Can students really be understood to have rights? Cases like Tinker, Pico, Goss, Morse, and Mahanoy attempt to present students as independent agents, architects of their educations and initiators of lawsuits to defend their designs. But this has never been the case. Most of our constitutional contests over students’ rights since Barnette have been mere smokescreens for political contests between shifting coalitions of adults—parents, school boards, teachers, administrators—seeking an edge in twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture wars. These adults, despairing of enacting their policy preferences by legislative means, have tried to transform their preferences into their children’s rights. In every such case, students themselves had little agency, while in parallel situations where they might have exercised agency, they had no rights. These contradictions prevail because, I will suggest, we continue to hew to the liberal principle of the age of majority, which renders most rights for minors incoherent.

Rita Koganzon is an associate professor in the School of Civic Life and Leadership at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the author of Liberal States, Authoritarian Families: Childhood and Authority in Early Modern Thought.