphemy laws.

And, then there is Holocaust denial...

For better or worse, the US legal system is far more liberal than France’s when it comes to speech. (As for the relative sensitivity of individual citizens of either country to foul language, I don’t know. Depends where you are, I guess.)

That's what I said. But there are no taboo words.

I think you're misreading the SCOTUS case: the issue at hand was that she bad mouthed the team she was on, not "bad words" in a vacuum. If, in France, I had published a video describing a teacher with "bad words" that became known to the high school, I'd have certainly expected consequences on school grounds.

No, I did not misunderstand the issue. I understand the issue is not strictly speaking the bad words. However I suspect that, had she used non taboo words to say the same thing, she wouldn't have been punished.

That's possible, but isn't that true in France (and presumably other countries) as well and relatively reasonable? "Bad words" have more impact and power, by design.

If I publish a public video where I say that "M. Untel est un professeur très injuste" ("Mr. So-and-so is very unfair"), no problem, "M. Untel est un fils de pute" ("Mr. So-and-so is an asshole"), consequences.

It's not that bad words don't matter, it's that people don't care nowhere as much as in the US. You can say shit and fuck (merde, nique) in, say, a business meeting without getting fired, it's just that it's usually not a good idea.

So there are no consequences in France for people to go around saying the N-word or similar? Calling your teacher a cunt? Nothing?

You can say nègre in France depending on the context, referentially for example. As in "il ne faut pas traiter quelqu'un de nègre" which means "you should not call someone a n....r."

Right but if you say the french equivalent of "you fucking n-word" to your teacher, nothing happens? I find that hard to believe.

Stepping away from race for a second because it probably is needlessly complicating this, you would not get in trouble in a french school for saying the french equivalent of "fuck you, you lazy piece of shit" to your teacher?

> Right but if you say the french equivalent of "you fucking n-word" to your teacher, nothing happens

No, that's exactly the opposite of what I said. In the US you have to circumlocute your way around saying the word in all circumstances, even when it's not used in a derogatory / insulting way (such as referentially, or even because it sounds that way, see "niggardly" and "nega nega" incidents.) Insulting someone is insulting someone. Saying "go get sexually penetrated you inferior race person" is offensive whether you use a taboo word or not.

Fair point. What about "you're a shitty fucking teacher" vs "you're a bad teacher"? The same response is expected?

Let's be clear here. The school board is a bunch of fucking muppets. Children swear. They express disappointment in poor ways. They're children. It's the schools job to know that and react with compassion and guidance, not removing a student from school for a year.

It's not clear to me that a school should have the ability to punish people at all for off campus actions, let alone that this punishment is proportional to the event.

This case is only about the schools ability to exercise arbitrary power over its students, and it was willing to take that to the supreme court-- something which is incredibly rare and expensive over something absolutely mundane and everyday.

Everybody has their own bugbears. Bad words, head scarves...

> The Court was trying to find a balance that allows schools to prevent kids from going around spewing expletives all day long without consequence, while at the same time not treading too heavily on the legitimate free speech rights of students.

Spewing expletives all day long without consequence is a right, guaranteed by the first amendment. If the school system doesn't like it, it's free to relocate to a country where free speech laws don't apply.

I still don't understand why this went all the way to the supreme court. It's such a clear-cut case of free speech. Some school admin's reading comprehension must be really poor if they couldn't make sense of the first sentence of the constitution.

> I still don't understand why this went all the way to the supreme court. It's such a clear-cut case of free speech.

The previous Supreme Court precedent (Tinker, [1]) was from 1969, and it wasn't clear how it should/would apply in the case of digital speech. For example, a student can be off-campus and tweet something that is instantaneously seen by hundreds of students who are on-campus. It wasn't clear how Tinker's framework would apply to this, since twitter and other platforms for remote speech didn't exist at that time.

1: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/393/503

Students don't (and shouldn't) have the right to disrupt the classroom with their speech. Like, you can't just go and yell expletives in a Wendy's and expect to not get kicked out, and IMO the same should apply to classrooms (even though it's the government that is enforcing these rules here, rather than private property owners).

I mean the stuff that is already impermissible for adults to say, calls for violence etc.

I totally understand the practical implications and what they are trying to do, I just don't understand how it's legal without a constitutional amendment.

I wouldn't call the latter an entirely new concept, it seems to have supplanted the concept of 'fighting words' - though that was speech that necessitated violence, the place it held in society was largely the same.

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