Your point on Barnette is fascinating, and I hope someone does some scholarship in that direction, particularly given museums like this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/24/arts/24crea.html?em&ex=1180152000&en=3fce574910e89398&ei=5087

But I still hold to this idea from Stevens in a concurring opinion in the Safeco case:

“the ’signal’ doctrine mandates a lowered level of protection for expression that ‘calls for an automatic response to a signal, rather than a reasoned response to an idea.’”

from Tribe, Const. Choices, p. 200.

I admit, Tribe is critical of this doctrine.

There always has been a tension between the liberty recognized in Barnette and compulsory education. If the school cannot compel students to salute the flag, then why should it be able to compel students to read Slaughterhouse Five or discuss sexuality in class or write a report on evolution? Schools struggle with this all the time in the face of parental requests for opt-outs from assignments. I am not sure off-hand if any First Amendment scholars have tried to resolve the tension, but I imagine it has something to do with how core something is to the school’s educational mission. An admittedly tough line, I know.

But I still think that the speech behind Cohen/Tinker/Hustler is part of a larger political worldview than the Mong/Bong cases. Mong/Bong are about a small group’s decision to mock the school. The others comment on larger themes.

If anything can be a message, then why not a refusal to do homework? Can’t that just be reconfigured as “this is my First Amendment right not to speak, sending a message that it is immoral to comply with an educational apparatus designed to sort us into different classes and train us for docility in the face of exploitation”?

The idea that anything can be a message can get out of hand pretty quickly.

Update on Mongzilla: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/316793_kentridge23.html

A federal district judge denied the student’s request for a TRO. The judge accepted the school’s argument that the punishment was for the disruptive in-class depicted in the video, thus not protected by the First Amendment. The judge specifically pointed to the student’s lewd and sexually suggestive gestures and gyrations towards the teacher (all behind her back) as unprotected disruptive behavior.

Such ex-post use of the disruption standard is troubling to me. No one in authority at the school knew about the inappropriate classroom behavior until some weeks AFTER it occurred. And there is no evidence that there was, in fact, any such disruption. The school (which only learned of this behavior because of the video) is using the video (i.e., speech) to decide that this conduct must have caused a disruption at the time, so it cna go back and suspend the student after the fact. That seems to blur further the line between disruption and speech.