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.

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.