Student journalists at the Dalton School, a tony private college prep academy on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, got a less than encouraging lesson about jounalistic independence last week when U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy gave a talk at their school. Writers and editors planned to cover the event in The Daltonian, the school newspaper, but when Justice Kennedy insisted on vetting anything they wrote before it appeared in print, the school ignominiously caved to his demands.

No  serious journalist worth his or her salt would agree to such terms, which amounts to giving the subject of an article veto power over its content. That's one of the first lessons aspiring journalists are supposed to learn: In a democracy, people in the news don't get to pick and choose who writes about them or to decide what makes it into print. Responsible journalism is about getting the facts straight and everyone's name spelled correctly, not about letting the people you cover tell you what you can and can't say.

We're saddened Dalton's aspiring journalists let themselves be cowed by the arrogance of power. Some of them are old enough to serve in the military defending this country's democratic values; surely they're old enough to write an account of Justice Kennedy's visit that doesn't require his approval.

We're disappointed, too, with Justice Kennedy, who on bench has been a champion of the First Amendment. Why in this case he seems not to have known better than to have made such an ill-conceived request is a mystery. True, Supreme Court justices need to pay close attention to how they are perceived by the public, and Mr. Kennedy may have felt he needed to correct any  inaccurracies in the students' account due to their inexperience. But it would have been better to have suffered a minor factual slip -- and later written a letter to the editor to correct it -- than to have trashed the nation's centuries-old tradition of a free press.

Finally, we're genuinely appalled that Dalton school officials apparently found nothing wrong with encouraging students to surrender their journalistic independence and integrity by ceding control of their story to the person they were writing about. (Neither Dalton head of school Ellen Stein nor The Daltonian's faculty advisor, Kevin Slick, returned phone calls on Wednesday requesting comment). If those are the lessons working on Dalton's student newspaper is supposed to impart, the school would probably be better off without it.