An elected official was banned from running for reelection because she objected to what an executive appointee had decided and called down the wrath of her constituents in the form of phone calls and e-mails; speech advocating her as a write-in candidate was censored and when, despite all efforts, the official received a plurality of votes, she was nevertheless denied office by that executive appointee.

That’s what Karissa Niehoff, then principal of Lewis H. Mills High School in Burlington, Conn., called teaching democracy. And the Second Circuit Court of Appeals says that’s OK: A reasonable principal wouldn’t have known better. The court even refused to say that the principal was wrong.

The case, which revisits an incident that has already been before the Second Circuit (then-Judge Sonia Sotomayor sided with the principal) may have broad ramifications for student rights because one of the statements for which then-junior class secretary Avery Doninger was punished was made on LiveJournal; the school thus asserted the right to control not only speech on school property, but all speech by a person who happens to be enrolled as a student, so long as it affects the school.

But the most disgusting part of the opinion is this: Under Tinker v. Des Moines, the key question in the case was whether Doninger’s speech was (or could have been expected to be) disruptive, and what the court treated as disruption was speech that should have been clearly protected: advocacy that Niehoff’s decision about a student performing event be reversed and that Doninger be elected senior class secretary. That’s a notion of disruption the butchers of Tiananmen Square would no doubt approve; it should have no place in an American public school.

Indeed, if conduct such as Niehoff’s is tolerable in American public education, we should abolish the public schools. The one worthwhile argument for having the government in charge of the schools is that it enables government to ensure that each rising generation is prepared to govern a free republic. The taxpayer should pay the teacher, on this argument, for the same reason he should pay the police officer and the judge: to protect his rights; the teacher merely does it at one remove, by educating the voters and jurors on whose judgment the future of freedom in an elective republic that relies on trial by jury must depend. Government-run schools can be legally required to teach American history and government, and because they are bound by the Constitution, they must do so while treating students as citizens with rights. As the Supreme Court said in Tinker, which the court in this case had the shamelessness to quote, “state-operated schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism.” A student in a public school thus learns both the knowledge and the habits he needs to help preserve the Republic.

But every student knows that many American public schools do not act as that argument would require. They routinely violate student rights, emphatically including the right of free speech, thus teaching students that “rights” are mere privileges granted by authority and subject to whatever limits authority chooses to set. If the courts do not teach a different lesson, both to students and to teachers and administrators, students in the public schools will continue developing the habit of submission to arbitrary rule instead of the habit of relying on their rights. And in that case, there is no reason to have public schools.

That said, it’s important to note that some students will refuse to learn such a lesson, no matter what the courts do. Avery Doninger seems to be one such student, having continued this case years beyond her high school graduation. For that, she should be honored.

Here’s the decision in Doninger v. Niehoff, courtesy of the Student Press Law Center.