I think freedom of speech only works in a well educated, rational society.

Indeed, that seems to have been Plato's view.

Can there be such a society without massive censorship to start off with (cf. the Republic)? ... The idea being that in order to have a population who are well educated and supremely rational, you'd have to censor what they have access to as children so that they have good, non-corrupted souls (characters).

Is education impossible without censorship? A curriculum contains some things you must see and hear, but does it matter what else you see and hear? Don't we think children can be taught to discriminate between truth and falsehood? Even that, in order to understand the distinction one must encounter it in the world.

It's not that there are things which nobody ought to see or hear.

It's that undue and unreasonable weight might be given to things which ought not to be believed on a wide scale.

It's that the natural path for unregulated expression might not be incremental enlightenment, as the ideal goes, but instead, just noise, or worse, aggregated, consolidated pan-societal ignorance.

Just as the belief that unchecked capitalism will naturally bring about a fairer society is probably a little naive.

Corrupt and false ideas are eventually sifted into the appropriate pile, where they lose their power and become lessons in what not to believe.

I've completely lost faith in this axiom. Not in our society of fools. How could we expect our conference of braying apes ever to refine itself in its own wasteful din?

At any rate, repressed ideas take on the glamor of a force that may yet prevail, if only it would be allowed to take the field in a fair fight.
This may be true of properly repressed ideas. But not of ideas crushed in a highly visible public process, limited and defined by legal parameters.

This is probably a good example of a difference between European and American sensibilities. Americans would never tolerate being forbidden to preach a certain line. Being crazy is considered a right. Even as we mock crazies we feel a certain warm glow because their public craziness is the guarantee that controversial content cannot be suppressed easily. (edited)

Edit: The specter of a public "destruction" of an idea only conjures, in my mind, the immediate upsurge of a movement claiming to be the resistance, to have been oppressed, to be carrying the real truth, etc. I feel like this is self-evident, but maybe this is cultural prejudice.

My anxiety about the regulation of speech has to do with losing the ability to call an idea bankrupt without having then to defend its regulation (if it is, indeed, so ridiculous as I have claimed); and also with preventing the regulation of speech from being politicized, against which I see no natural barrier.

Clarification: In the last paragraph it would have been clearer to say that the regulation of ideas will frustrate and make more difficult the efforts of public-minded, thoughtful people to informally regulate them by engaging them. As an intellectual I feel like saying, "Back off, politicos. Let me do my job."

Maybe the phrase I have been searching for is that we feel ideas deserve the right to cross-examine their detractors. Suppression of an idea means only the detractors get to point out to us how they're wrong, and those who would answer these arguments are hamstrung by the law.

'Censorship' is a muddy concept. It isn't just neglect of an idea by public officials when individuals could access, discuss, and promote that idea on their own without fear of reprisal. It also doesn't have anything to do with what is or is not taught in schools. Schools, like public fora (e.g. town hall meetings) face constraints on time and attention that place practical limits on what can and cannot be covered. (This, in particular, is why agenda-setting is so important for political purposes.)

That a topic never gets discussed in schools or in public fora doesn't necessarily mean that it is being suppressed. It could simply mean that the idea did not make it past the "triage"-like process used to decide the curriculum or the agenda. So long as there is free access to the idea, no fear of reprisal for accessing it or discussing it in public settings, no legally sanctioned harassment of the idea's originators or partisans, then I don't think censorship is happening.

I do think it is important to push for good ideas, and to push against lousy ones. Like Zero I don't have a lot of faith that "truth will out" in the political sphere. I think more often than not truth dies a quiet death in back alleys, suffocated with saran wrap by ideologically and commercially motivated media-thugs and pitch-men. That means that the pressure is on the people to get the spotlight on the ideas that they think ought to matter. The pressure is on educators not to push any particular party line, but to make sure students get the critical thinking skills necessary to know the difference between an argument and a sales pitch, and leave school with the intellectual ability and intestinal fortitude necessary to call bullsh*t on anything like the latter.

td