For high school seniors, walking at graduation can be a moment of great pride. But Mikala Bartson didn’t walk.

Miss Bartson was barred from Fremont Ross High School’s commencement for an act of civil disobedience. The administration, she said, hypocritically touted the value of individuality while denying opportunities for students to express themselves.

In particular, she was displeased that the custom of featuring senior quotes in the yearbook had been abolished. The student handbook bears out her broader point: In its “educational philosophy” section, it says, “Self-realization and self-expression are encouraged.”

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Miss Bartson’s mode of protest was to express herself in a way the school had prohibited: with paint on her graduation cap. The image she chose was Katsushika Hokusai’s famous The Great Wave off Kanagawa. “It represented power,” she said.

For engaging in an act expressly prohibited by school officials, Miss Bartson was denied the event of her graduation — the walk. She was not, of course, denied her diploma, which she had earned in any case.

Was Miss Bartson treated unjustly? No. Schools have to have rules and people who make and enforce them, even if the rules and the rulers are not terribly intelligent.

Miss Bartson engaged in the fine old American tradition of civil disobedience, and, in the spirit of that tradition, took her lumps. Protest isn’t free. Nor should it be.

Being willing to accept the price of dissent is part of what makes dissent noble and worthwhile. Martin Luther King, Jr., like St. Paul, wrote some of his most eloquent words from jail.

First Published June 20, 2017, 10:16 p.m.