Bryan R. Warnick: Understanding Student Rights in Schools: Speech, Religion, and Privacy in Educational Settings

In Understanding Student Rights in Schools: Speech, Religion, and Privacy in Educational Settings, Warnick presents a legal, ethical, and philosophical construction of student rights in the light of the special characteristics of schools, relating specific examples back to a central guiding principle: the “educational criterion.” In essence, Warnick’s “educational criterion” asserts that, when student rights must be limited, they ought to be limited in an educational manner (when possible). Warnick opens the book with a broad-stroke discussion of rights, their place in school, and the limited role ethics currently play, as compared to narrower legal concepts, in the student rights paradigm. He then details his views of the “special characteristics” that separate the public schools from other environments, and goes on to develop his arguments in light of three specific student rights-categories—speech, religion, and privacy. He closes with an exhortation to educators and policymakers to look beyond the law to ethics and other considerations in their treatment of students’ rights. Ethics, he most crucially argues, much more richly inform the treatment of students in schools than does a strictly legalistic conception of students’ rights. …