*504Mr. Justice Fortas

delivered the opinion of the Court.

Petitioner John F. Tinker, 15 years old, and petitioner Christopher Eckhardt, 16 years old, attended high schools in Des Moines, Iowa. Petitioner Mary Beth Tinker, John’s sister, was a 13-year-old student in junior high school.

In December 1965, a group of adults and students in Des Moines held a meeting at the Eckhardt home. The group determined to publicize their objections to the hostilities in Vietnam and their support for a truce by wearing black armbands during the holiday season and by fasting on December 16 and New Year’s Eve. Petitioners and their parents had previously engaged in similar activities, and they decided to participate in the program.

The principals of the Des Moines schools became aware of the plan to wear armbands. On December 14, 1965, they met and adopted a policy that any student wearing an armband to school would be asked to remove it, and if he refused he would be suspended until he returned without the armband. Petitioners were aware of the regulation that the school authorities adopted.

On December 16, Mary Beth and Christopher wore black armbands to their schools. John Tinker wore his armband the next day. They were all sent home and suspended from school until they would come back without their armbands. They did not return to school until after the planned period for wearing armbands had expired — that is, until after New Year’s Day.

This complaint was filed in the United States District Court by petitioners, through their fathers, under § 1983 of Title 42 of the United States Code. It prayed for an injunction restraining the respondent school officials and the respondent members of the board of directors of the school district from disciplining the petitioners, and it sought nominal damages. After an evidentiary hearing the District Court dismissed the complaint. It up*505held the constitutionality of the school authorities' action on the ground that it was reasonable in order to prevent disturbance of school discipline. 258 F. Supp. 971 (1966). The court referred to but expressly declined to follow the Fifth Circuit’s holding in a similar ease that the wearing of symbols like the armbands cannot be prohibited unless it “materially and substantially interfere[s] with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school.” Burnside v. Byars, 363 F. 2d 744, 749 (1966).1

On appeal, the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit considered the case en banc. The court was equally divided, and the District Court’s decision was accordingly affirmed, without opinion. 383 F. 2d 988 (1967). We granted certiorari. 390 U. S. 942 (1968).

I.

The District Court recognized that the wearing of an armband for the purpose of expressing certain views is the type of symbolic act that is within the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment. See West Virginia v. Barnette, 319 U. S. 624 (1943); Stromberg v. California, 283 U. S. 359 (1931). Cf. Thornhill v. Alabama, 310 U. S. 88 (1940); Edwards v. South Carolina, 372 U. S. 229 (1963); Brown v. Louisiana, 383 U. S. 131 (1966). As we shall discuss, the wearing of armbands in the circumstances of this case was entirely divorced from actually or potentially disruptive conduct by those participating in it. It was closely akin to “pure speech” *506which, we have repeatedly held, is entitled to comprehensive protection under the First Amendment. Cf. Cox v. Louisiana, 379 U. S. 536, 555 (1965); Adderley v. Florida, 385 U. S. 39 (1966).

First Amendment rights, applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment, are available to teachers and students. It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate. This has been the unmistakable holding of this Court for almost 50 years. In Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U. S. 390 (1923), and Bartels v. Iowa, 262 U. S. 404 (1923), this Court, in opinions by Mr. Justice McReynolds, held that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prevents States from forbidding the teaching of a foreign language to young students. Statutes to this effect, the Court held, unconstitutionally interfere with the liberty of teacher, student, and parent.2 See also Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 *507U. S. 510 (1925); West Virginia v. Barnette, 319 U. S. 624 (1943); McCollum v. Board of Education, 333 U. S. 203 (1948); Wieman v. Updegraff, 344 U. S. 183, 195 (1952) (concurring opinion); Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 354 U. S. 234 (1957); Shelton v. Tucker, 364 U. S. 479, 487 (1960); Engel v. Vitale, 370 U. S. 421 (1962); Keyishian v. Board of Regents, 385 U. S. 589, 603 (1967); Epperson v. Arkansas, ante, p. 97 (1968).

In West Virginia v. Barnette, supra, this Court held that under the First Amendment, the student in public school may not be compelled to salute the flag. Speaking through Mr. Justice Jackson, the Court said:

“The Fourteenth Amendment, as now applied to the States, protects the citizen against the State itself and all of its creatures — Boards of Education not excepted. These have, of course, important, delicate, and highly discretionary functions, but none that they may not perform within the limits of the Bill of Rights. That they are educating the young for citizenship is reason for scrupulous protection of Constitutional freedoms of the individual, if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source and teach youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes.” 319 U. S., at 637.

On the other hand, the Court has repeatedly emphasized the need for affirming the comprehensive authority of the States and of school officials, consistent with fundamental constitutional safeguards, to prescribe and control conduct in the schools. See Epperson v. Arkansas, supra, at 104; Meyer v. Nebraska, supra, at 402. Our problem lies in the area where students in the exercise of First Amendment rights collide with the rules of the school authorities.

II.

The problem posed by the present case does not relate to regulation of the length of skirts or the type of cloth*508ing, to hair style, or deportment. Cf. Ferrell v. Dallas Independent School District, 392 F. 2d 697 (1968); Pugsley v. Sellmeyer, 158 Ark. 247, 250 S. W. 538 (1923). It does not concern aggressive, disruptive action or even group demonstrations. Our problem involves direct, primary First Amendment rights akin to “pure speech.”

The school officials banned and sought to punish petitioners for a silent, passive expression of opinion, unaccompanied by any disorder or disturbance on the part of petitioners. There is here no evidence whatever of petitioners’ interference, actual or nascent, with the schools’ work or of collision with the rights of other students to be secure and to be let alone. Accordingly, this case does not concern speech or action that intrudes upon the work of the schools or the rights of other students.

Only a few of the 18,000 students in the school system wore the black armbands. Only five students were suspended for wearing them. There is no indication that the work of the schools or any class was disrupted. Outside the classrooms, a few students made hostile remarks to the children wearing armbands, but there were no threats or acts of violence on school premises.

The District Court concluded that the action of the school authorities was reasonable because it was based upon their fear of a disturbance from the wearing of the armbands. But, in our system, undifferentiated fear or apprehension of disturbance is not enough to overcome the right to freedom of expression. Any departure from absolute regimentation may cause trouble. Any variation from the majority’s opinion may inspire fear. Any word spoken, in class, in the lunchroom, or on the campus, that deviates from the views of another person may start an argument or cause a disturbance. But our Constitution says we must take this risk, Terminiello v. Chicago, 337 U. S. 1 (1949); and our history says that it is this sort of hazardous freedom — this kind of openness — that is *509the basis of our national strength and of the independence and vigor of Americans who grow up and live in this relatively permissive, often disputatious, society.

In order for the State in the person of school officials to justify prohibition of a particular expression of opinion, it must be able to show that its action was caused by something more than a mere desire to avoid the discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint. Certainly where there is no finding and no showing that engaging in the forbidden conduct would “materially and substantially interfere with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school,” the prohibition cannot be sustained. Burnside v. Byars, supra, at 749.

In the present case, the District Court made no such finding, and our independent examination of the record fails to yield evidence that the school authorities had reason to anticipate that the wearing of the armbands would substantially interfere with the work of the school or impinge upon the rights of other students. Even an official memorandum prepared after the suspension that listed the reasons for the ban on wearing the armbands made no reference to the anticipation of such disruption.3

*510On the contrary, the action of the school authorities appears to have been based upon an urgent wish to avoid the controversy which might result from the expression, even by the silent symbol of armbands, of opposition to this Nation’s part in the conflagration in Vietnam.4 It is revealing, in this respect, that the meeting at which the school principals decided to issue the contested regulation was called in response to a student’s statement to the journalism teacher in one of the schools that he wanted to write an article on Vietnam and have it published in the school paper. (The student was dissuaded.5)

It is also relevant that the school authorities did not purport to prohibit the wearing of all symbols of political or controversial significance. The record shows that students in some of the schools wore buttons relating to national political campaigns, and some even wore the Iron Cross, traditionally a symbol of Nazism. The order prohibiting the wearing of armbands did not extend to these. Instead, a particular symbol — black armbands worn to exhibit opposition to this Nation’s involvement *511in Vietnam — was singled out for prohibition. Clearly, the prohibition of expression of one particular opinion, at least without evidence that it is necessary to avoid material and substantial interference with schoolwork or discipline, is not constitutionally permissible.

In our system, state-operated schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism. School officials do not possess absolute authority over their students. Students in school as well as out of school are “persons” under our Constitution. They are possessed of fundamental rights which the State must respect, just as they themselves must respect their obligations to the State. In our system, students may not be regarded as closed-circuit recipients of only that which the State chooses to communicate. They may not be confined to the expression of those sentiments that are officially approved. In the absence of a specific showing of constitutionally valid reasons to regulate their speech, students are entitled to freedom of expression of their views. As Judge Gewin, speaking for the Fifth Circuit, said, school officials cannot suppress “expressions of feelings with which they do not wish to contend.” Burnside v. Byars, supra, at 749.

In Meyer v. Nebraska, supra, at 402, Mr. Justice McReynolds expressed this Nation’s repudiation of the principle that a State might so conduct its schools as to “foster a homogeneous people.” He said:

“In order to submerge the individual and develop ideal citizens, Sparta assembled the males at seven into barracks and intrusted their subsequent education and training to official guardians. Although such measures have been deliberately approved by men of great genius, their ideas touching the relation between individual and State were wholly different from those upon which our institutions rest; and it hardly will be affirmed that any legislature could impose such restrictions upon the people of a *512State without doing violence to both letter and spirit of the Constitution.”

This principle has been repeated by this Court on numerous occasions during the intervening years. In Keyishian v. Board of Regents, 385 U. S. 589, 603, Mr. Justice Brennan, speaking for the Court, said:

“ 'The vigilant protection of constitutional freedoms is nowhere more vital than in thé community of American schools.' Shelton v. Tucker, [364 U. S. 479,] at 487. The classroom is peculiarly the 'marketplace of ideas.' The Nation's future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth 'out of a multitude of tongues, [rather] than through any kind of authoritative selection.’ ”

The principle of these cases is not confined to the supervised and ordained discussion which takes place in the classroom. The principal use to which the schools are dedicated is to accommodate students during prescribed hours for the purpose of certain types of activities. Among those activities is personal intercommunication among the students.6 This is not only an inevitable part of the process of attending school; it is also an important part of the educational process. A student’s rights, therefore, do not embrace merely the classroom hours. When he is in the cafeteria, or on the playing field, or on *513the campus during the authorized hours, he may express his opinions, even on controversial subjects like the conflict in Vietnam, if he does so without “materially and substantially interfering] with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school” and without colliding with the rights of others. Burnside v. Byars, supra, at 749. But conduct by the student, in class or out of it, which for any reason — whether it stems from time, place, or type of behavior — materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others is, of course, not immunized by the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech. Cf. Blackwell v. Issaquena County Board of Education, 363 F. 2d 749 (C. A. 5th Cir. 1966).

Under our Constitution, free speech is not a right that is given only to be so circumscribed that it exists in principle but not in fact. Freedom of expression would not truly exist if the right could be exercised only in an area that a benevolent government has provided as a safe haven for crackpots. The Constitution says that Congress (and the States) may not abridge the right to free speech. This provision means what it says. We properly read it to permit reasonable regulation of speech-connected activities in carefully restricted circumstances. But we do not confine the permissible exercise of First Amendment rights to a telephone booth or the four corners of a pamphlet, or to supervised and ordained discussion in a school classroom.

If a regulation were adopted by school officials forbidding discussion of the Vietnam conflict, or the expression by any student of opposition to it anywhere on school property except as part of a prescribed classroom exercise, it would be obvious that the regulation would violate the constitutional rights of students, at least if it could not be justified by a showing that the students’ activities would materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school. Cf. Ham*514mond v. South Carolina State College, 272 F. Supp. 947 (D. C. S. C. 1967) (orderly protest meeting on state college campus); Dickey v. Alabama State Board of Education, 273 F. Supp. 613 (D. C. M. D. Ala. 1967) (expulsion of student editor of college newspaper). In the circumstances of the present case, the prohibition of the silent, passive “witness of the armbands,” as one of the children called it, is no less offensive to the Constitution’s guarantees.

As we have discussed, the record does not demonstrate any facts which might reasonably have led school authorities to forecast substantial disruption of or material interference with school activities, and no disturbances or disorders on the school premises in fact occurred. These petitioners merely went about their ordained rounds in school. Their deviation consisted only in wearing on their sleeve a band of black cloth, not more than two inches wide. They wore it to exhibit their disapproval of the Vietnam hostilities and their advocacy of a truce, to make their views known, and, by their example, to influence others to adopt them. They neither interrupted school activities nor sought to intrude in the school affairs or the lives of others. They caused discussion outside of the classrooms, but no interference with work and no disorder. In the circumstances, our Constitution does not permit officials of the State to deny their form of expression.

We express no opinion as to the form of relief which should be granted, this being a matter for the lower courts to determine. We reverse and remand for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

Reversed and remanded.

Me. Justice Stewart,

concurring.

Although I agree with much of what is said in the Court’s opinion, and with its judgment in this case, I *515cannot share the Court’s uncritical assumption that, school discipline aside, the First Amendment rights of children are co-extensive with those of adults. Indeed, I had thought the Court decided otherwise just last Term in Ginsberg v. New York, 390 U. S. 629. I continue to hold the view I expressed in that case: “[A] State may permissibly determine that, at least in some precisely delineated areas, a child — like someone in a captive audience — is not possessed of that full capacity for individual choice which is the presupposition of First Amendment guarantees.” Id., at 649-650 (concurring in result). Cf. Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U. S. 158.

Me. Justice White,

concurring.

While I join the Court’s opinion, I deem it appropriate to note, first, that the Court continues to recognize a distinction between communicating by words and communicating by acts or conduct which sufficiently impinges on some valid state interest; and, second, that I do not subscribe to everything the Court of Appeals said about free speech in its opinion in Burnside v. Byars, 363 F. 2d 744, 748 (C. A. 5th Cir. 1966), a case relied upon by the Court in the matter now before us.

Mb. Justice Black,

dissenting.

The Court’s holding in this case ushers in what I deem to be an entirely new era in which the power to control pupils by the elected “officials of state supported public schools . . .” in the United States is in ultimate effect transferred to the Supreme Court.1 The Court brought *516this particular case here on a petition for certiorari urging that the First and Fourteenth Amendments protect the right of school pupils to express their political views all the way “from kindergarten through high school.” Here the constitutional right to “political expression” asserted was a right to wear black armbands during school hours and at classes in order to demonstrate to the other students that the petitioners were mourning because of the death of United States soldiers in Vietnam and to protest that war which they were against. Ordered to refrain from wearing the armbands in school by the elected school officials and the teachers vested with state authority to do so, apparently only seven out of the school system’s 18,000 pupils deliberately refused to obey the order. One defying pupil was Paul Tinker, 8 years old, who was in the second grade; another, Hope Tinker, was 11 years old and in the fifth grade; a third member of the Tinker family was 13, in the eighth grade; and a fourth member of the same family was John Tinker, 15 years old, an 11th grade high school pupil. Their father, a Methodist minister without a church, is paid a salary by the American Friends Service Committee. Another student who defied the school order and insisted on wearing an armband in school was Christopher Eckhardt, an 11th grade pupil and a petitioner in this case. His mother is an official in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

As I read the Court’s opinion it relies upon the following grounds for holding unconstitutional the judgment of the Des Moines school officials and the two courts below. First, the Court concludes that the wearing of armbands is “symbolic speech” which is “akin to ‘pure speech’ ” and therefore protected by the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Secondly, the Court decides that the public schools are an appropriate place to exercise “symbolic speech” as long as normal school func*517tions are not “unreasonably” disrupted. Finally, the Court arrogates to itself, rather than to the State’s elected officials charged with running the schools, the decision as to which school disciplinary regulations are “reasonable.”

Assuming that the Court is correct in holding that the conduct of wearing armbands for the purpose of conveying political ideas is protected by the First Amendment, cf., e. g., Giboney v. Empire Storage & Ice Co., 336 U. S. 490 (1949), the crucial remaining questions are whether students and teachers may use the schools at their whim as a platform for the exercise of free speech — “symbolic” or “pure” — and whether the courts will allocate to themselves the function of deciding how the pupils’ school day will be spent. While I have always believed that under the First and Fourteenth Amendments neither the State nor the Federal Government has any authority to regulate or censor the content of speech, I have never believed that any person has a right to give speeches or engage in demonstrations where he pleases and when he pleases. This Court has already rejected such a notion. In Cox v. Louisiana, 379 U. S. 536, 554 (1965), for example, the Court clearly stated that the rights of free speech and assembly “do not mean that everyone with opinions or beliefs to express may address a group at any public place and at any time.”

While the record does not show that any of these armband students shouted, used profane language, or were violent in any manner, detailed testimony by some of them shows their armbands caused comments, warnings by other students, the poking of fun at them, and a warning by an older football player that other, nonprotesting students had better let them alone. There is also evidence that a teacher of mathematics had his lesson period practically “wrecked” chiefly by disputes with Mary Beth Tinker, who wore her armband for her “demonstra*518tion.” Even a casual reading of the record shows.that this armband did divert students’ minds from their regular lessons, and that talk, comments, etc., made John Tinker “self-conscious” in attending school with his armband. While the absence of obscene remarks or boisterous and loud disorder perhaps justifies the Court’s statement that the few armband students did not actually “disrupt” the classwork, I think the record overwhelmingly shows that the armbands did exactly what the elected school officials and principals foresaw they would, that is, took the students’ minds off their classwork and diverted them to thoughts about the highly emotional subject of the Vietnam war. And I repeat that if the time has come when pupils of state-supported schools, kindergartens, grammar schools, or high schools, can defy and flout orders of school officials to keep their minds on their own schoolwork, it is the beginning of a new revolutionary era of permissiveness in this country fostered by the judiciary. The next logical step, it appears to me, would be to hold unconstitutional laws that bar pupils under 21 or 18 from voting, or from being elected members of the boards of education.2

The United States District Court refused to hold that the state school order violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments. 258 F. Supp. 971. Holding that the protest was akin to speech, which is protected by the First *519and Fourteenth Amendments, that court held that the school order was “reasonable” and hence constitutional. There was at one time a line of cases holding “reasonableness” as the court saw it to be the test of a “due process” violation. Two cases upon which the Court today heavily relies for striking down this school order used this test of reasonableness, Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U. S. 390 (1923), and Bartels v. Iowa, 262 U. S. 404 (1923). The opinions in both cases were written by Mr. Justice McReynolds; Mr. Justice Holmes, who opposed this reasonableness test, dissented from the holdings as did Mr. Justice Sutherland. This constitutional test of reasonableness prevailed in this Court for a season. It was this test that brought on President Franklin Roosevelt’s well-known Court fight. His proposed legislation did not pass, but the fight left the “reasonableness” constitutional test dead on the battlefield, so much so that this Court in Ferguson v. Skrupa, 372 U. S. 726, 729, 730, after a thorough review of the old cases, was able to conclude in 1963:

“There was a time when the Due Process Clause was used by this Court to strike down laws which were thought unreasonable, that is, unwise or incompatible with some particular economic or social philosophy.

“The doctrine that prevailed in Lochner, Coppage, Adkins, Burns, and like cases — that due process authorizes courts to hold laws unconstitutional when they believe the legislature has acted unwisely — has long since been discarded.”

The Ferguson case totally repudiated the old reasonableness-due process test, the doctrine that judges have the power to hold laws unconstitutional upon the belief of judges that they “shock the conscience” or that they are *520“unreasonable,” “arbitrary,” “irrational,” “contrary to fundamental 'decency,’ ” or some other such flexible term without precise boundaries. I have many times expressed my opposition to that concept on the ground that it gives judges power to strike down any law they do not like. If the majority of the Court today, by agreeing to the opinion of my Brother Fortas, is resurrecting that old reasonableness-due process test, I think the constitutional change should be plainly, unequivocally, and forthrightly stated for the benefit of the bench and bar. It will be a sad day for the country, I believe, when the present-day Court returns to the McReynolds due process concept. Other cases cited by the Court do not, as implied, follow the McReynolds reasonableness doctrine. West Virginia v. Barnette, 319 U. S. 624, clearly rejecting the “reasonableness” test, held that the Fourteenth Amendment made the First applicable to the States, and that the two forbade a State to compel little schoolchildren to salute the United States flag when they had religious scruples against doing so.3 Neither Thornhill v. Alabama, 310 U. S. 88; Stromberg v. California, 283 U. S. 359; Edwards *521v. South Carolina, 372 U. S. 229; nor Brown v. Louisiana, 383 U. S. 131, related to schoolchildren at all, and none of these cases embraced Mr. Justice McReynolds’ reasonableness test; and Thornhill, Edwards, and Brown relied on the vagueness of state statutes under scrutiny to hold them unconstitutional. Cox v. Louisiana, 379 U. S. 536, 555, and Adderley v. Florida, 385 U. S. 39, cited by the Court as a “compare,” indicating, I suppose, that these two cases are no longer the law, were not rested to the slightest extent on the Meyer and Bartels “reasonableness-due process-McReynolds” constitutional test.

*520“The First Amendment declares that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The Fourteenth Amendment has rendered the legislatures of the states as incompetent as Congress to enact such laws. The constitutional inhibition of legislation on the subject of religion has a double aspect. On the one hand, it forestalls compulsion by law of the acceptance of any creed or the practice of any form of worship. Freedom of conscience and freedom to adhere to such religious organization or form of worship as the individual may choose cannot be restricted by law. On the other hand, it safeguards the free exercise of the chosen form of religion. Thus the Amendment embraces two concepts,- — freedom to believe and freedom to act. The first is absolute but, in the nature of things, the second cannot be. Conduct remains subject to regulation for the protection of society.”

*521I deny, therefore, that it has been the “unmistakable holding of this Court for almost 50 years” that “students” and “teachers” take with them into the “schoolhouse gate” constitutional rights to “freedom of speech or expression.” Even Meyer did not hold that. It makes no reference to “symbolic speech” at all; what it did was to strike down as “unreasonable” and therefore unconstitutional a Nebraska law barring the teaching of the German language before the children reached the eighth grade. One can well agree with Mr. Justice Holmes and Mr. Justice Sutherland, as I do, that such a law was no more unreasonable than it would be to bar the teaching of Latin and Greek to pupils who have not reached the eighth grade. In fact, I think the majority’s reason for invalidating the Nebraska law was that it did not like it or in legal jargon that it “shocked the Court’s conscience,” “offended its sense of justice,” or was “contrary to fundamental concepts of the English-speaking world,” as the Court has sometimes said. See, e. g., Rochin v. California, 342 U. S. 165, and Irvine v. California, 347 U. S. 128. The truth is that a teacher of kindergarten, grammar school, or high school pupils no more carries into a school with him a complete right to freedom of speech and expression than an anti-Catholic or anti-Semite carries with him a complete freedom of *522speech and religion into a Catholic church or Jewish synagogue. Nor does a person carry with him into the United States Senate or House, or into the Supreme Court, or any other court, a complete constitutional right to go into those places contrary to their rules and speak his mind on any subject he pleases. It is a myth to say that any person has a constitutional right to say what he pleases, where he pleases, and when he pleases. Our Court has decided precisely the opposite. See, e. g., Cox v. Louisiana, 379 U. S. 536, 555; Adderley v. Florida, 385 U. S. 39.

In my view, teachers in state-controlled public schools are hired to teach there. Although Mr. Justice McReyn-olds may have intimated to the contrary in Meyer v. Nebraska, supra, certainly a teacher is not paid to go into school and teach subjects the State does not hire him to teach as a part of its selected curriculum. Nor are public school students sent to the schools at public expense to broadcast political or any other views to educate and inform the public. The original idea of schools, which I do not believe is yet abandoned as worthless or out of date, was that children had not yet reached the point of experience and wisdom which enabled them to teach all of their elders. It may be that the Nation has outworn the old-fashioned slogan that “children are to be seen not heard,” but one may, I hope, be permitted to harbor the thought that taxpayers send children to school on the premise that at their age they need to learn, not teach.

The true principles on this whole subject were in my judgment spoken by Mr. Justice McKenna for the Court in Waugh v. Mississippi University in 237 U. S. 589, 596-597. The State had there passed a law barring students from peaceably assembling in Greek letter fraternities and providing that students who joined them could be expelled from school. This law would appear on the surface to run afoul of the First Amendment’s *523freedom of assembly clause. The law was attacked as violative of due process and of the privileges and immunities clause and as a deprivation of property and of liberty, under the Fourteenth Amendment. It was argued that the fraternity made its members more moral, taught discipline, and inspired its members to study harder and to obey better the rules of discipline and order. This Court rejected all the “fervid” pleas of the fraternities’ advocates and decided unanimously against these Fourteenth Amendment arguments. The Court in its next to the last paragraph made this statement which has complete relevance for us today:

“It is said that the fraternity to which complainant belongs is a moral and of itself a disciplinary force. This need not be denied. But whether such membership makes against discipline was for the State of Mississippi to determine. It is to be remembered that the University was established by the State and is under the control of the State, and the enactment of the statute may have been induced by the opinion that membership in the prohibited societies divided the attention of the students and distracted from that singleness of purpose which the State desired to exist in its public educational institutions. It is not for us to entertain conjectures in opposition to the views of the State and annul its regulations upon disputable considerations of their wisdom or necessity.” (Emphasis supplied.)

It was on the foregoing argument that this Court sustained the power of Mississippi to curtail the First Amendment’s right of peaceable assembly. And the same reasons are equally applicable to curtailing in the States’ public schools the right to complete freedom of expression. Iowa’s public schools, like Mississippi’s university, are operated to give students an opportunity to learn, not to talk politics by actual speech, or by “sym*524bolic” speech. And, as I have pointed out before, the record amply shows that public protest in the school classes against the Vietnam war “distracted from that singleness of purpose which the State [here Iowa] desired to exist in its public educational institutions.” Here the Court should accord Iowa educational institutions the same right to determine for themselves to what extent free expression should be allowed in its schools as it accorded Mississippi with reference to freedom of assembly. But even if the record were silent as to protests against the Vietnam war distracting students from their assigned class work, members of this Court, like all other citizens, know, without being told, that the disputes over the wisdom of the Vietnam war have disrupted and divided this country as few other issues ever have. Of course students, like other people, cannot concentrate on lesser issues when black armbands are being ostentatiously displayed in their presence to call attention to the wounded and dead of the war, some of the wounded and the dead being their friends and neighbors. It was, of course, to distract the attention of other students that some students insisted up to the very point of their own suspension from school that they were determined to sit in school wdth their symbolic armbands.

Change has been said to be truly the law of life but sometimes the old and the tried and true are worth holding. The schools of this Nation have undoubtedly contributed to giving us tranquility and to making us a more law-abiding people. Uncontrolled and uncontrollable liberty is an enemy to domestic peace. We cannot close our eyes to the fact that some of the country’s greatest problems are crimes committed by the youth, too many of school age. School discipline, like parental discipline, is an integral and important part of training our children to be good citizens — to be better citizens. Here a very small number of students have crisply and sum*525marily refused to obey a school order designed to give pupils who want to learn the opportunity to do so. One does not need to be a prophet or the son of a prophet to know that after the Court's holding today some students in Iowa schools and indeed in all schools will be ready, able, and willing to defy their teachers on practically all orders. This is the more unfortunate for the schools since groups of students all over the land are already running loose, conducting break-ins, sit-ins, lie-ins, and smash-ins. Many of these student groups, as is all too familiar to all who read the newspapers and watch the television news programs, have already engaged in rioting, property seizures, and destruction. They have picketed schools to force students not to cross their picket lines and have too often violently attacked earnest but frightened students who wanted an education that the pickets did not want them to get. Students engaged in such activities are apparently confident that they know far more about how to operate public school systems than do their parents, teachers, and elected school officials. It is no answer to say that the particular students here have not yet reached such high points in their demands to attend classes in order to exercise their political pressures. Turned loose with lawsuits for damages and injunctions against their teachers as they are here, it is nothing but wishful thinking to imagine that young, immature students will not soon believe it is their right to control the schools rather than the right of the States that collect the taxes to hire the teachers for the benefit of the pupils. This case, therefore, wholly without constitutional reasons in my judgment, subjects all the public schools in the country to the whims and caprices of their loudest-mouthed, but maybe not their brightest, students. I, for one, am not fully persuaded that school pupils are wise enough, even with this Court's expert help from Washington, to run the 23,390 public school *526systems4 in our 50 States. I wish, therefore, wholly to disclaim any purpose on my part to hold that the Federal Constitution compels the teachers, parents, and elected school officials to surrender control of the American public school system to public- school students. I dissent.

Mr. Justice Harlan,

dissenting.

I certainly agree that state public school authorities in the discharge of their responsibilities are not wholly exempt from the requirements of the Fourteenth Amendment respecting the freedoms of expression and association. At the same time I am reluctant to believe that there is any disagreement between the majority and myself on the proposition that school officials should be accorded the widest authority in maintaining discipline and good order in their institutions. To translate that proposition into a workable constitutional rule, I would, in cases like this, east upon those complaining the burden of showing that a particular school measure was motivated by other than legitimate school concerns — for example, a desire to prohibit the expression of an unpopular point of view, while permitting expression of the dominant opinion.

Finding nothing in this record which impugns the good faith of respondents in promulgating the armband regulation, I would affirm the judgment below.

*262Justice White

delivered the opinion of the Court.

This case concerns the extent to which educators may exercise editorial control over the contents of a high school newspaper produced as part of the school’s journalism curriculum.

I

Petitioners are the Hazelwood School District in St. Louis County, Missouri; various school officials; Robert Eugene Reynolds, the principal of Hazelwood East High School; and Howard Emerson, a teacher in the school district. Respondents are three former Hazelwood East students who were staff members of Spectrum, the school newspaper. They contend that school officials violated their First Amendment rights by deleting two pages of articles from the May 13, 1983, issue of Spectrum.

Spectrum was written and edited by the Journalism II class at Hazelwood East. The newspaper was published every three weeks or so during the 1982-1983 school year. More than 4,500 copies of the newspaper were distributed during that year to students, school personnel, and members of the community.

The Board of Education allocated funds from its annual budget for the printing of Spectrum. These funds were supplemented by proceeds from sales of the newspaper. The printing expenses during the 1982-1983 school year totaled $4,668.50; revenue from sales was $1,166.84. The other costs associated with the newspaper — such as supplies, text*263books, and a portion of the journalism teacher’s salary — were borne entirely by the Board.

The Journalism II course was taught by Robert Stergos for most of the 1982-1983 academic year. Stergos left Hazel-wood East to take a job in private industry on April 29, 1983, when the May 13 edition of Spectrum was nearing completion, and petitioner Emerson took his place as newspaper adviser for the remaining weeks of the term.

The practice at Hazelwood East during the spring 1983 semester was for the journalism teacher to submit page proofs of each Spectrum issue to Principal Reynolds for his review prior to publication. On May 10, Emerson delivered the proofs of the May 13 edition to Reynolds, who objected to two of the articles scheduled to appear in that edition. One of the stories described three Hazelwood East students’ experiences with pregnancy; the other discussed the impact of divorce on students at the school.

Reynolds was concerned that, although the pregnancy story used false names “to keep the identity of these girls a secret,” the pregnant students still might be identifiable from the text. He also believed that the article’s references to sexual activity and birth control were inappropriate for some of the younger students at the school. In addition, Reynolds was concerned that a student identified by name in the divorce story had complained that her father “wasn’t spending enough time with my mom, my sister and I” prior to the divorce, “was always out of town on business or out late playing cards with the guys,” and “always argued about everything” with her mother. App. to Pet. for Cert. 38. Reynolds believed that the student’s parents should have been given an opportunity to respond to these remarks or to consent to their publication. He was unaware that Emerson had deleted the student’s name from the final version of the article.

Reynolds believed that there was no time to make the necessary changes in the stories before the scheduled press run *264and that the newspaper would not appear before the end of the school year if printing were delayed to any significant extent. He concluded that his only options under the circumstances were to publish a four-page newspaper instead of the planned six-page newspaper, eliminating the two pages on which the offending stories appeared, or to publish no newspaper at all. Accordingly, he directed Emerson to withhold from publication the two pages containing the stories on pregnancy and divorce.1 He informed his superiors of the decision, and they concurred.

Respondents subsequently commenced this action in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri seeking a declaration that their First Amendment rights had been violated, injunctive relief, and monetary damages. After a bench trial, the District Court denied an injunction, holding that no First Amendment violation had occurred. 607 F. Supp. 1450 (1985).

The District Court concluded that school officials may impose restraints on students’ speech in activities that are “‘an integral part of the school’s educational function’” — including the publication of a school-sponsored newspaper by a journalism class — so long as their decision has “‘a substantial and reasonable basis.’” Id., at 1466 (quoting Frasca v. Andrews, 463 F. Supp. 1043, 1052 (EDNY 1979)). The court found that Principal Reynolds’ concern that the pregnant students’ anonymity would be lost and their privacy invaded was “legitimate and reasonable,” given “the small number of pregnant students at Hazelwood East and several identifying characteristics that were disclosed in the article.” 607 F. Supp., at 1466. The court held that Reynolds’ action was also justified “to avoid the impression that [the school] en*265dorses the sexual norms of the subjects” and to shield younger students from exposure to unsuitable material. Ibid. The deletion of the article on divorce was seen by the court as a reasonable response to the invasion of privacy concerns raised by the named student’s remarks. Because the article did not indicate that the student’s parents had been offered an opportunity to respond to her allegations, said the court, there was cause for “serious doubt that the article complied with the rules of fairness which are standard in the field of journalism and which were covered in the textbook used in the Journalism II class.” Id., at 1467. Furthermore, the court concluded that Reynolds was justified in deleting two full pages of the newspaper, instead of deleting only the pregnancy and divorce stories or requiring that those stories be modified to address his concerns, based on his “reasonable belief that he had to make an immediate decision and that there was no time to make modifications to the articles in question.” Id., at 1466.

The Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit reversed. 795 F. 2d 1368 (1986). The court held at the outset that Spectrum was not only “a part of the school adopted curriculum,” id., at 1373, but also a public forum, because the newspaper was “intended to be and operated as a conduit for student viewpoint.” Id., at 1372. The court then concluded that Spectrum’s status as a public forum precluded school officials from censoring its contents except when “ ‘necessary to avoid material and substantial interference with school work or discipline ... or the rights of others.’” Id., at 1374 (quoting Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School Dist., 393 U. S. 503, 511 (1969)).

The Court of Appeals found “no evidence in the record that the principal could have reasonably forecast that the censored articles or any materials in the censored articles would have materially disrupted elasswork or given rise to substantial disorder in the school.” 795 F. 2d, at 1375. School officials were entitled to censor the articles on the ground that *266they invaded the rights of others, according to the court, only if publication of the articles could have resulted in tort liability to the school. The court concluded that no tort action for libel or invasion of privacy could have been maintained against the school by the subjects of the two articles or by their families. Accordingly, the court held that school officials had violated respondents’ First Amendment rights by deleting the two pages of the newspaper.

We granted certiorari, 479 U. S. 1053 (1987), and we now reverse.

II

Students in the public schools do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” Tinker, supra, at 506. They cannot be punished merely for expressing their personal views on the school premises — whether “in the cafeteria, or on the playing field, or on the campus during the authorized hours,” 393 U. S., at 512-513 — unless school authorities have reason to believe that such expression will “substantially interfere with the work of the school or impinge upon the rights of other students.” Id., at 509.

We have nonetheless recognized that the First Amendment rights of students in the public schools “are not automatically coextensive with the rights of adults in other settings,” Bethel School District No. 403 v. Fraser, 478 U. S. 675, 682 (1986), and must be “applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment.” Tinker, supra, at 506; cf. New Jersey v. T. L. O., 469 U. S. 325, 341-343 (1985). A school need not tolerate student speech that is inconsistent with its “basic educational mission,” Fraser, supra, at 685, even though the government could not censor similar speech outside the school. Accordingly, we held in Fraser that a student could be disciplined for having delivered a speech that was “sexually explicit” but not legally obscene at an official school assembly, because the school was entitled to “disassociate itself” from the speech in a man*267ner that would demonstrate to others that such vulgarity is “wholly inconsistent with the ‘fundamental values’ of public school education.” 478 U. S., at 685-686. We thus recognized that “[t]he determination of what manner of speech in the classroom or in school assembly is inappropriate properly rests with the school board,” id., at 683, rather than with the federal courts. It is in this context that respondents’ First Amendment claims must be considered.

A

We deal first with the question whether Spectrum may appropriately be characterized as a forum for public expression. The public schools do not possess all of the attributes of streets, parks, and other traditional public forums that “time out of mind, have been used for purposes of assembly, communicating thoughts between citizens, and discussing public questions.” Hague v. CIO, 307 U. S. 496, 515 (1939). Cf. Widmar v. Vincent, 454 U. S. 263, 267-268, n. 5 (1981). Hence, school facilities may be deemed to be public forums only if school authorities have “by policy or by practice” opened those facilities “for indiscriminate use by the general public,” Perry Education Assn. v. Perry Local Educators’ Assn., 460 U. S. 37, 47 (1983), or by some segment of the public, such as student organizations. Id., at 46, n. 7 (citing Widmar v. Vincent). If the facilities have instead been reserved for other intended purposes, “communicative or otherwise,” then no public forum has been created, and school officials may impose reasonable restrictions on the speech of students, teachers, and other members of the school community. 460 U. S., at 46, n. 7. “The government does not create a public forum by inaction or by permitting limited discourse, but only by intentionally opening a nontraditional forum for public discourse.” Cornelius v. NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., 473 U. S. 788, 802 (1985).

*268The policy of school officials toward Spectrum was reflected in Hazelwood School Board Policy 348.51 and the Hazelwood East Curriculum Guide. Board Policy 348.51 provided that “[s]chool sponsored publications are developed within the adopted curriculum and its educational implications in regular classroom activities.” App. 22. The Hazelwood East Curriculum Guide described the Journalism II course as a “laboratory situation in which the students publish the school newspaper applying skills they have learned in Journalism I.” Id., at 11. The lessons that were to be learned from the Journalism II course, according to the Curriculum Guide, included development of journalistic skills under deadline pressure, “the legal, moral, and ethical restrictions imposed upon journalists within the school community,” and “responsibility and acceptance of criticism for articles of opinion.” Ibid. Journalism II was taught by a faculty member during regular class hours. Students received grades and academic credit for their performance in the course.

School officials did not deviate in practice from their policy that production of Spectrum was to be part of the educational curriculum and a “regular classroom activity].” The District Court found that Robert Stergos, the journalism teacher during most of the 1982-1983 school year, “both had the authority to exercise and in fact exercised a great deal of control over Spectrum.” 607 F. Supp., at 1453. For example, Stergos selected the editors of the newspaper, scheduled publication dates, decided the number of pages for each issue, assigned story ideas to class members, advised students on the development of their stories, reviewed the use of quotations, edited stories, selected and edited the letters to the editor, and dealt with the printing company. Many of these decisions were made without consultation with the Journalism II students. The District Court thus found it “clear that Mr. Stergos was the final authority with respect to almost every aspect of the production and publication of Spectrum, including its content.” Ibid. Moreover, after *269each Spectrum issue had been finally approved by Stergos or his successor, the issue still had to be reviewed by Principal Reynolds prior to publication. Respondents’ assertion that they had believed that they could publish “practically anything” in Spectrum was therefore dismissed by the District Court as simply “not credible.” Id., at 1456. These factual findings are amply supported by the record, and were not rejected as clearly erroneous by the Court of Appeals.

The evidence relied upon by the Court of Appeals in finding Spectrum to be a public forum, see 795 F. 2d, at 1372-1373, is equivocal at best. For example, Board Policy 348.51, which stated in part that “[sjchool sponsored student publications will not restrict free expression or diverse viewpoints within the rules of responsible journalism,” also stated that such publications were “developed within the adopted curriculum and its educational implications.” App. 22. One might reasonably infer from the full text of Policy 348.51 that school officials retained ultimate control over what constituted “responsible journalism” in a school-sponsored newspaper. Although the Statement of Policy published in the September 14, 1982, issue of Spectrum declared that “Spectrum, as a student-press publication, accepts all rights implied by the First Amendment,” this statement, understood in the context of the paper’s role in the school’s curriculum, suggests at most that the administration will not interfere with the students’ exercise of those First Amendment rights that attend the publication of a school-sponsored newspaper. It does not reflect an intent to expand those rights by converting a curricular newspaper into a public forum.2 Fi*270nally, that students were permitted to exercise some authority over the contents of Spectrum was fully consistent with the Curriculum Guide objective of teaching the Journalism II students “leadership responsibilities as issue and page editors.” App. 11. A decision to teach leadership skills in the context of a classroom activity hardly implies a decision to relinquish school control over that activity. In sum, the evidence relied upon by the Court of Appeals fails to demonstrate the “clear intent to create a public forum,” Cornelius, 473 U. S., at 802, that existed in cases in which we found public forums to have been created. See id., at 802-803 (citing Widmar v. Vincent, 454 U. S., at 267; Madison School District v. Wisconsin Employment Relations Comm’n, 429 U. S. 167, 174, n. 6 (1976); Southeastern Promotions, Ltd. v. Conrad, 420 U. S. 546, 555 (1975)). School officials did not evince either “by policy or by practice,” Perry Education Assn., 460 U. S., at 47, any intent to open the pages of Spectrum to “indiscriminate use,” ibid., by its student reporters and editors, or by the student body generally. Instead, they “reserve[d] the forum for its intended purpos[e],” id., at 46, as a supervised learning experience for journalism students. Accordingly, school officials were entitled to regulate the contents of Spectrum in any reasonable manner. Ibid. It is this standard, rather than our decision in Tinker, that governs this case.

B

The question whether the First Amendment requires a school to tolerate particular student speech — the question that we addressed in Tinker — is different from the question whether the First Amendment requires a school affirma*271tively to promote particular student speech. The former question addresses educators’ ability to silence a student’s personal expression that happens to occur on the school premises. The latter question concerns educators’ authority over school-sponsored publications, theatrical productions, and other expressive activities that students, parents, and members of the public might reasonably perceive to bear the imprimatur of the school. These activities may fairly be characterized as part of the school curriculum, whether or not they occur in a traditional classroom setting, so long as they are supervised by faculty members and designed to impart particular knowledge or skills to student participants and audiences.3

Educators are entitled to exercise greater control over this second form of student expression to assure that participants learn whatever lessons the activity is designed to teach, that readers or listeners are not exposed to material that may be inappropriate for their level of maturity, and that the views of the individual speaker are not erroneously attributed to the school. Hence, a school may in its capacity as publisher of a school newspaper or producer of a school play “disassociate itself,” Fraser, 478 U. S., at 685, not only from speech that would “substantially interfere with [its] work ... or impinge upon the rights of other students,” Tinker, 393 U. S., at 509, but also from speech that is, for example, ungrammatical, poorly written, inadequately researched, biased or prejudiced, vulgar or profane, or unsuitable for immature audiences.4 A school must be able to set high standards for *272the student speech that is disseminated under its auspices — standards that may be higher than those demanded by some newspaper publishers or theatrical producers in the “real” world — and may refuse to disseminate student speech that does not meet those standards. In addition, a school must be able to take into account the emotional maturity of the intended audience in determining whether to disseminate student speech on potentially sensitive topics, which might range from the existence of Santa Claus in an elementary school setting to the particulars of teenage sexual activity in a high school setting. A school must also retain the authority to refuse to sponsor student speech that might reasonably be perceived to advocate drug or alcohol use, irresponsible sex, or conduct otherwise inconsistent with “the shared values of a civilized social order,” Fraser, supra, at 683, or to associate the school with any position other than neutrality on matters of political controversy. Otherwise, the schools would be unduly constrained from fulfilling their role as “a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment.” Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483, 493 (1954).

Accordingly, we conclude that the standard articulated in Tinker for determining when a school may punish student expression need not also be the standard for determining when a school may refuse to lend its name and resources to the dis*273semination of student expression.5 Instead, we hold that educators do not offend the First Amendment by exercising editorial control over the style and content of student speech in school-sponsored expressive activities so long as their actions are reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns.6

This standard is consistent with our oft-expressed view that the education of the Nation’s youth is primarily the responsibility of parents, teachers, and state and local school officials, and not of federal judges. See, e. g., Board of Education of Hendrick Hudson Central School Dist. v. Rowley, 458 U. S. 176, 208 (1982); Wood v. Strickland, 420 U. S. 308, 326 (1975); Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U. S. 97, 104 (1968). It is only when the decision to censor a school-sponsored publication, theatrical production, or other vehicle of student expression has no valid educational purpose that the First Amendment is so “directly and sharply implicated],” ibid., as to require judicial intervention to protect students’ constitutional rights.7

*274Ill

We also conclude that Principal Reynolds acted reasonably in requiring the deletion from the May 13 issue of Spectrum of the pregnancy article, the divorce article, and the remaining articles that were to appear on the same pages of the newspaper.

The initial paragraph of the pregnancy article declared that “[a]ll names have been changed to keep the identity of these girls a secret.” The principal concluded that the students’ anonymity was not adequately protected, however, given the other identifying information in the article and the small number of pregnant students at the school. Indeed, a teacher at the school credibly testified that she could positively identify at least one of the girls and possibly all three. It is likely that many students at Hazelwood East would have been at least as successful in identifying the girls. Reynolds therefore could reasonably have feared that the article violated whatever pledge of anonymity had been given to the pregnant students. In addition, he could reasonably have been concerned that the article was not sufficiently sensitive to the privacy interests of the students’ boyfriends and parents, who were discussed in the article but who were given no opportunity to consent to its publication or to offer a response. The article did not contain graphic accounts of sexual activity. The girls did comment in the article, however, concerning their sexual histories and their use or nonuse of birth control. It was not unreasonable for the principal to have concluded that such frank talk was inappropriate in a school-sponsored publication distributed to 14-year-old fresh*275men and presumably taken home to be read by students’ even younger brothers and sisters.

The student who was quoted by name in the version of the divorce article seen by Principal Reynolds made comments sharply critical of her father. The principal could reasonably have concluded that an individual publicly identified as an inattentive parent — indeed, as one who chose “playing cards with the guys” over home and family — was entitled to an opportunity to defend himself as a matter of journalistic fairness. These concerns were shared by both of Spectrum’s faculty advisers for the 1982-1983 school year, who testified that they would not have allowed the article to be printed without deletion of the student’s name.8

Principal Reynolds testified credibly at trial that, at the time that he reviewed the proofs of the May 13 issue during an extended telephone conversation with Emerson, he believed that there was no time to make any changes in the articles, and that the newspaper had to be printed immediately or not at all. It is true that Reynolds did not verify whether the necessary modifications could still have been made in the articles, and that Emerson did not volunteer the information that printing could be delayed until the changes were made. We nonetheless agree with the District Court that the decision to excise the two pages containing the problematic articles was reasonable given the particular circumstances of this case. These circumstances included the very recent *276replacement of Stergos by Emerson, who may not have been entirely familiar with Spectrum editorial and production procedures, and the pressure felt by Reynolds to make an immediate decision so that students would not be deprived of the newspaper altogether.

In sum, we cannot reject as unreasonable Principal Reynolds’ conclusion that neither the pregnancy article nor the divorce article was suitable for publication in Spectrum. Reynolds could reasonably have concluded that the students who had written and edited these articles had not sufficiently mastered those portions of the Journalism II curriculum that pertained to the treatment of controversial issues and personal attacks, the need to protect the privacy of individuals whose most intimate concerns are to be revealed in the newspaper, and “the legal, moral, and ethical restrictions imposed upon journalists within [a] school community” that includes adolescent subjects and readers. Finally, we conclude that the principal’s decision to delete two pages of Spectrum, rather than to delete only the offending articles or to require that they be modified, was reasonable under the circumstances as he understood them. Accordingly, no violation of First Amendment rights occurred.9

The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit is therefore

Reversed.

*277Justice Brennan,

with whom Justice Marshall and Justice Blackmun join, dissenting.

When the young men and women of Hazelwood East High School registered for Journalism II, they expected a civics lesson. Spectrum, the newspaper they were to publish, “was not just a class exercise in which students learned to prepare papers and hone writing skills, it was a . . . forum established to give students an opportunity to express their views while gaining an appreciation of their rights and responsibilities under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution .......” 795 F. 2d 1368, 1373 (CA8 1986). “[A]t the beginning of each school year,” id., at 1372, the student journalists published a Statement of Policy — tacitly approved each year by school authorities — announcing their expectation that “Spectrum, as a student-press publication, accepts all rights implied by the First Amendment .... Only speech that ‘materially and substantially interferes with the requirements of appropriate discipline’ can be found unacceptable and therefore prohibited.” App. 26 (quoting Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School Dist., 393 U. S. 503, 513 (1969)).1 The school board itself affirmatively guaranteed the students of Journalism II an atmosphere conducive to fostering such an appreciation and exercising the full panoply of rights associated with a free student press. “School sponsored student publications,” it vowed, “will not restrict free expression or diverse viewpoints within the rules of responsible journalism.” App. 22 (Board Policy 348.51).

*278This case arose when the Hazelwood East administration breached its own promise, dashing its students’ expectations. The school principal, without prior consultation or explanation, excised six articles — comprising two full pages — of the May 13, 1983, issue of Spectrum. He did so not because any of the articles would “materially and substantially interfere with the requirements of appropriate discipline,” but simply because he considered two of the six “inappropriate, personal, sensitive, and unsuitable” for student consumption. 795 F. 2d, at 1371.

In my view the principal broke more than just a promise. He violated the First Amendment’s prohibitions against censorship of any student expression that neither disrupts classwork nor invades the rights of others, and against any censorship that is not narrowly tailored to serve its purpose.

I

Public education serves vital national interests in preparing the Nation’s youth for life in our increasingly complex society and for the duties of citizenship in our democratic Republic. See Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483, 493 (1954). The public school conveys to our young the information and tools required not merely to survive in, but to contribute to, civilized society. It also inculcates in tomorrow’s leaders the “fundamental values necessary to the maintenance of a democratic political system . . . .” Ambach v. Norwick, 441 U. S. 68, 77 (1979). All the while, the public educator nurtures students’ social and moral development by transmitting to them an official dogma of “ ‘community values.’” Board of Education v. Pico, 457 U. S. 853, 864 (1982) (plurality opinion) (citation omitted).

The public educator’s task is weighty and delicate indeed. It demands particularized and supremely subjective choices among diverse curricula, moral values, and political stances to teach or inculcate in students, and among various methodologies for doing so. Accordingly, we have traditionally re*279served the “daily operation of school systems” to the States and their local school boards. Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U. S. 97, 104 (1968); see Board of Education v. Pico, supra, at 863-864. We have not, however, hesitated to intervene where their decisions run afoul of the Constitution. See e. g., Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U. S. 578 (1987) (striking state statute that forbade teaching of evolution in public school unless accompanied by instruction on theory of “creation science”); Board of Education v. Pico, supra (school board may not remove books from library shelves merely because it disapproves of ideas they express); Epperson v. Arkansas, supra (striking state-law prohibition against teaching Darwinian theory of evolution in public school); West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U. S. 624 (1943) (public school may not compel student to salute flag); Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U. S. 390 (1923) (state law prohibiting the teaching of foreign languages in public or private schools is unconstitutional).

Free student expression undoubtedly sometimes interferes with the effectiveness of the school’s pedagogical functions. Some brands of student expression do so by directly preventing the school from pursuing its pedagogical mission: The young polemic who stands on a soapbox during calculus class to deliver an eloquent political diatribe interferes with the legitimate teaching of calculus. And the student who delivers a lewd endorsement of a student-government candidate might so extremely distract an impressionable high school audience as to interfere with the orderly operation of the school. See Bethel School Dist. No. 403 v. Fraser, 478 U. S. 675 (1986). Other student speech, however, frustrates the school’s legitimate pedagogical purposes merely by expressing a message that conflicts with the school’s, without directly interfering with the school’s expression of its message: A student who responds to a political science teacher’s question with the retort, “socialism is good,” subverts the school’s inculcation of the message that capitalism is better. *280Even the maverick who sits in class passively sporting a symbol of protest against a government policy, cf. Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School Dist., 393 U. S. 503 (1969), or the gossip who sits in the student commons swapping stories of sexual escapade could readily muddle a clear official message condoning the government policy or condemning teenage sex. Likewise, the student newspaper that, like Spectrum, conveys a moral position at odds with the school’s official stance might subvert the administration’s legitimate inculcation of its own perception of community values.

If mere incompatibility with the school’s pedagogical message were a constitutionally sufficient justification for the suppression of student speech, school officials could censor each of the students or student organizations in the foregoing hypotheticals, converting our public schools into “enclaves of totalitarianism,” id., at 511, that “strangle the free mind at its source,” West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, supra, at 637. The First Amendment permits no such blanket censorship authority. While the “constitutional rights of students in public school are not automatically coextensive with the rights of adults in other settings,” Fraser, supra, at 682, students in the public schools do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate,” Tinker, supra, at 506. Just as the public on the street corner must, in the interest of fostering “enlightened opinion,” Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U. S. 296, 310 (1940), tolerate speech that “tempt[s] [the listener] to throw [the speaker] off the street,” id., at 309, public educators must accommodate some student expression even if it offends them or offers views or values that contradict those the school wishes to inculcate.

In Tinker, this Court struck the balance. We held that official censorship of student expression — there the suspension of several students until they removed their armbands protesting the Vietnam war — is unconstitutional unless the *281speech “materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others . . . 393 U. S., at 513. School officials may not suppress “silent, passive expression of opinion, unaccompanied by any disorder or disturbance on the part of” the speaker. Id., at 508. The “mere desire to avoid the discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint,” id., at 509, or an unsavory subject, Fraser, supra, at 688-689 (Brennan, J., concurring in judgment), does not justify official suppression of student speech in the high school.

This Court applied the Tinker test just a Term ago in Fraser, supra, upholding an official decision to discipline a student for delivering a lewd speech in support of a student-government candidate. The Court today casts no doubt on Tinker’s vitality. Instead it erects a taxonomy of school censorship, concluding that Tinker applies to one category and not another. On the one hand is censorship “to silence a student’s personal expression that happens to occur on the school premises.” Ante, at 271. On the other hand is censorship of expression that arises in the context of “school-sponsored . . . expressive activities that students, parents, and members of the public might reasonably perceive to bear the imprimatur of the school.” Ibid.

The Court does not, for it cannot, purport to discern from our precedents the distinction it creates. One could, I suppose, readily characterize the students’ symbolic speech in Tinker as “personal expression that happens to [have] occur [red] on school premises,” although Tinker did not even hint that the personal nature of the speech was of any (much less dispositive) relevance. But that same description could not by any stretch of the imagination fit Fraser’s speech. He did not just “happen” to deliver his lewd speech to an ad hoc gathering on the playground. As the second paragraph of Fraser evinces, if ever a forum for student expression was “school-sponsored,” Fraser’s was:

*282“Fraser . . . delivered a speech nominating a fellow student for student elective office. Approximately 600 high school students . . . attended the assembly. Students were required to attend the assembly or to report to the study hall. The assembly was part of a school-sponsored, educational program in self-government.” Fraser, 478 U. S., at 677 (emphasis added).

Yet, from the first sentence of its analysis, see id., at 680, Fraser faithfully applied Tinker.

Nor has this Court ever intimated a distinction between personal and school-sponsored speech in any other context. Particularly telling is this Court’s heavy reliance on Tinker in two cases of First Amendment infringement on state college campuses. See Papish v. University of Missouri Board of Curators, 410 U. S. 667, 671, n. 6 (1973) (per curiam); Healy v. James, 408 U. S. 169, 180, 189, and n. 18, 191 (1972). One involved the expulsion of a student for lewd expression in a newspaper that she sold on campus pursuant to university authorization, see Papish, supra, at 667-668, and the other involved the denial of university recognition and concomitant benefits to a political student organization, see Healy, supra, at 174, 176, 181-182. Tracking Tinkers analysis, the Court found each act of suppression unconstitutional. In neither case did this Court suggest the distinction, which the Court today finds dispositive, between school-sponsored and incidental student expression.

II

Even if we were writing on a clean slate, I would reject the Court’s rationale for abandoning Tinker in this case. The Court offers no more than an obscure tangle of three excuses to afford educators “greater control” over school-sponsored speech than the Tinker test would permit: the public educator’s prerogative to control curriculum; the pedagogical interest in shielding the high school audience from objectionable viewpoints and sensitive topics; and the school’s need *283to dissociate itself from student expression. Ante, at 271. None of the excuses, once disentangled, supports the distinction that the Court draws. Tinker fully addresses the first concern; the second is illegitimate; and the third is readily achievable through less oppressive means.

A

The Court is certainly correct that the First Amendment permits educators “to assure that participants learn whatever lessons the activity is designed to teach . . . .” Ante, at 271. That is, however, the essence of the Tinker test, not an excuse to abandon it. Under Tinker, school officials may censor only such student speech as would “materially disrupt” a legitimate curricular function. Manifestly, student speech is more likely to disrupt a curricular function when it arises in the context of a curricular activity — one that “is designed to teach” something — than when it arises in the context of a noncurricular activity. Thus, under Tinker, the school may constitutionally punish the budding political orator if he disrupts calculus class but not if he holds his tongue for the cafeteria. See Consolidated Edison Co. v. Public Service Comm’n of New York, 447 U. S. 530, 544-545 (1980) (Stevens, J., concurring in judgment). That is not because some more stringent standard applies in the curricular context. (After all, this Court applied the same standard whether the students in Tinker wore their armbands to the “classroom” or the “cafeteria.” 393 U. S., at 512.) It is because student speech in the noncurricular context is less likely to disrupt materially any legitimate pedagogical purpose.

I fully agree with the Court that the First Amendment should afford an educator the prerogative not to sponsor the publication of a newspaper article that is “ungrammatical, poorly written, inadequately researched, biased or prejudiced,” or that falls short of the “high standards for . . . student speech that is disseminated under [the school’s] auspices . . . .” Ante, at 271-272. But we need not abandon Tinker *284to reach that conclusion; we need only apply it. The enumerated criteria reflect the skills that the curricular newspaper “is designed to teach.” The educator may, under Tinker, constitutionally “censor” poor grammar, writing, or research because to reward such expression would “materially disrupt]” the newspaper’s curricular purpose.

The same cannot be said of official censorship designed to shield the audience or dissociate the sponsor from the expression. Censorship so motivated might well serve (although, as I demonstrate infra, at 285-289, cannot legitimately serve) some other school purpose. . But it in no way furthers the curricular purposes of a student newspaper, unless one believes that the purpose of the school newspaper is to teach students that the press ought never report bad news, express unpopular views, or print a thought that might upset its sponsors. Unsurprisingly, Hazelwood East claims no such pedagogical purpose.

The Court relies on bits of testimony to portray the principal’s conduct as a pedagogical lesson to Journalism II students who “had not sufficiently mastered those portions of the . . . curriculum that pertained to the treatment of controversial issues and personal attacks, the need to protect the privacy of individuals . . . , and ‘the legal, moral, and ethical restrictions imposed upon journalists ....’” Ante, at 276. In that regard, the Court attempts to justify censorship of the article on teenage pregnancy on the basis of the principal’s judgment that (1) “the [pregnant] students’ anonymity was not adequately protected,” despite the article’s use of aliases; and (2) the judgment that “the article was not sufficiently sensitive to the privacy interests of the students’ boyfriends and parents . . . .” Ante, at 274. Similarly, the Court finds in the principal’s decision to censor the divorce article a journalistic lesson that the author should have given the father of one student an “opportunity to defend himself” against her charge that (in the Court’s words) he ^‘chose *285‘playing cards with the guys’ over home and family . . . Ante, at 275.

But the principal never consulted the students before censoring their work. “[T]hey learned of the deletions when the paper was released . . . .” 795 F. 2d, at 1371. Further, he explained the deletions only in the broadest of generalities. In one meeting called at the behest of seven protesting Spectrum staff members (presumably a fraction of the full class), he characterized the articles as “ ‘too sensitive’ for ‘our immature audience of readers,”’ 607 F. Supp. 1450, 1459 (ED Mo. 1985), and in a later meeting he deemed them simply “inappropriate, personal, sensitive and unsuitable for the newspaper,” ibid. The Court’s supposition that the principal intended (or the protesters understood) those generalities as a lesson on the nuances of journalistic responsibility is utterly incredible. If he did, a fact that neither the District Court nor the Court of Appeals found, the lesson was lost on all but the psychic Spectrum staffer.

B

The Court’s second excuse for deviating from precedent is the school’s interest in shielding an impressionable high school audience from material whose substance is “unsuitable for immature audiences.” Ante, at 271 (footnote omitted). Specifically, the majority decrees that we must afford educators authority to shield high school students from exposure to “potentially sensitive topics” (like “the particulars of teenage sexual activity”) or unacceptable social viewpoints (like the advocacy of “irresponsible se[x] or conduct otherwise inconsistent with ‘the shared values of a civilized social order’ ”) through school-sponsored student activities. Ante, at 272 (citation omitted).

Tinker teaches us that the state educator’s undeniable, and undeniably vital, mandate to inculcate moral and political values is not a general warrant to act as “thought police” stifling discussion of all but state-approved topics and advocacy of all *286but the official position. See also Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U. S. 97 (1968); Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U. S. 390 (1923). Otherwise educators could transform students into “closed-circuit recipients of only that which the State chooses to communicate,” Tinker, 393 U. S., at 511, and cast a perverse and impermissible “pall of orthodoxy over the classroom,” Keyishian v. Board of Regents, 385 U. S. 589, 603 (1967). Thus, the State cannot constitutionally prohibit its high school students from recounting in the locker room “the particulars of [their] teen-age sexual activity,” nor even from advocating “irresponsible se[x]” or other presumed abominations of “the shared values of a civilized social order.” Even in its capacity as educator the State may not assume an Orwellian “guardianship of the public mind,” Thomas v. Collins, 323 U. S. 516, 545 (1945) (Jackson, J., concurring).

The mere fact of school sponsorship does not, as the Court suggests, license such thought control in the high school, whether through school suppression of disfavored viewpoints or through official assessment of topic sensitivity.2 The former would constitute unabashed and unconstitutional view*287point discrimination, see Board of Education v. Pico, 457 U. S., at 878-879 (Blackmun, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment), as well as an impermissible infringement of the students’ “‘right to receive information and ideas,”’ id., at 867 (plurality opinion) (citations omitted); see First National Bank v. Bellotti, 435 U. S. 765, 783 (1978).3 Just as a school board may not purge its state-funded library of all books that “‘offen[d] [its] social, political and moral tastes,’” 457 U. S., at 858-859 (plurality opinion) (citation omitted), school officials may not, out of like motivation, discriminatorily excise objectionable ideas from a student publication. The State’s prerogative to dissolve the student newspaper entirely (or to limit its subject matter) no more entitles it to dictate which viewpoints students may express on its pages, than the State’s prerogative to close down the schoolhouse entitles it to prohibit the nondisruptive expression of antiwar sentiment within its gates.

Official censorship of student speech on the ground that it addresses “potentially sensitive topics” is, for related reasons, equally impermissible. I would not begrudge an educator the authority to limit the substantive scope of a school-sponsored publication to a certain, objectively definable topic, such as literary criticism, school sports, or an overview of the school year. Unlike those determinate limitations, “potential topic sensitivity” is a vaporous nonstandard — like “‘public welfare, peace, safety, health, decency, good order, morals or convenience,”’ Shuttlesworth v. Birmingham, 394 U. S. 147, 150 (1969), or “‘general welfare of citizens,’” Staub v. Baxley, 355 U. S. 313, 322 (1958)— that invites manipulation to achieve ends that cannot permissibly be achieved through blatant viewpoint discrimination and chills student speech to which school officials might not *288object. In part because of those dangers, this Court has consistently condemned any scheme allowing a state official boundless discretion in licensing speech from a particular forum. See, e. g., Shuttlesworth v. Birmingham, supra, at 150-151, and n. 2; Cox v. Louisiana, 379 U. S. 536, 557-558 (1965); Staub v. Baxley, supra, at 322-324.

The case before us aptly illustrates how readily school officials (and courts) can camouflage viewpoint discrimination as the “mere” protection of students from sensitive topics. Among the grounds that the Court advances to uphold the principal’s censorship of one of the articles was the potential sensitivity of “teenage sexual activity.” Ante, at 272. Yet the District Court specifically found that the principal “did not, as a matter of principle, oppose discussion of said topi[c] in Spectrum” 607 F. Supp., at 1467. That much is also clear from the same principal’s approval of the “squeal law” article on the same page, dealing forthrightly with “teenage sexuality,” “the use of contraceptives by teenagers,” and “teenage pregnancy,” App. 4-5. If topic sensitivity were the true basis of the principal’s decision, the two articles should have been equally objectionable. It is much more likely that the objectionable article was objectionable because of the viewpoint it expressed: It might have been read (as the majority apparently does) to advocate “irresponsible sex.” See ante, at 272.

C

The sole concomitant of school sponsorship that might conceivably justify the distinction that the Court draws between sponsored and nonsponsored student expression is the risk “that the views of the individual speaker [might be] erroneously attributed to the school.” Ante, at 271. Of course, the risk of erroneous attribution inheres in any student expression, including “personal expression” that, like the armbands in Tinker, “happens to occur on the school premises,” ante, at 271. Nevertheless, the majority is certainly correct that indicia of school sponsorship increase the likelihood *289of such attribution, and that state educators may therefore have a legitimate interest in dissociating themselves from student speech.

But “ ‘[e]ven though the governmental purpose be legitimate and substantial, that purpose cannot be pursued by means that broadly stifle fundamental personal liberties when the end can be more narrowly achieved.’” Keyishian v. Board of Regents, 385 U. S., at 602 (quoting Shelton v. Tucker, 364 U. S. 479, 488 (1960)). Dissociative means short of censorship are available to the school. It could, for example, require the student activity to publish a disclaimer, such as the “Statement of Policy” that Spectrum published each school year announcing that “[a]ll . . . editorials appearing in this newspaper reflect the opinions of the Spectrum staff, which are not necessarily shared by the administrators or faculty of Hazelwood East,” App. 26; or it could simply issue its own response clarifying the official position on the matter and explaining why the student position is wrong. Yet, without so much as acknowledging the less oppressive alternatives, the Court approves of brutal censorship.

Ill

Since the censorship served no legitimate pedagogical purpose, it cannot by any stretch of the imagination have been designed to prevent “materia[l] disruption of] classwork,” Tinker, 393 U. S., at 513. Nor did the censorship fall within the category that Tinker described as necessary to prevent student expression from “inva[ding] the rights of others,” ibid. If that term is to have any content, it must be limited to rights that are protected by law. “Any yardstick less exacting than [that] could result in school officials curtailing speech at the slightest fear of disturbance,” 795 F. 2d, at 1376, a prospect that would be completely at odds with this Court’s pronouncement that the “undifferentiated fear or apprehension of disturbance is not enough [even in the public school context] to overcome the right to freedom of expres*290sion.” Tinker, supra, at 508. And, as the Court of Appeals correctly reasoned, whatever journalistic impropriety these articles may have contained, they could not conceivably be tortious, much less criminal. See 795 F. 2d, at 1375-1376.

Finally, even if the majority were correct that the principal could constitutionally have censored the objectionable material, I would emphatically object to the brutal manner in which he did so. Where “[t]he separation of legitimate from illegitimate speech calls for more sensitive tools” Speiser v. Randall, 357 U. S. 513, 525 (1958); see Keyishian v. Board of Regents, supra, at 602, the principal used a paper shredder. He objected to some material in two articles, but excised six entire articles. He did not so much as inquire into obvious alternatives, such as precise deletions or additions (one of which had already been made), rearranging the layout, or delaying publication. Such unthinking contempt for individual rights is intolerable from any state official. It is particularly insidious from one to whom the public entrusts the task of inculcating in its youth an appreciation for the cherished democratic liberties that our Constitution guarantees.

IV

The Court opens its analysis in this case by purporting to reaffirm Tinker’s time-tested proposition that public school students “do not ‘shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.’” Ante, at 266 (quoting Tinker, supra, at 506). That is an ironic introduction to an opinion that denudes high school students of much of the First Amendment protection that Tinker itself prescribed. Instead of “teaching] children to respect the diversity of ideas that is fundamental to the American system,” Board of Education v. Pico, 457 U. S., at 880 (Black-MUN, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment), and “that our Constitution is a living reality, not parchment preserved under glass,” Shanley v. Northeast Independent School Dist., Bexar Cty., Tex., 462 F. 2d 960, 972 (CA5 *2911972), the Court today “teach[es] youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes.” West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U. S., at 637. The young men and women of Hazelwood East expected a civics lesson, but not the one the Court teaches them today.

I dissent.

*396Chief Justice Roberts

delivered the opinion of the Court.

At a school-sanctioned and school-supervised event, a high school principal saw some of her students unfurl a large banner conveying a message she reasonably regarded as promoting illegal drug use. Consistent with established school policy prohibiting such messages at school events, the principal directed the students to take down the banner. One student — among those who had brought the banner to the event — refused to do so. The principal confiscated the banner and later suspended the student. The Ninth Circuit held that the principal’s actions violated the First Amendment, and that the student could sue the principal for damages.

Our cases make clear that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School Dist., 393 U. S. 503, 506 (1969). At the same time, we have held that “the constitutional rights of students in public school are not automatically coextensive *397with the rights of adults in other settings,” Bethel School Dist. No. 403 v. Fraser, 478 U. S. 675, 682 (1986), and that the rights of students “must be ‘applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment,’” Hazelwood School Dist. v. Kuhlmeier, 484 U. S. 260, 266 (1988) (quoting Tinker, supra, at 506). Consistent with these principles, we hold that schools may take steps to safeguard those entrusted to their care from speech that can reasonably be regarded as encouraging illegal drug use. We conclude that the school officials in this ease did not violate the First Amendment by confiscating the pro-drug banner and suspending the student responsible for it.

I

On January 24, 2002, the Olympic Torch Relay passed through Juneau, Alaska, on its way to the winter games in Salt Lake City, Utah. The torchbearers were to proceed along a street in front of Juneau-Douglas High School (JDHS) while school was in session. Petitioner Deborah Morse, the school principal, decided to permit staff and students to participate in the Torch Relay as an approved social event or class trip. App. 22-23. Students were allowed to leave class to observe the relay from either side of the street. Teachers and administrative officials monitored the students’ actions.

Respondent Joseph Frederick, a JDHS senior, was late to school that day. When he arrived, he joined his friends (all but one of whom were JDHS students) across the street from the school to watch the event. Not all the students waited patiently. Some became rambunctious, throwing plastic cola bottles and snowballs and scuffling with their classmates. As the torchbearers and camera crews passed by, Frederick and his friends unfurled a 14-foot banner bearing the phrase: “BONG HiTS 4 JESUS.” App. to Pet. for Cert. 70a. The large banner was easily readable by the students on the other side of the street.

*398Principal Morse immediately crossed the street and demanded that the banner be taken down. Everyone but Frederick complied. Morse confiscated the banner and told Frederick to report to her office, where she suspended him for 10 days. Morse later explained that she told Frederick to take the banner down because she thought it encouraged illegal drug use, in violation of established school policy. Juneau School Board Policy No. 5520 states: “The Board specifically prohibits any assembly or public expression that . . . advocates the use of substances that are illegal to minors----” Id., at 53a. In addition, Juneau School Board Policy No. 5850 subjects “[p]upils who participate in approved social events and class trips” to the same student conduct rules that apply during the regular school program. Id., at 58a.

Frederick administratively appealed his suspension, but the Juneau School District Superintendent upheld it, limiting it to time served (eight days). In a memorandum setting forth his reasons, the superintendent determined that Frederick had displayed his banner “in the midst of his fellow students, during school hours, at a school-sanctioned activity.” Id., at 63a. He further explained that Frederick “was not disciplined because the principal of the school ‘disagreed’ with his message, but because his speech appeared to advocate the use of illegal drugs.” Id., at 61a.

The superintendent continued:

“The common-sense understanding of the phrase ‘bong hits’ is that it is a reference to a means of smoking marijuana. Given [Frederick’s] inability or unwillingness to express any other credible meaning for the phrase, I can only agree with the principal and countless others who saw the banner as advocating the use of illegal drugs. [Frederick’s] speech was not political. He was not advocating the legalization of marijuana or promoting a religious belief. He was displaying a fairly silly message promoting illegal drug usage in the midst *399of a school activity, for the benefit of television cameras covering the Torch Relay. [Frederick’s] speech was potentially disruptive to the event and clearly disruptive of and inconsistent with the school’s educational mission to educate students about the dangers of illegal drugs and to discourage their use.” Id., at 61a-62a.

Relying on our decision in Fraser, supra, the superintendent concluded that the principal’s actions were permissible because Frederick’s banner was “speech or action that intrudes upon the work of the schools.” App. to Pet. for Cert. 62a (internal quotation marks omitted). The Juneau School District Board of Education upheld the suspension.

Frederick then filed suit under 42 U. S. C. § 1983, alleging that the school board and Morse had violated his First Amendment rights. He sought declaratory and injunctive relief, unspecified compensatory damages, punitive damages, and attorney’s fees. The District Court granted summary judgment for the school board and Morse, ruling that they were entitled to qualified immunity and that they had not infringed Frederick’s First Amendment rights. The court found that Morse reasonably interpreted the banner as promoting illegal drug use — a message that “directly contravened the Board’s policies relating to drug abuse prevention.” App. to Pet. for Cert. 36a-38a. Under the circumstances, the court held that “Morse had the authority, if not the obligation, to stop such messages at a school-sanctioned activity.” Id., at 37a.

The Ninth Circuit reversed. Deciding that Frederick acted during a “school-authorized activity],” and “proceeding] on the basis that the banner expressed a positive sentiment about marijuana use,” the court nonetheless found a violation of Frederick’s First Amendment rights because the school punished Frederick without demonstrating that his speech gave rise to a “risk of substantial disruption.” 439 F. 3d 1114, 1118, 1121-1123 (2006). The court further concluded that Frederick’s right to display his banner was *400so “clearly established” that a reasonable principal in Morse’s position would have understood that her actions were unconstitutional, and that Morse was therefore not entitled to qualified immunity. Id., at 1123-1125.

We granted certiorari on two questions: whether Frederick had a First Amendment right to wield his banner, and, if so, whether that right was so clearly established that the principal may be held liable for damages. 549 U. S. 1075 (2006). We resolve the first question against Frederick, and therefore have no occasion to reach the second.1

II

At the outset, we reject Frederick’s argument that this is not a school speech case — as has every other authority to address the question. See App. 22-23 (Principal Morse); App. to Pet. for Cert. 63a (superintendent); id., at 69a (school board); id., at 34a-35a (District Court); 439 F. 3d, at 1117 (Ninth Circuit). The event occurred during normal school hours. It was sanctioned by Principal Morse “as an approved social event or class trip,” App. 22-23, and the school district’s rules expressly provide that pupils in “approved social events and class trips are subject to district rules for *401student conduct,” App. to Pet. for Cert. 58a. Teachers and administrators were interspersed among the students and charged with supervising them. The high school band and cheerleaders performed. Frederick, standing among other JDHS students across the street from the school, directed his banner toward the school, making it plainly visible to most students. Under these circumstances, we agree with the superintendent that Frederick cannot “stand in the midst of his fellow students, during school hours, at a school-sanctioned activity and claim he is not at school.” Id., at 63a. There is some uncertainty at the outer boundaries as to when courts should apply school speech precedents, see Porter v. Ascension Parish School Bd., 393 F. 3d 608, 615, n. 22 (CA5 2004), but not on these facts.

Ill

The message on Frederick’s banner is cryptic. It is no doubt offensive to some, perhaps amusing to others. To still others, it probably means nothing at all. Frederick himself claimed “that the words were just nonsense meant to attract television cameras.” 439 F. 3d, at 1117-1118. But Principal Morse thought the banner would be interpreted by those viewing it as promoting illegal drug use, and that interpretation is plainly a reasonable one.

As Morse later explained in a declaration, when she saw the sign, she thought that “the reference to a ‘bong hit’ would be widely understood by high school students and others as referring to smoking marijuana.” App. 24. She further believed that “display of the banner would be construed by students, District personnel, parents and others witnessing the display of the banner, as advocating or promoting illegal drug use” — in violation of school policy. Id., at 25; see ibid. (“I told Frederick and the other members of his group to put the banner down because I felt that it violated the [school] policy against displaying. .. material that advertises or promotes use of illegal drugs”).

*402We agree with Morse. At least two interpretations of the words on the banner demonstrate that the sign advocated the use of illegal drugs. First, the phrase could be interpreted as an imperative: “[Take] bong hits ... ” — a message equivalent, as Morse explained in her declaration, to “smoke marijuana” or “use an illegal drug.” Alternatively, the phrase could be viewed as celebrating drug use — “bong hits [are a good thing],” or “[we take] bong hits” — and we discern no meaningful distinction between celebrating illegal drug use in the midst of fellow students and outright advocacy or promotion. See Guiles v. Marineau, 461 F. 3d 320, 328 (CA2 2006) (discussing the present case and describing the sign as “a clearly pro-drug banner”).

The pro-drug interpretation of the banner gains further plausibility given the paucity of alternative meanings the banner might bear. The best Frederick can come up with is that the banner is “meaningless and funny.” 439 F. 3d, at 1116. The dissent similarly refers to the sign’s message as “curious,” post, at 434 (opinion of Stevens, J.), “ambiguous,” ibid., “nonsense,” post, at 435, “ridiculous,” post, at 438, “obscure,” post, at 439, “silly,” post, at 444, “quixotic,” post, at 445, and “stupid,” ibid. Gibberish is surely a possible interpretation of the words on the banner, but it is not the only one, and dismissing the banner as meaningless ignores its undeniable reference to illegal drugs.

The dissent mentions Frederick’s “credible and uncontradicted explanation for the message — he just wanted to get on television.” Post, at 444. But that is a description of Frederick’s motive for displaying the banner; it is not an interpretation of what the banner says. The way Frederick was going to fulfill his ambition of appearing on television was by unfurling a pro-drug banner at a school event, in the presence of teachers and fellow students.

Elsewhere in its opinion, the dissent emphasizes the importance of political speech and the need to foster “national debate about a serious issue,” post, at 448, as if to suggest *403that the banner is political speech. But not even Frederick argues that the banner conveys any sort of political or religious message. Contrary to the dissent’s suggestion, see post, at 446-448, this is plainly not a case about political debate over the criminalization of drug use or possession.

IV

The question thus becomes whether a principal may, consistent with the First Amendment, restrict student speech at a school event, when that speech is reasonably viewed as promoting illegal drug use. We hold that she may.

In Tinker, this Court made clear that “First Amendment rights, applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment, are available to teachers and students.” 393 U. S., at 506. Tinker involved a group of high school students who decided to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War. School officials learned of the plan and then adopted a policy prohibiting students from wearing armbands. When several students nonetheless wore armbands to school, they were suspended. Id., at 504. The students sued, claiming that their First Amendment rights had been violated, and this Court agreed.

Tinker held that student expression may not be suppressed unless school officials reasonably conclude that it will “materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school.” Id., at 513. The essential facts of Tinker are quite stark, implicating concerns at the heart of the First Amendment. The students sought to engage in political speech, using the armbands to express their “disapproval of the Vietnam hostilities and their advocacy of a truce, to make their views known, and, by their example, to influence others to adopt them.” Id., at 514. Political speech, of course, is “at the core of what the First Amendment is designed to protect.” Virginia v. Black, 538 U. S. 343, 365 (2003) (plurality opinion). The only interest the Court discerned underlying the school’s actions was the “mere desire to avoid *404the discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint,” or “an urgent wish to avoid the controversy which might result from the expression.” Tinker, 393 U. S., at 509, 510. That interest was not enough to justify banning “a silent, passive expression of opinion, unaccompanied by any disorder or disturbance.” Id., at 508.

This Court’s next student speech case was Fraser, 478 U. S. 675. Matthew Fraser was suspended for delivering a speech before a high school assembly in which he employed what this Court called “an elaborate, graphic, and explicit sexual metaphor.” Id., at 678. Analyzing the case under Tinker, the District Court and Court of Appeals found no disruption, and therefore no basis for disciplining Fraser. 478 U. S., at 679-680. This Court reversed, holding that the “School District acted entirely within its permissible authority in imposing sanctions upon Fraser in response to his offensively lewd and indecent speech.” Id., at 685.

The mode of analysis employed in Fraser is not- entirely clear. The Court was plainly attuned to the content of Fraser’s speech, citing the “marked distinction between the political ‘message’ of the armbands in Tinker and the sexual content of [Fraser’s] speech.” Id., at 680. But the Court also reasoned that school boards have the authority to determine “what manner of speech in the classroom or in school assembly is inappropriate.” Id., at 683. Cf. id., at 689 (Brennan, J., concurring in judgment) (“In the present case, school officials sought only to ensure that a high school assembly proceed in an orderly manner. There is no suggestion that school officials attempted to regulate [Fraser’s] speech because they disagreed with the views he sought to express”).

We need not resolve this debate to decide this case. For present purposes, it is enough to distill from Fraser two basic principles. First, Fraser’s holding demonstrates that “the constitutional rights of students in public school are not automatically coextensive with the rights , of adults in other *405settings.” Id., at 682. Had Fraser delivered the same speech in a public forum outside the school context, it would have been protected. See Cohen v. California, 403 U. S. 15 (1971); Fraser, supra, at 682-683. In school, however, Fraser’s First Amendment rights were circumscribed “in light of the special characteristics of the school environment.” Tinker, supra, at 506. Second, Fraser established that the mode of analysis set forth in Tinker is not absolute. Whatever approach Fraser employed, it certainly did not conduct the “substantial disruption” analysis prescribed by Tinker, supra, at 514. See Kuhlmeier, 484 U. S., at 271, n. 4 (disagreeing with the proposition that there is “no difference between the First Amendment analysis applied in Tinker and that applied in Fraser,” and noting that the holding in Fraser was not based on any showing of substantial disruption).

Our most recent student speech case, Kuhlmeier, concerned “expressive activities that students, parents, and members of the public might reasonably perceive to bear the imprimatur of the school.” 484 U. S., at 271. Staff members of a high school newspaper sued their school when it chose not to publish two of their articles. The Court of Appeals analyzed the case under Tinker, ruling in favor of the students because it found no evidence of material disruption to classwork or school discipline. Kuhlmeier v. Hazelwood School Dist., 795 F. 2d 1368, 1375 (CA8 1986). This Court reversed, holding that “educators do not offend the First Amendment by exercising editorial control over the style and content of student speech in school-sponsored expressive activities so long as their actions are reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns.” Kuhlmeier, 484 U. S., at 273.

Kuhlmeier does not control this case because no one would reasonably believe that Frederick’s banner bore the school’s imprimatur. The case is nevertheless instructive because it confirms both principles cited above. Kuhlmeier acknowl*406edged that schools may regulate some speech “even though the government could not censor similar speech outside the school.” Id., at 266. And, like Fraser, it confirms that the rule of Tinker is not the only basis for restricting student speech.2

Drawing on the principles applied in our student speech cases, we have held in the Fourth Amendment context that “while children assuredly do not ‘shed their constitutional rights ... at the schoolhouse gate,’ ... the nature of those rights is what is appropriate for children in school.” Vernonia School Dist. 47J v. Acton, 515 U. S. 646, 655-656 (1995) (quoting Tinker, supra, at 506). In particular, “the school setting requires some easing of the restrictions to which searches by public authorities are ordinarily subject.” New Jersey v. T. L. O., 469 U. S. 325, 340 (1985). See Vernonia, supra, at 656 (“Fourth Amendment rights, no less than First and Fourteenth Amendment rights, are different in public schools than elsewhere ... ”); Board of Ed. of Independent School Dist. No. 92 of Pottawatomie Cty. v. Earls, 536 U. S. 822, 829-830 (2002) (“ ‘special needs’ inhere in the public school context”; “[wjhile schoolchildren do not shed their constitutional rights when they enter the schoolhouse, Fourth Amendment rights ... are different in public schools than elsewhere; the ‘reasonableness’ inquiry cannot disregard the schools’ custodial and tutelary responsibility for children” (quoting Vernonia, 515 U. S., at 656; citation and some internal quotation marks omitted)).

*407Even more to the point, these cases also recognize that deterring drug use by schoolchildren is an “important— indeed, perhaps compelling” interest. Id., at 661. Drug abuse can cause severe and permanent damage to the health and well-being of young people:

“School years are the time when the physical, psychological, and addictive effects of drugs are most severe. Maturing nervous systems are more critically impaired by intoxicants than mature ones are; childhood losses in learning are lifelong and profound; children grow chemically dependent more quickly than adults, and their record of recovery is depressingly poor. And of course the effects of a drug-infested school are visited not just upon the users, but upon the entire student body and faculty, as the educational process is disrupted.” Id., at 661-662 (citations and internal quotation marks omitted).

Just five years ago, we wrote: “The drug abuse problem among our Nation’s youth has hardly abated since Vernonia was decided in 1995. In fact, evidence suggests that it has only grown worse.” Earls, supra, at 834, and n. 5.

The problem remains serious today. See generally 1 National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health, Monitoring the Future: National Survey Results on Drug Use, 1975-2005, Secondary School Students (2006). About half of American 12th graders have used an illicit drug, as have more than a third of 10th graders and about one-fifth of 8th graders. Id., at 99. Nearly one in four 12th graders has used an illicit drug in the past month. Id., at 101. Some 25% of high schoolers say that they have been offered, sold, or given an illegal drug on school property within the past year. Dept, of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance — United States, 2005, 55 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Surveillance Summaries, No. SS-5, p. 19 (June 9, 2006).

*408Congress has declared that part of a school’s job is educating students about the dangers of illegal drug use. It has provided billions of dollars to support state and local drug-prevention programs, Brief for United States as Amicus Curiae 1, and required that schools receiving federal funds under the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act of 1994 certify that their drug-prevention programs “convey a clear and consistent message that ... the illegal use of drugs [is] wrong and harmful,” 20 U. S. C. § 7114(d)(6) (2000 ed., Supp. IV).

Thousands of school boards throughout the country — including JDHS — have adopted policies aimed at effectuating this message. See Pet. for Cert. 17-21. Those school boards know that peer pressure is perhaps “the single most important factor leading schoolchildren to take drugs,” and that students are more likely to use drugs when the norms in school appear to tolerate such behavior. Earls, supra, at 840 (Breyer, J., concurring). Student speech celebrating illegal drug use at a school event, in the presence of school administrators and teachers, thus poses a particular challenge for school officials working to protect those entrusted to their care from the dangers of drug abuse.

The “special characteristics of the school environment,” Tinker, 393 U. S., at 506, and the governmental interest in stopping student drug abuse — reflected in the policies of Congress and myriad school boards, including JDHS — allow schools to restrict student expression that they reasonably regard as promoting illegal drug use. Tinker warned that schools may not prohibit student speech because of “undifferentiated fear or apprehension of disturbance” or “a mere desire to avoid the discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint.” Id., at 508, 509. The danger here is far more serious and palpable. The particular concern to prevent student drug abuse at issue here, embodied in established school policy, App. 92-95; App. to Pet. *409for Cert. 53a, extends well beyond an abstract desire to avoid controversy.

Petitioners urge us to adopt the broader rule that Frederick’s speech is proseribable because it is plainly “offensive” as that term is used in Fraser. See Reply Brief for Petitioners 14-15. We think this stretches Fraser too far; that case should not be read to encompass any speech that could fit under some definition of “offensive.” After all, much political and religious speech might be perceived as offensive to some. The concern here is not that Frederick’s speech was offensive, but that it was reasonably viewed as promoting illegal drug use.

Although accusing this decision of doing “serious violence to the First Amendment” by authorizing “viewpoint discrimination,” post, at 435, 437, the dissent concludes that “it might well be appropriate to tolerate some targeted viewpoint discrimination in this unique setting,” post, at 439. Nor do we understand the dissent to take the position that schools are required to tolerate student advocacy of illegal drug use at school events, even if that advocacy falls short of inviting “imminent” lawless action. See ibid. (“[I]t is possible that our rigid imminence requirement ought to be relaxed at schools”). And even the dissent recognizes that the issues here are close enough that the principal should not be held liable in damages, but should instead enjoy qualified immunity for her actions. See post, at 434. Stripped of rhetorical flourishes, then, the debate between the dissent and this opinion is less about constitutional first principles than about whether Frederick’s banner constitutes promotion of illegal drug use. We have explained our view that it does. The dissent’s contrary view on that relatively narrow question hardly justifies sounding the First Amendment bugle.

* * *

School principals have a difficult job, and a vitally important one. When Frederick suddenly and unexpectedly un*410furled his banner, Morse, had to decide to act — or not act— on the spot. It was reasonable for her to conclude that the banner promoted illegal drug use — in violation of established school policy — and that failing to act would send a powerful message to the students in her charge, including Frederick, about how serious the school was about the dangers of illegal drug use. The First Amendment does not require schools to tolerate at school events student expression that contributes to those dangers.

The judgment of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

It is so ordered.

Justice Thomas,

concurring.

The Court today decides that a public school may prohibit speech advocating illegal drug use. I agree and therefore join its opinion in full. I write separately to state my view that the standard set forth in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School Dist., 393 U. S. 503 (1969), is without basis in the Constitution.

I

The First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech.” As this Court has previously observed, the First Amendment was not originally understood to permit all sorts of speech; instead, “[t]here are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem.” Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 315 U. S. 568, 571-572 (1942); see also Cox v. Louisiana, 379 U. S. 536, 554 (1965). In my view, the history of public education suggests that the First Amendment, as originally understood, does not protect stu*411dent speech in public schools. Although colonial schools were exclusively private, public education proliferated in the early 1800’s. By the time the States ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, public schools had become relatively common. W. Reese, America’s Public Schools: From the Common-School to “No Child Left Behind” 11-12 (2005) (hereinafter Reese). If students in public schools were originally understood as having free-speech rights, one would have expected 19th-century public schools to have respected those rights and courts to have enforced them.1 They did not.

A

During the colonial era, private schools and tutors offered the only educational opportunities for children, and teachers managed classrooms with an iron hand. R. Butts & L. Cremin, A History of Education in American Culture 121, 123 (1953) (hereinafter Butts). Public schooling arose, in part, as a way to educate those too poor to afford private schools. See Kaestle & Vinovskis, From Apron Strings to ABCs: Parents, Children, and Schooling in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts, 84 Am. J. Sociology S39, S49 (Supp. 1978). Because public schools were initially created as substitutes for private schools, when States developed public education systems in the early 1800’s, no one doubted the government’s ability to educate and discipline children as private schools did. Like their private counterparts, early public schools were not places for freewheeling debates or exploration of competing ideas. Rather, teachers instilled “a core of common values” in students and taught them self-control. Reese 23; A. Potter & G. Emerson, The School and *412the Schoolmaster: A Manual 125 (1843) (“By its discipline it contributes, insensibly, to generate a spirit of subordination to lawful authority, a power of self-control, and a habit of postponing present indulgence to a greater future good ... ”); D. Parkerson & J. Parkerson, The Emergence of the Common School in the U. S. Countryside 6 (1998) (hereinafter Parkerson) (noting that early education activists, such as Benjamin Rush, believed public schools “help[ed] control the innate selfishness of the individual”).

Teachers instilled these values not only by presenting ideas but also through strict discipline. Butts 274-275. Schools punished students for behavior the school considered disrespectful or wrong. Parkerson 65 (noting that children were punished for idleness, talking, profanity, and slovenliness). Rules of etiquette were enforced, and courteous behavior was demanded. Reese 40. To meet their educational objectives, schools required absolute obedience. C. Northend, The Teacher’s Assistant or Hints and Methods in School Discipline and Instruction 44,52 (1865) (“I consider a school judiciously governed, where order prevails; where the strictest sense of propriety is manifested by the pupils towards the teacher, and towards each other ...” (internal quotation marks omitted)).2

In short, in the earliest public schools, teachers taught, and students listened. Teachers commanded, and students obeyed. Teachers did not rely solely on the power of ideas to persuade; they relied on discipline to maintain order.

*413B

Through the legal doctrine of in loco parentis, courts upheld the right of schools to discipline students, to enforce rules, and to maintain order.3 Rooted in the English common law, in loco parentis originally governed the legal rights and obligations of tutors and private schools. 1 W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 441 (1765) (“[A parent] may also delegate part of his parental authority, during his life, to the tutor or schoolmaster of his child; who is then in loco parentis, and has such a portion of the power of the parent committed to his charge, viz. that of restraint and correction, as may be necessary to answer the purposes for which he is employed”). Chancellor James Kent noted the acceptance of the doctrine as part of American law in the early 19th century. 2 J. Kent, Commentaries on American Law *205, *206-*207 (“So the power allowed by law to the parent over the person of the child may be delegated to a tutor or instructor, the better to accomplish the purpose of education”).

As early as 1837, state courts applied the in loco parentis principle to public schools:

“One of the most sacred duties of parents, is to train up and qualify their children, for becoming useful and virtuous members of society; this duty cannot be effectually performed without the ability to command obedience, to control stubbornness, to quicken diligence, and *414to reform bad habits.... The teacher is the substitute of the parent;... and in the exercise of these delegated duties, is invested with his power.” State v. Pendergrass, 19 N. C. 365, 365-366 (1837).

Applying in loco parentis, the judiciary was reluctant to interfere in the routine business of school administration, allowing schools and teachers to set and enforce rules and to maintain order. Sheehan v. Sturges, 53 Conn. 481, 483-484, 2 A. 841, 842 (1885). Thus, in the early years of public schooling, schools and teachers had considerable discretion in disciplinary matters:

“To accomplish th[e] desirable ends [of teaching self-restraint, obedience, and other civic virtues], the master of a school is necessarily invested with much discretionary power.... He must govern these pupils, quicken the slothful, spur the indolent, restrain the impetuous, and control the stubborn. He must make rules, give commands, and punish disobedience. What rules, what commands, and what punishments shall be imposed, are necessarily largely within the discretion of the master, where none are defined by the school board.” Patterson v. Nutter, 78 Me. 509, 511, 7 A. 273, 274 (1886).4

A review of the case law shows that in loco parentis allowed schools to regulate student speech as well. Courts routinely preserved the rights of teachers to punish speech that the school or teacher thought was contrary to the interests of the school and its educational goals. For example, the Vermont Supreme Court upheld the corporal punishment of a student who called his teacher “Old Jack Seaver” in *415front of other students. Lander v. Seaver, 32 Vt. 114, 115 (1859). The court explained its decision as follows:

“[L]anguage used to other scholars to stir up disorder and subordination, or to heap odium and disgrace upon the master; writings and pictures placed so as to suggest evil and corrupt language, images and thoughts to the youth who must frequent the school; all such or similar acts tend directly to impair the usefulness of the school, the welfare of the scholars and the authority of the master. By common consent and by the universal custom in our New England schools, the master has always been deemed to have the right to punish such offences. Such power is essential to the preservation of order, decency, decorum and good government in schools.” Id., at 121.

Similarly, the California Court of Appeal upheld the expulsion of a student who gave a speech before the student body that criticized the administration for having an unsafe building “because of the possibility of fire.” Wooster v. Sunderland, 27 Cal. App. 51, 52, 148 P. 959 (1915). The punishment was appropriate, the court stated, because the speech “was intended to discredit and humiliate the board in the eyes of the students, and tended to impair the discipline of the school.” Id., at 55, 148 P., at 960. Likewise, the Missouri Supreme Court explained that a “rule which forbade the use of profane language [and] quarrelling” “was not only reasonable, but necessary to the orderly conduct of the school.” Deskins v. Gose, 85 Mo. 485, 487, 488 (1885). And the Indiana Supreme Court upheld the punishment of a student who made distracting demonstrations in class for “a breach of good deportment.” Vanvactor v. State, 113 Ind. 276, 281, 15 N. E. 341, 343 (1888).5

*416The doctrine of in loco parentis limited the ability of schools to set rules and control their classrooms in almost no way. It merely limited the imposition of excessive physical punishment. In this area, the case law was split. One line of cases specified that punishment was wholly discretionary as long as the teacher did not act with legal malice or cause permanent injury. E. g., Boyd v. State, 88 Ala. 169, 170-172, 7 So. 268, 269 (1890) (allowing liability where the “punishment inflicted is immoderate, or excessive, and ... it was induced by legal malice, or wickedness of motive”). Another line allowed courts to intervene where the corporal punishment was “clearly excessive.” E. g., Lander, supra, at 124. Under both lines of cases, courts struck down only punishments that were excessively harsh; they almost never questioned the substantive restrictions on student conduct set by teachers and schools. E. g., Sheehan, supra, at 483-484, 2 A., at 842; Gardner v. State, 4 Ind. 632, 635 (1853); Anderson v. State, 40 Tenn. 455, 456 (1859); Hardy v. James, 5 Ky. Op. 36 (1872).6 **6

II

Tinker effected a sea change in students’ speech rights, extending them well beyond traditional bounds. The case *417arose when a school punished several students for wearing black armbands to school to protest the Vietnam War. 393 U. S., at 504. Determining that the punishment infringed the students’ First Amendment rights, this Court created a new standard for students’ freedom of speech in public schools:

“[W]here there is no finding and no showing that engaging in the forbidden conduct would materially and substantially interfere with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school, the prohibition cannot be sustained.” Id., at 509 (internal quotation marks omitted).

Accordingly, unless a student’s speech would disrupt the educational process, students had a fundamental right to speak their minds (or wear their armbands) — even on matters the school disagreed with or found objectionable. Ibid. (“[The school] must be able to show that its action was caused by something more than a mere desire to avoid the discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint”).

Justice Black dissented, criticizing the Court for “subjecting] all the public schools in the country to the whims and caprices of their loudest-mouthed, but maybe not their brightest, students.” Id., at 525. He emphasized the instructive purpose of schools: “[T]axpayers send children to school on the premise that at their age they need to learn, not teach.” Id., at 522. In his view, the Court’s decision “surrender[ed] control of the American public school system to public school students.” Id., at 526.

Of course, Tinker’s reasoning conflicted with the traditional understanding of the judiciary’s role in relation to public schooling, a role limited by in loco parentis. Perhaps for that reason, the Court has since scaled back Tinker’s standard, or rather set the standard aside on an ad hoc basis. In Bethel School Dist. No. 403 v. Fraser, 478 U. S. 675, 677, 678 *418(1986), a public school suspended a student for delivering a speech that contained “an elaborate, graphic, and explicit sexual metaphor.” The Court of Appeals found that the speech caused no disruption under the Tinker standard, and this Court did not question that holding. 478 U. S., at 679-680. The Court nonetheless permitted the school to punish the student because of the objectionable content of his speech. Id., at 685 (“A high school assembly or classroom is no place for a sexually explicit monologue directed towards an unsuspecting audienee of teenage students”). Signaling at least a partial break with Tinker, Fraser left the regulation of indecent student speech to local schools.7 478 U. S., at 683.

Similarly, in Hazelwood School Dist. v. Kuhlmeier, 484 U. S. 260 (1988), the Court made an exception to Tinker for school-sponsored activities. The Court characterized newspapers and similar school-sponsored activities “as part of the school curriculum” and held that “[ejducators are entitled to exercise greater control over” these forms of student expression., 484 U. S., at 271. Accordingly, the Court expressly refused to apply Tinker’s standard. 484 U. S., at 272-273. Instead, for school-sponsored activities, the Court created a new standard that permitted school regulations of student speech that are “reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns.” Id., at 273.

Today, the Court creates another exception. In doing so, we continue to distance ourselves from Tinker, but we neither overrule it nor offer an explanation of when it operates and when it does not. Ante, at 404-409. I am afraid that our jurisprudence now says that students have a right to speak in schools except when they do not — a standard continuously developed through litigation against local schools and their administrators. In my view, petitioners could prevail for a much simpler reason: As originally understood, the *419Constitution does not afford students a right to free speech in public schools.

Ill

In light of the history of American public education, it cannot seriously be suggested that the First Amendment “freedom of speech” encompasses a student’s right to speak in public schools. Early public schools gave total control to teachers, who expected obedience and respect from students. And courts routinely deferred to schools’ authority to make rules and to discipline students for violating those rules. Several points are clear: (1) Under in loco parentis, speech rules and other school rules were treated identically; (2) the in loco parentis doctrine imposed almost no limits on the types of rules that a school could set while students were in school; and (3) schools and teachers had tremendous discretion in imposing punishments for violations of those rules.

It might be suggested that the early school speech cases dealt only with slurs and profanity. But that criticism does not withstand scrutiny. First, state courts repeatedly reasoned that schools had discretion to impose discipline to maintain order. The substance of the student’s speech or conduct played no part in the analysis. Second, some cases involved punishment for speech on weightier matters, for instance a speech criticizing school administrators for creating a fire hazard. See Wooster, 27 Cal. App., at 52-53, 148 P., at 959. Yet courts refused to find an exception to in loco parentis even for this advocacy of public safety.

To be sure, our educational system faces administrative and pedagogical challenges different from those faced by 19th-century schools. And the idea of treating children as though it were still the 19th century would find little support today. But I see no constitutional imperative requiring public schools to allow all student speech. Parents decide whether to send their children to public schools. Cf. Hamilton v. Regents of Univ. of Cal., 293 U. S. 245, 262 *420(1934) (“California has not drafted or called them to attend the university. They are seeking education offered by the State and at the same time insisting that they be excluded from the prescribed course . . . ”); id., at 266 (Cardozo, J., concurring). If parents do not like the rules imposed by those schools, they can seek redress in school boards or legislatures; they can send their children to private schools or homeschool them; or they can simply move. Whatever rules apply to student speech in public schools, those rules can be challenged by parents in the political process.

In place of that democratic regime, Tinker substituted judicial oversight of the day-to-day affairs of public schools. The Tinker Court made little attempt to ground its holding in the history of education or in the original understanding of the First Amendment.8 Instead, it imposed a new and malleable standard: Schools could not inhibit student speech unless it “substantially interfere^] with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school.” 393 U. S., at 509 (internal quotation marks omitted). Inherent *421in the application of that standard are judgment calls about what constitutes interference and what constitutes appropriate discipline. See id., at 517-518 (Black, J., dissenting) (arguing that the armbands in fact caused a disruption). Historically, courts reasoned that only local school districts were entitled to make those calls. The Tinker Court usurped that traditional authority for the judiciary.

And because Tinker utterly ignored the history of public education, courts (including this one) routinely find it necessary to create ad hoc exceptions to its central premise. This doctrine of exceptions creates confusion without fixing the underlying problem by returning to first principles. Just as I cannot accept Tinker’s standard, I cannot subscribe to Kuhlmeier’s alternative. Local school boards, not the courts, should determine what pedagogical interests are “legitimate” and what rules “reasonably relat[e]” to those interests. 484 U. S., at 273.

Justice Black may not have been “a prophet or the son of a prophet,” but his dissent in Tinker has proved prophetic. 393 U. S., at 525. In the name of the First Amendment, Tinker has undermined the traditional authority of teachers to maintain order in public schools. “Once a society that generally respected the authority of teachers, deferred to their judgment, and trusted them to act in the best interest of school children, we now accept defiance, disrespect, and disorder as daily occurrences in many of our public schools.” Dupre, Should Students Have Constitutional Rights? Keeping Order in the Public Schools, 65 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 49, 50 (1996). We need look no further than this case for an example: Frederick asserts a constitutional right to utter at a school event what is either “[g]ibberish,” ante, at 402, or an open call to use illegal drugs. To elevate such impertinence to the status of constitutional protection would be farcical and would indeed be to “surrender control of the American public school system to public school students.” Tinker, supra, at 526 (Black, J., dissenting).

*422* * *

I join the Court’s opinion because it erodes Tinker’s hold in the realm of student speech, even though it does so by adding to the patchwork of exceptions to the Tinker standard. I think the better approach is to dispense with Tinker altogether, and given the opportunity, I would do so.

Justice Alito,

with whom Justice Kennedy joins, concurring.

I join the opinion of the Court on the understanding that (1) it goes no further than to hold that a public school may restrict speech that a reasonable observer would interpret as advocating illegal drug use and (2) it provides no support for any restriction of speech that can plausibly be interpreted as commenting on any political or social issue, including speech on issues such as “the wisdom of the war on drugs or of legalizing marijuana for medicinal use.” See post, at 445 (Stevens, J., dissenting).

The opinion of the Court correctly reaffirms the recognition in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School Dist., 393 U. S. 503, 506 (1969), of the fundamental principle that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” The Court is also correct in rioting that Tinker, which permits the regulation of student speech that threatens a concrete and “substantial disruption,” id., at 514, does not set out the only ground on which in-school student speech may be regulated by state actors in a way that would not be constitutional in other settings.

But I do not read the opinion to mean that there are necessarily any grounds for such regulation that are not already recognized in the holdings of this Court. In addition to Tinker, the decision in the present case allows the restriction of speech advocating illegal drug use; Bethel School Dist. No. 403 v. Fraser, 478 U. S. 675 (1986), permits the regulation of speech that is delivered in a lewd or vulgar manner as *423part of a high school program; and Hazelwood School Dist. v. Kuhlmeier, 484 U. S. 260 (1988), allows a school to regulate what is in essence the school’s own speech, that is, articles that appear in a publication that is an official school organ. I join the opinion of the Court on the understanding that the opinion does not hold that the special characteristics of the public schools necessarily justify any other speech restrictions.

The opinion of the Court does not endorse the broad argument advanced by petitioners and the United States that the First Amendment permits public school officials to censor any student speech that interferes with a school’s “educational mission.” See Brief for Petitioners 21; Brief for United States as Amicus Curiae 6. This argument can easily be manipulated in dangerous ways, and I would reject it before such abuse occurs. The “educational mission” of the public schools is defined by the elected and appointed public officials with authority over the schools and by the school administrators and faculty. As a result, some public schools have defined their educational missions as including the inculcation of whatever political and social views are held by the members of these groups. ’

During the Tinker era, a public school could have defined its educational mission to include solidarity with our soldiers and their families and thus could have attempted to outlaw the wearing of black armbands on the ground that they undermined this mission. Alternatively, a school could have defined its educational mission to include the promotion of world peace and could have sought to ban the wearing of buttons expressing support for the troops on the ground that the buttons signified approval of war. The “educational mission” argument would give public school authorities a license to suppress speech on political and social issues based on disagreement with the viewpoint expressed. The argument, therefore, strikes at the very heart of the First Amendment.

*424The public schools are invaluable and beneficent institutions, but they are, after all, organs of the State. When public school authorities regulate student speech, they act as agents of the State; they do not stand in the shoes of the students’ parents. It is a dangerous fiction to pretend that parents simply delegate their authority — including their authority to determine what their children may say and hear— to public school authorities. It is even more dangerous to assume that such a delegation of authority somehow strips public school authorities of their status as agents of the State. Most parents, realistically, have no choice but to send their children to a public school and little ability to influence what occurs in the school. It is therefore wrong to treat public school officials, for purposes relevant to the First Amendment, as if they were private, nongovernmental actors standing in loco parentis.

For these reasons, any argument for altering the usual free speech rules in the public schools cannot rest on a theory of delegation but must instead be based on some special characteristic of the school setting. The special characteristic that is relevant in this case is the threat to the physical safety of students. School attendance can expose students to threats to their physical safety that they would not otherwise face. Outside of school, parents can attempt to protect their children in many ways and may take steps to monitor and exercise control over the persons with whom their children associate. Similarly, students, when not in school, may be able to avoid threatening individuals and situations. During school hours, however, parents are not present to provide protection and guidance, and students’ movements and their ability to choose the persons with whom they spend time are severely restricted. Students may be compelled on a daily basis to spend time at close quarters with other students who may do them harm. Experience shows that schools can be places of special danger.

*425In most settings, the First Amendment strongly limits the government’s ability to suppress speech on the ground that it presents a threat of violence. See Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U. S. 444 (1969) (per curiam). But due to the special features of the school environment, school officials must have greater authority to intervene before speech leads to violence. And, in most cases, Tinker’s “substantial disruption” standard permits school officials to step in before actual violence erupts. See 393 U. S., at 508-509.

Speech advocating illegal drug use poses a threat to student safety that is just as serious, if not always as immediately obvious. As we have recognized in the past and as the opinion of the Court today details, illegal drug use presents a grave and in many ways unique threat to the physical safety of students. I therefore conclude that the public schools may ban speech advocating illegal drug use. But I regard such regulation as standing at the far reaches of what the First Amendment permits. I join the opinion of the Court with the understanding that the opinion does not endorse any further extension.

Justice Breyer,

concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part.

This Court need not and should not decide this difficult First Amendment issue on the merits. Rather, I believe that it should simply hold that qualified immunity bars the student’s claim for monetary damages and say no more.

I

Resolving the First Amendment question presented in this case is, in my view, unwise and unnecessary. In part that is because the question focuses upon specific content narrowly defined: May a school board punish students for speech that advocates drug use and, if so, when? At the same time, the underlying facts suggest that Principal Morse acted as she did not simply because of the specific content *426and viewpoint of Joseph Frederick’s speech but also because of the surrounding context and manner in which Frederick expressed his views. To say that school officials might reasonably prohibit students during school-related events from unfurling 14-foot banners (with any kind of irrelevant or inappropriate message) designed to attract attention from television cameras seems unlikely to undermine basic First Amendment principles. But to hold, as the Court does, that “schools may take steps to safeguard those entrusted to their care from speech that can reasonably be regarded as encouraging illegal drug use” (and that “schools” may “restrict student expression that they reasonably regard as promoting illegal drug use”) is quite a different matter. Ante, at 397, 408. This holding, based as it is on viewpoint restrictions, raises a host of serious concerns.

One concern is that, while the holding is theoretically limited to speech promoting the use of illegal drugs, it could in fact authorize further viewpoint-based restrictions. Illegal drugs, after all, are not the only illegal substances. What about encouraging the underage consumption of alcohol? Moreover, it is unclear how far the Court’s rule regarding drug advocacy extends. What about a conversation during the lunch period where one student suggests that glaucoma sufferers should smoke marijuana to relieve the pain? What about deprecating commentary about an antidrug film shown in school? And what about drug messages mixed with other, more expressly political, content? If, for example, Frederick’s banner had read “LEGALIZE BONG HiTS,” he might be thought to receive protection from the majority’s rule, which goes to speech “encouraging illegal drug use.” Ante, at 397 (emphasis added). But speech advocating change in drug laws might also be perceived of as promoting the disregard of existing drug laws.

Legal principles must treat like instances alike. Those principles do not permit treating “drug use” separately without a satisfying explanation of why drug use is sui generis. *427To say that illegal drug use is harmful to students, while surely true, does not itself constitute a satisfying explanation because there are many such harms. During a real war, one less metaphorical than the war on drugs, the Court declined an opportunity to draw narrow subject-matter-based lines. Cf. West Virginia Bd. of Ed. v. Barnette, 319 U. S. 624 (1943) (holding students cannot be compelled to recite the Pledge of Allegiance during World War II). We should decline this opportunity today.

Although the dissent avoids some of the majority’s pitfalls, I fear that, if adopted as law, it would risk significant interference with reasonable sehool efforts to maintain discipline. What is a principal to do when a student unfurls a 14-foot banner (carrying an irrelevant or inappropriate message) during a school-related event in an effort to capture the attention of television cameras? Nothing? In my view, a principal or a teacher might reasonably view Frederick’s conduct, in this setting, as simply beyond the pale. And a school official, knowing that adolescents often test the outer boundaries of acceptable behavior, may believe it is important (for the offending student and his classmates) to establish when a student has gone too far.

Neither can I simply say that Morse may have taken the right action (confiscating Frederick’s banner) but for the wrong reason (“drug speech”). Teachers are neither lawyers nor police officers; and the law should not demand that they fully understand the intricacies of our First Amendment jurisprudence. As the majority rightly points out, the circumstances here called for a quick decision. See ante, at 410 (noting that “Morse had to decide to act — or not act — on the spot”). But this consideration is better understood in terms of qualified immunity than of the First Amendment. See infra, at 429-432.

All of this is to say that, regardless of the outcome of the constitutional determination, a decision on the underlying First Amendment issue is both difficult and unusually por*428tentous. And that is a reason for us not to decide the issue unless we must.

In some instances, it is appropriate to decide a constitutional issue in order to provide “guidance” for the future. But I cannot find much guidance in today’s decision. The Court makes clear that school officials may “restrict” student speech that promotes “illegal drug use” and that they may “take steps” to “safeguard” students from speech that encourages “illegal drug use.” Ante, at 397, 403. Beyond “steps” that prohibit the unfurling of banners at school outings, the Court does not explain just what those “restrict[ions]” or those “steps” might be.

Nor, if we are to avoid the risk of interpretations that are too broad or too narrow, is it easy to offer practically valuable guidance. 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.

In order to avoid resolving the fractious underlying constitutional question, we need only decide a different question that this case presents, the question of “qualified immunity.” See Pet. for Cert. 23-28. The principle of qualified immunity fits this case perfectly and, by saying so, we would diminish the risk of bringing about the adverse consequences I have identified. More importantly, we should also adhere to a basic constitutional obligation by avoiding unnecessary decision of constitutional questions. See Ashwander v. *429TVA, 297 U.S. 288, 347 (1936) (Brandeis, J., concurring) (“The Court will not pass upon a constitutional question although properly presented by the record, if there is also present some other ground upon which the case may be disposed of”).

II

A

The defense of “qualified immunity” requires courts to enter judgment in favor of a government employee unless the employee’s conduct violates “clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.” Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U. S. 800, 818 (1982). The defense is designed to protect “all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.” Malley v. Briggs, 475 U. S. 335, 341 (1986).

Qualified immunity applies here and entitles Principal Morse to judgment on Frederick’s monetary damages claim because she did not clearly violate the law during her confrontation with the student. At the time of that confrontation, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School Dist., 393 U. S. 503, 513 (1969), indicated that school officials could not prohibit students from wearing an armband in protest of the Vietnam War, where the conduct at issue did not “materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school”; Bethel School Dist. No. 403 v. Fraser, 478 U. S. 675 (1986), indicated that school officials could restrict a student’s freedom to give a school assembly speech containing an elaborate sexual metaphor; and Hazelwood School Dist. v. Kuhlmeier, 484 U. S. 260 (1988), indicated that school officials could restrict student contributions to a school-sponsored newspaper, even without threat of imminent disruption. None of these cases clearly governs the case at hand.

The Ninth Circuit thought it “clear” that these cases did not permit Morse’s actions. See 439 F. 3d 1114, 1124 (2006). That is because, in the Ninth Circuit’s view, this case in*430volved neither lewd speech, cf. Fraser, supra, nor school-sponsored speech, cf. Kuhlmeier, supra, and hence Tinker’s substantial disruption test must guide the inquiry. See 439 F. 3d, at 1123. But unlike the Ninth Circuit, other courts have described the tests these eases suggest as complex and often difficult to apply. See, e. g., Guiles v. Marineau, 461 F. 3d 320, 326 (CA2 2006) (“It is not entirely clear whether Tinker’s rule applies to all student speech that is not sponsored by schools, subject to the rule of Fraser, or whether it applies only to political speech or to political viewpoint-based discrimination”); Baxter v. Vigo Cty. School Corp., 26 F. 3d 728, 737 (CA7 1994) (pointing out that Fraser “cast some doubt on the extent to which students retain free speech rights in the school setting”). Indeed, the fact that this Court divides on the constitutional question (and that the majority reverses the Ninth Circuit’s constitutional determination) strongly suggests that the answer as to how to apply prior law to these facts was unclear.

The relative ease with which we could decide this case on the qualified immunity ground, and thereby avoid deciding a far more difficult constitutional question, underscores the need to lift the rigid “order of battle” decisionmaking requirement that this Court imposed upon lower courts in Saucier v. Katz, 533 U. S. 194, 201-202 (2001). In Saucier, the Court wrote that lower courts’ “first inquiry must be whether a constitutional right would have been violated on the facts alleged.” Id., at 200. Only if there is a constitutional violation can lower courts proceed to consider whether the official is entitled to “qualified immunity.” See ibid.

I have previously explained why I believe we should abandon Saucier’s order-of-battle rule. See Scott v. Harris, 550 U. S. 372, 387-389 (2007) (concurring opinion); Brosseau v. Haugen, 543 U. S. 194, 201-202 (2004) (same). Sometimes the rule will require lower courts unnecessarily to answer difficult constitutional questions, thereby wasting judicial resources. Sometimes it will require them to resolve constitu*431tional issues that are poorly presented. Sometimes the rule will immunize an incorrect constitutional holding from further review. And often the rule violates the longstanding principle that courts should “not . . . pass on questions of constitutionality... unless such adjudication is unavoidable.” Spector Motor Service, Inc. v. McLaughlin, 323 U. S. 101, 105 (1944).

This last point warrants amplification. In resolving the underlying constitutional question, we produce several differing opinions. It is utterly unnecessary to do so. Were we to decide this case on the ground of qualified immunity, our decision would be unanimous, for the dissent concedes that Morse should not be held liable in damages for confiscating Frederick’s banner. Post, at 434 (opinion of Stevens, J.). And the “cardinal principle of judicial restraint” is that “if it is not necessary to decide more, it is necessary not to decide more.” PDK Labs., Inc. v. Drug Enforcement Admin., 362 F. 3d 786, 799 (CADC 2004) (Roberts, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment).

If it is Saucier that tempts this Court to adhere to the rigid “order of battle” that binds lower courts, it should resist that temptation. Saucier does not bind this Court. Regardless, the rule of Saucier has generated considerable criticism from both. commentators and judges. See Leval, Judging Under the Constitution: Dicta About Dicta, 81 N. Y. U. L. Rev. 1249, 1275 (2006) (calling the requirement “a puzzling misadventure in constitutional dictum”); Dirrane v. Brookline Police Dept., 315 F. 3d 65, 69-70 (CA1 2002) (referring to the requirement as “an uncomfortable exercise” when “the answer whether there was a violation may depend on a kaleidoscope of facts not yet fully developed”); Lyons v. Xenia, 417 F. 3d 565, 580-584 (CA6 2005) (Sutton, J., concurring). While Saucier justified its rule by contending that it was necessary to permit constitutional law to develop, see 533 U. S., at 201, this concern is overstated because overruling Saucier would not mean that the law prohibited judges *432from passing on constitutional questions, only that it did not require them to do so. Given that Saucier is a judge-made procedural rule, stare decisis concerns supporting preservation of the rule are weak. See, e. g., Payne v. Tennessee, 501 U. S. 808, 828 (1991) (“Considerations in favor of stare decisis” are at their weakest in eases “involving procedural and evidentiary rules”).

Finally, several Members of this Court have previously suggested that always requiring lower courts first to answer constitutional questions is misguided. See County of Sacramento v. Lewis, 523 U. S. 833, 859 (1998) (Stevens, J., concurring in judgment) (resolving the constitutional question first is inappropriate when that “question is both difficult and unresolved”); Bunting v. Mellen, 541 U. S. 1019, 1025 (2004) (Scalia, J., dissenting from denial of certiorari) (“We should either make clear that constitutional determinations are not insulated from our review ... or else drop any pretense at requiring the ordering in every case”); Saucier, supra, at 210 (Ginsrurg, J., concurring in judgment) (“The two-part test today’s decision imposes holds large potential to confuse”); Siegert v. Gilley, 500 U. S. 226, 235 (1991) (Kennedy, J., concurring in judgment) (“If it is plain that a plaintiff’s required malice allegations are insufficient but there is some doubt as to the constitutional right asserted, it seems to reverse the usual ordering of issues to tell the trial and appellate courts that they should resolve the constitutional question first”). I would end the failed Saucier experiment now.

B

There is one remaining objection to deciding this case on the basis of qualified immunity alone. The plaintiff in this case has sought not only damages; he has also sought an injunction requiring the school district to expunge his suspension from its records. A “qualified immunity” defense applies in respect to damages actions, but not to injunctive relief. See, e. g., Wood v. Strickland, 420 U. S. 308, 314, n. 6 *433(1975). With respect to that claim, the underlying question of constitutionality, at least conceivably, remains.

I seriously doubt, however, that it does remain. At the plaintiff’s request, the school superintendent reviewed Frederick’s 10-day suspension. The superintendent, in turn, reduced the suspension to the eight days that Frederick had served before the appeal. But in doing so the superintendent noted that several actions independent of Frederick’s speech supported the suspension, including the plaintiff’s disregard of a school official’s instruction, his failure to report to the principal’s office on time, his “defiant [and] disruptive behavior,” and the “belligerent attitude” he displayed when he finally reported. App. to Pet. for Cert. 65a. The superintendent wrote that “were” he to “concede” that Frederick’s “speech ... is protected ... , the remainder of his behavior was not excused.” Id., at 66a.

The upshot is that the school board’s refusal to erase the suspension from the record may well be justified on non-speech-related grounds. In addition, plaintiff’s counsel appeared to agree with the Court’s suggestion at oral argument that Frederick “would not pursue” injunctive relief if he prevailed on the damages question. Tr. of Oral Arg. 46-48. And finding that Morse was entitled to qualified immunity would leave only the question of injunctive relief.

Given the high probability that Frederick’s request for an injunction will not require a court to resolve the constitutional issue, see Ashwander, 297 U. S., at 347 (Brandéis, J., concurring), I would decide only the qualified immunity question and remand the rest of the case for an initial consideration.

Justice Stevens,

with whom Justice Souter and Justice Ginsburg join, dissenting.

A significant fact barely mentioned by the Court sheds a revelatory light on the motives of both the students and the principal of Juneau-Douglas High School (JDHS). On Janu*434ary 24, 2002, the Olympic Torch Relay gave those Alaska residents a rare chance to appear on national television. As Joseph Frederick repeatedly explained, he did not address the curious message — “BONG HiTS 4 JESUS” — to his fellow students. He just wanted to get the camera crews’ attention. Moreover, concern about a nationwide evaluation of the conduct of the JDHS student body would have justified the principal’s decision to remove an attention-grabbing 14-foot banner, even if it had merely proclaimed “Glaciers Melt!”

I agree with the Court that the principal should not be held liable for pulling down Frederick’s banner. See Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U. S. 800, 818 (1982). I would hold, however, that the school’s interest in protecting its students from exposure to speech “reasonably regarded as promoting illegal drug use,” ante, at 396, cannot justify disciplining Frederick for his attempt to make an ambiguous statement to a television audience simply because it contained an oblique reference to drugs. The First Amendment demands more, indeed, much more.

The Court holds otherwise only after laboring to establish two uncontroversial propositions: first, that the constitutional rights of students in school settings are not coextensive with the rights of adults, see ante, at 403-406; and second, that deterring drug use by schoolchildren is a valid and terribly important interest, see ante, at 407-408. As to the first, I take the Court’s point that the message on Frederick’s banner is not necessarily protected speech, even though it unquestionably would have been had the banner been unfurled elsewhere. As to the second, I am willing to assume that the Court is correct that the pressing need to deter drug use supports JDHS’ rule prohibiting willful conduct that expressly “advocates the use of substances that are illegal to minors.” App. to Pet. for Cert. 53a. But it is a gross non sequitur to draw from these two unremarkable propositions the remarkable conclusion that the school may suppress stu*435dent speech that was never meant to persuade anyone to do anything.

In my judgment, the First Amendment protects student speech if the message itself neither violates a permissible rule nor expressly advocates conduct that is illegal and harmful to students. This nonsense banner does neither, and the Court does serious violence to the First Amendment in upholding — indeed, lauding — a school’s decision to punish Frederick for expressing a view with which it disagreed.

I

In December 1965, we were engaged in a controversial war, a war that “divided this country as few other issues ever have.” Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School Dist., 393 U. S. 503, 524 (1969) (Black, J., dissenting). Having learned that some students planned to wear black armbands as a symbol of opposition to the country’s involvement in Vietnam, officials of the Des Moines public school district adopted a policy calling for the suspension of any student who refused to remove the armband. As we explained when we considered the propriety of that policy, “[t]he school officials banned and sought to punish petitioners for a silent, passive expression of opinion, unaccompanied by any disorder or disturbance on the part of petitioners.” Id., at 508. The district justified its censorship on the ground that it feared that the expression of a controversial and unpopular opinion would generate disturbances. Because the school officials had insufficient reason to believe that those disturbances would “materially and substantially interfere with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school,” we found the justification for the rule to lack any foundation and therefore held that the censorship violated the First Amendment. Id., at 509 (internal quotation marks omitted).

Justice Harlan dissented, but not because he thought the school district could censor a message with which it dis*436agreed. Rather, he would have upheld the district’s rule only because the students never cast doubt on the district’s antidisruption justification by proving that the rule was motivated “by other than legitimate school concerns — for example, a desire to prohibit the expression of an unpopular point of view, while permitting expression of the dominant opinion.” Id., at 526.

Two cardinal First Amendment principles animate both the Court’s opinion in Tinker and Justice Harlan’s dissent. First, censorship based on the content of speech, particularly censorship that depends on the viewpoint of the speaker, is subject to the most rigorous burden of justification:

“Discrimination against speech because of its message is presumed to be unconstitutional. ... When the government targets not subject matter, but particular views taken by speakers on a subject, the violation of the First Amendment is all the more blatant. Viewpoint discrimination is thus an egregious form of content discrimination. The government must abstain from regulating speech when the specific motivating ideology or the opinion or perspective of the speaker is the rationale for the restriction.” Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of Univ. of Va., 515 U. S. 819, 828-829 (1995) (citation omitted).

Second, punishing someone for advocating illegal conduct is constitutional only when the advocacy is likely to provoke the harm that the government seeks to avoid. See Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U. S. 444, 449 (1969) (per curiam) (distinguishing “mere advocacy” of illegal conduct from “incitement to imminent lawless action”).

However necessary it may be to modify those principles in the school setting, Tinker affirmed their continuing vitality. 393 U. S., at 509 (“In order for the State in the person of school officials to justify prohibition of a particular expression of opinion, it must be able to show that its action was *437caused by something more than a mere desire to avoid the discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint. Certainly where there is no finding and no showing that engaging in the forbidden conduct would materially and substantially interfere with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school, the prohibition cannot be sustained” (internal quotation marks omitted)). As other federal courts have long recognized, under Tinker,

“regulation of student speech is generally permissible only when the speech would substantially disrupt or interfere with the work of the school or the rights of other students. . . . Tinker requires a specific and significant fear of disruption, not just some remote apprehension of disturbance.” Saxe v. State College Area School Dist., 240 F. 3d 200, 211 (CA3 2001) (Alito, J.) (emphasis added).

Yet today the Court fashions a test that trivializes the two cardinal principles upon which Tinker rests. See ante, at 408 (“[S]chools [may] restrict student expression that they reasonably regard as promoting illegal drug use”). The Court’s test invites stark viewpoint discrimination. In this case, for example, the principal has unabashedly acknowledged that she disciplined Frederick because she disagreed with the pro-drug viewpoint she ascribed to the message on the banner, see App. 25 — a viewpoint, incidentally, that Frederick has disavowed, see id., at 28. Unlike our recent decision in Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Assn. v. Brentwood Academy, ante, at 296 (plurality opinion), see also ante, at 423 (Alito, J., concurring), the Court’s holding in this case strikes at “the heart of the First Amendment” because it upholds a punishment meted out on the basis of a listener’s disagreement with her understanding (or, more likely, misunderstanding) of the speaker’s viewpoint. “If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amend*438ment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.” Texas v. Johnson, 491 U. S. 397, 414 (1989).

It is also perfectly clear that “promoting illegal drug use,” ante, at 409, comes nowhere close to proseribable “incitement to imminent lawless action.” Brandenburg, 395 U. S., at 449. Encouraging drug use might well increase the likelihood that a listener will try an illegal drug, but that hardly justifies censorship:

“Every denunciation of existing law tends in some measure to increase the probability that there will be violation of it. Condonation of a breach enhances the probability. Expressions of approval add to the probability. . . . Advocacy of law-breaking heightens it still further. But even advocacy of violation, however reprehensible morally, is not a justification for denying free speech where the advocacy falls short of incitement and there is nothing to indicate that the advocacy would be immediately acted on.” Whitney v. California, 274 U. S. 357, 376 (1927) (Brandeis, J., concurring) (footnote omitted).

No one seriously maintains that drug advocacy -(much less Frederick’s ridiculous sign) comes within the vanishingly small category of speech that can be prohibited because of its feared consequences. Such advocacy, to borrow from Justice Holmes, “ha[s] no chance of starting a present conflagration.” Gitlow v. New York, 268 U. S. 652, 673 (1925) (dissenting opinion).

II

The Court rejects outright these twin foundations of Tinker because, in its view, the unusual importance of protecting children from the scourge of drugs supports a ban on all speech in the school environment that promotes drug use. Whether or not such a rule is sensible as a matter of policy, carving out pro-drug speech for uniquely harsh treatment *439finds no support in our case law and is inimical to the values protected by the First Amendment.1 See infra, at 446-448.

I will nevertheless assume for the sake of argument that the school’s concededly powerful interest in protecting its students adequately supports its restriction on “any assembly or public expression that . . . advocates the use of substances that are illegal to minors . . . .” App. to Pet. for Cert. 53a. Given that the relationship between schools and students “is custodial and tutelary, permitting a degree of supervision and control that could not be exercised over free adults,” Vernonia School Dist. 47J v. Acton, 515 U. S. 646, 655 (1995), it might well be appropriate to tolerate some targeted viewpoint discrimination in this unique setting. And while conventional speech may be restricted only when likely to “incit[e] . . . imminent lawless action,” Brandenburg, 395 U. S., at 449, it is possible that our rigid imminence requirement ought to be relaxed at schools. See Bethel School Dist. No. 403 v. Fraser, 478 U. S. 675, 682 (1986) (“[T]he constitutional rights of students in public school are not automatically coextensive with the rights of adults in other settings”).

But it is one thing to restrict speech that advocates drug use. It is another thing entirely to prohibit an obscure message with a drug theme that a third party subjectively— and not very reasonably — thinks is tantamount to express advocacy. Cf. Masses Pub. Co. v. Patten, 244 F. 535, 540, 541 (SDNY 1917) (Hand, J.) (distinguishing sharply between “agitation, legitimate as such,” and “the direct advocacy” of unlawful conduct). Even the school recognizes the paramount need to hold the line between, on the one hand, non-disruptive speech that merely expresses a viewpoint that is unpopular or contrary to the school’s preferred message, and on the other hand, advocacy of an illegal or unsafe course of *440conduct. The district’s prohibition of drug advocacy is a gloss on a more general rule that is otherwise quite tolerant of nondisruptive student speech:

“Students will not be disturbed in the exercise of their constitutionally guaranteed rights to assemble peaceably and to express ideas and opinions, privately or publicly, provided that their activities do not infringe on the rights of others and do not interfere with the operation of the educational program.

“The Board will not permit the conduct on school premises of any willful activity ... that interferes with the orderly operation of the educational program or offends the rights of others. The Board specifically prohibits any assembly or public expression that . . . advocates the use of substances that are illegal to minors . ...” App. to Pet. for Cert. 53a; see also ante, at 398 (opinion of the Court) (quoting rule in part).

There is absolutely no evidence that Frederick’s banner’s reference to drug paraphernalia “willful[ly]” infringed on anyone’s rights or interfered with any of the school’s educational programs.2 On its face, then, the rule gave Frederick wide berth “to express [his] ideas and opinions” so long as they did not amount to “advoca[cy]” of drug use. App. to Pet. for Cert. 53a. If the school’s rule is, by hypothesis, a valid one, it is valid only insofar as it scrupulously preserves adequate space for constitutionally protected speech. When First Amendment rights are at stake, a rule that “sweep[s] in a great variety of conduct under a general and indefinite characterization” may not leave “too wide a discretion in its *441application.” Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U. S. 296, 308 (1940). Therefore, just as we insisted in Tinker that the school establish some likely connection between the armbands and their feared consequences, so too JDHS must show that Frederick’s supposed advocacy stands a meaningful chance of making otherwise-abstemious students try marijuana.

But instead of demanding that the school make such a showing, the Court punts. Figuring out just how it punts is tricky; “[t]he mode of analysis [it] employ[s] ... is not entirely clear,” see ante, at 404. On occasion, the Court suggests it is deferring to the principal’s “reasonable” judgment that Frederick’s sign qualified as drug advocacy.3 At other times, the Court seems to say that it thinks the banner’s message constitutes express advocacy.4 **4 Either way, its approach is indefensible.

To the extent the Court defers to the principal’s ostensibly reasonable judgment, it abdicates its constitutional responsibility. The beliefs of third parties, reasonable or otherwise, have never dictated which messages amount to proscribable advocacy. Indeed, it would be a strange constitutional doctrine that would allow the prohibition of only the narrowest category of speech advocating unlawful conduct, see Bran*442denburg, 395 U. S., at 447-448, yet would permit a listener’s perceptions to determine which speech deserved constitutional protection.5

Such a peculiar doctrine is alien to our case law. In Abrams v. United States, 250 U. S. 616 (1919), this Court affirmed the conviction of a group of Russian “rebels, revolutionists, [and] anarchists,” id., at 617-618 (internal quotation marks omitted), on the ground that the leaflets they distributed were thought to “incite, provoke and encourage resistance to the United States,” id., at 617 (internal quotation marks omitted). Yet Justice Holmes’ dissent — which has emphatically carried the day — never inquired into the reasonableness of the United States’ judgment that the leaflets would likely undermine the war effort. The dissent instead ridiculed that judgment: “[N]obody can suppose that the surreptitious publishing of a silly leaflet by an unknown man, without more, would present any immediate danger that its opinions would hinder the success of the government arms or have any appreciable tendency to do so.” Id., at 628. In Thomas v. Collins, 323 U. S. 516 (1945) (opinion for the Court by Rutledge, J.), we overturned the conviction of a union organizer who violated a restraining order prohibiting him from exhorting workers. In so doing, we held that the distinction between advocacy and incitement could not depend on how one of those workers might have understood the organizer’s speech. That would “pu[t] the speaker in these circumstances wholly at the mercy of the varied understanding of his hearers and consequently of whatever inference may *443be drawn as to his intent and meaning.” Id., at 535. In Cox v. Louisiana, 379 U. S. 536, 543 (1965), we vacated a civil rights leader’s conviction for disturbing the peace, even though a Baton Rouge sheriff had “deem[ed]” the leader’s “appeal to . . . students to sit in at the lunch counters to be ‘inflammatory.’ ” We never asked if the sheriff’s in-person, on-the-spot judgment was “reasonable.” Even in Fraser, we made no inquiry into whether the school administrators reasonably thought the student’s speech was obscene or profane; we rather satisfied ourselves that “[t]he pervasive sexual innuendo in Fraser’s speech was plainly offensive to both teachers and students — indeed to any mature person.” 478 U. S., at 683. Cf. Bose Corp. v. Consumers Union of United States, Inc., 466 U. S. 485, 499 (1984) (“[I]n cases raising First Amendment issues we have repeatedly held that an appellate court has an obligation to make an independent examination of the whole record in order to make sure that the judgment does not constitute a forbidden intrusion on the field of free expression” (internal quotation marks omitted)).6

*444To the extent the Court independently finds that “BONG HiTS 4 JESUS” objectively amounts to the advocacy of illegal drug use — in other words, that it can most reasonably be interpreted as such — that conclusion practically refutes itself. This is a nonsense message, not advocacy. The Court’s feeble effort to divine its hidden meaning is strong evidence of that. Ante, at 402 (positing that the banner might mean, alternatively, “ ‘[Take] bong hits,’ ” “ ‘bong hits [are a good thing], ’ ” or “ ‘[we take] bong hits’ ”). Frederick’s credible and uncontradicted explanation for the message— he just wanted to get on television — is also relevant because a speaker who does not intend to persuade his audience can hardly be said to be advocating anything.7 **7 But most importantly, it takes real imagination to read a “cryptic” message (the Court’s characterization, not mine, see ante, at 401) with a slanting drug reference as an incitement to drug use. Admittedly, some high school students (including those who use drugs) are dumb. Most students, however, do not shed their brains at the schoolhouse gate, and most students know dumb advocacy when they see it. The notion that the message on this banner would actually persuade either the average student or even the dumbest one to change his or her behavior is most implausible. That the Court believes such a silly message can be proscribed as advocacy underscores the novelty of its position, and suggests that the principle it articulates has no stopping point.

Even if advocacy could somehow be wedged into Frederick’s obtuse reference to marijuana, that advocacy was at best subtle and ambiguous. There is abundant precedent, including another opinion The Chief Justice announces *445today, for the proposition that when the “First Amendment is implicated, the tie goes to the speaker,” Federal Election Comm'n v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc., post, at 474 (principal opinion), and that “when it comes to defining what speech qualifies as the functional equivalent of express advocacy ... we give the benefit of the doubt to speech, not censorship,” post, at 482. If this were a close case, the tie would have to go to Frederick’s speech, not to the principal’s strained reading of his quixotic message.

Among other things, the Court’s ham-handed, categorical approach is deaf to the constitutional imperative to permit unfettered debate, even among high school students, about the wisdom of the war on drugs or of legalizing marijuana for medicinal use.8 See Tinker, 393 U. S., at 511 (“[Students] may not be confined to the expression of those sentiments that are officially approved”). If Frederick’s stupid reference to marijuana can in the Court’s view justify censorship, then high school students everywhere could be forgiven for zipping their mouths about drugs at school lest some “reasonable” observer censor and then punish them for promot*446ing drugs. See also ante, at 426 (Breyer, J., concurring in judgment in part and dissenting in part).

Consider, too, that the school district’s rule draws no distinction between alcohol and marijuana, but applies evenhandedly to all “substances that are illegal to minors.” App. to Pet. for Cert. 53a; see also App. 83 (expressly defining “‘drugs’” to include “all alcoholic beverages”). Given the tragic consequences of teenage alcohol consumption — drinking causes far more fatal accidents than the misuse of marijuana — the school district’s interest in deterring teenage alcohol use is at least comparable to its interest in preventing marijuana use. Under the Court’s reasoning, must the First Amendment give way whenever a school seeks to punish a student for any speech mentioning beer, or indeed anything else that might be deemed risky to teenagers? While I find it hard to believe the Court would support punishing Frederick for flying a “WINE SiPS 4 JESUS” banner — which could quite reasonably be construed either as a protected religious message or as a pro-alcohol message — the breathtaking sweep of its opinion suggests it would.

Ill

Although this case began with a silly, nonsensical banner, it ends with the Court inventing out of whole cloth a special First Amendment rule permitting the censorship of any student speech that mentions drugs, at least so long as someone could perceive that speech to contain a latent pro-drug message. Our First Amendment jurisprudence has identified some categories of expression that are less deserving of protection than others — fighting words, obscenity, and commercial speech, to name a few. Rather than reviewing our opinions discussing sueh categories, I mention two personal recollections that have no doubt influenced my conclusion that it would be profoundly unwise to create special rules for speech about drug and alcohol use.

*447The Vietnam War is remembered today as an impopular war. During its early stages, however, “the dominant opinion” that Justice Harlan mentioned in his Tinker dissent regarded opposition to the war as unpatriotic, if not treason. 393 U. S., at 526. That dominant opinion strongly supported the prosecution of several of those who demonstrated in Grant Park during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, see United States v. Dellinger, 472 P. 2d 340 (CA7 1972), and the vilification of vocal opponents of the war like Julian Bond, cf. Bond v. Floyd, 385 U. S. 116 (1966). In 1965, when the Des Moines students wore their armbands, the school district’s fear that they might “start an argument or cause a disturbance” was well founded. Tinker, 393 U. S., at 508. Given that context, there is special force to the Court’s insistence that “our Constitution says we must take th[at] risk; and our history says that it is this sort of hazardous freedom — this kind of openness — that is the basis of our national strength and of the independence and vigor of Americans who grow up and live in this relatively permissive, often disputatious, society.” Id., at 508-509 (citation omitted). As we now know, the then-dominant opinion about the Vietnam War was not etched in stone.

Reaching back still further, the current dominant opinion supporting the war on drugs in general, and our antimarijuana laws in particular, is reminiscent of the opinion that supported the nationwide ban on alcohol consumption when I was a student. While alcoholic beverages are now regarded as ordinary articles of commerce, their use was then condemned with the same moral fervor that now supports the war on drugs. The ensuing change in public opinion occurred much more slowly than the relatively rapid shift in Americans’ views on the Vietnam War, and progressed on a state-by-state basis over a period of many years. But just as prohibition in the 1920’s and early 1930’s was secretly questioned by thousands of otherwise law-abiding patrons of *448bootleggers and speakeasies, today the actions of literally millions of otherwise law-abiding users of marijuana,9 and of the majority of voters in each of the several States that tolerate medicinal uses of the product,10 lead me to wonder whether the fear of disapproval by those in the majority is silencing opponents of the war on drugs. Surely our national experience with alcohol should make us wary of dampening speech suggesting — however inarticulately — that it would be better to tax and regulate marijuana than to persevere in a futile effort to ban its use entirely.

Even in high school, a rule that permits only one point of view to be expressed is less likely to produce correct answers than the open discussion of countervailing views. Whitney, 274 U. S., at 377 (Brandeis, J., concurring); Abrams, 250 U. S., at 630 (Holmes, J., dissenting); Tinker, 393 U. S., at 512. In the national debate about a serious issue, it is the expression of the minority’s viewpoint that most demands the protection of the First Amendment. Whatever the better policy may be, a full and frank discussion of the costs and benefits of the attempt to prohibit the use of marijuana is far wiser than suppression of speech because it is unpopular.

I respectfully dissent.