During the past week, the results of a recent study of student views on First Amendment rights was released and has produced some thought provoking material for faculty notice and classroom discussion. Notably, students were largely unaware of what rights were protected and, when informed, believed that these rights were too broad. Have the years from 9/11 distorted our fundamental beliefs? In proclaiming Homeland Security is the US rewriting the First Amendment? How to you believe adults would have reacted to the same questions?
Personally, this report is a red flag, a call for educators to take responsibility for putting Freedom of the Press into a historical perspective. In wartime and emergencies, it may seem expedient to limit personal freedoms. For a democracy to continue we must assure that in the long run, the constitutional foundations remain in place and represent a commonly held vision of our united beliefs.
On How Students Interpret the First Amendment
From a USA Today article by Greg Toppo (1/30/2005): "U.S. students say press freedoms go too far," reports a survey of First Amendment rights commissioned by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and conducted during the spring of 2004 by the University of Connecticut. It questioned 112,003 students, 327 principals and 7,889 teachers.
The students stated that: "36% believe newspapers should get "government approval" of stories before publishing; 51% say they should be able to publish freely; 13% have no opinion. Asked whether the press enjoys "too much freedom," not enough or about the right amount, 32% say "too much," and 37% say it has the right amount. Ten percent say it has too little."
Link to USA Today
While based on the same study, CNN provides a different emphasis on its interpretation of the data.
Link to CNN
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Hi Karolyn, I just recently had the students read a portion of Security versus Civil Liberties by Richard Posner. He quotes Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, "The Bill of Rights should not be made into a suicide pact." The point was that during a crisis, we should error on the side of security. The students speculated about crisis that can be "engineered" by the administration. The statistics Posner provides support the position that usually threats are downplayed. I bet I can speculate your opinion on this point.
Post a Comment