Liberty and Learning: Academic Freedom for Teachers and Students

“I strongly encourage teachers, administrators, districts, and state boards of education to make time to read this book together. David Moshman’s flawless research, probing questions, and insightful principles will lay the foundation for a new era in academic freedom, perhaps prompting school systems to create strong policies to guard against challenges to intellectual freedom.”
ReLeah Cossett Lent
Co-author of At the Schoolhouse Gate: Lessons in Intellectual Freedom

Academic freedom, argues David Moshman, is neither a special privilege of college faculty nor a First Amendment right of individual teachers and students. Rather, academic freedom is intellectual freedom in academic contexts, consisting of five principles that everyone is obligated to respect:

• Freedom of belief and identity
• Freedom of expression and discussion
• Freedom of inquiry
• Freedom from indoctrination
• Rights of equality, privacy, and due process

Moshman succinctly shows readers how these principles resolve some of the most intractable problems facing education today. On matters ranging from evolution to sex education to the literary canon, his principles address the concerns of teachers, administrators, students, parents, and their communities alike, providing tools that promote real student learning and thinking.

ReLeah Cossett Lent was a middle and high school teacher before becoming a founding member of a statewide literacy project at the University of Central Florida. She is now an international consultant, writing and speaking about adolescent literacy, Common Core, and school leadership. Her latest book is Overcoming Textbook Fatigue: 21st Century Tools to Invigorate Learning (ASCD).

ReLeah's work with Jimmy Santiago Baca, award-winning poet and writer, led to a book and CD for reaching at-risk adolescents, Adolescents on the Edge, Stories and Lessons to Transform Learning (Heinemann). She has also written Keep Them Reading: An Anti-Censorship Guide for Educators and Literacy for Real: Reading, Thinking and Learning in the Content Areas (Teachers College Press), Engaging Adolescent Learners and Literacy Learning Communities (Heinemann). ReLeah's first two books, co-authored with Gloria Pipkin and published by Heinemann won the American Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Award and the NCTE/Slate Intellectual Freedom Award. ReLeah was also the recipient of the PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award in 1999. You can find her at www.releahlent.com.

David Moshman has studied and advocated the intellectual and First Amendment rights of students of all ages since 1981. A professor of educational psychology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, he developed the principles of academic freedom adopted by the Academic Freedom Coalition of Nebraska in 1999. He is the author of Adolescent Psychological Development: Rationality, Morality, and Identity.