The U.S. Supreme Court increasingly leverages a rigid interpretation of the Free Speech Clause to strike regulations that address campaign financing, health care warnings, tax disclosures, collective bargaining agreements, and consumer protections. History has become little more than a slogan that the majority periodically invokes but seldom accurately evaluates. That lack of nuance augments the justices’ authority to articulate absolutist-sounding rules to the detriment of legislatures’ exercise of traditional governmental functions. Jurists would do better to rely on a more proportionate and less categorical approach to decide whether laws impose direct or peripheral burdens on communications. The level of safeguards enjoyed by expressions should be gauged by their value to political self-determination, personal development, or informational contribution. The degree of protections that speech enjoys should be balanced against countervailing government interests, alternatives available to speakers, fit between law and public ends, and relevant history.

Australia’s migration history has produced one of the most ethnically diverse nations in the world, but this has presented challenges for educational equity. The introduction of multiculturalism in the 1970s coincided with an increasing focus on structural inequities in education. In this essay, we examine the context of changing educational policies and programs over the last half century, arguing that there has not been a steady process of reform involving measures redressing various inequalities but a period of policy turbulence. We consider the impact of the competing logics of multiculturalism—incorporation, recognition, civility—upon educational policy and practice to argue that, together with the consequences of neoliberal reforms, the equitable delivery of multiculturalism in schools has proved challenging. We conclude that multicultural education must refocus on the critical capacities that teachers and students alike need to understand the cultural complexities of a globalized world.