Finished
Via Eschaton, a “survey, conducted by researchers at the University of Connecticut,” finds that high school students not only are not familiar with the protections the First Amendment provides, but when told of the full text they didn’t like it so much.
From the MSNBC article:
Yet, when told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three high school students said it goes “too far” in the rights it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories.
“These results are not only disturbing; they are dangerous,” said Hodding Carter III, president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which sponsored the $1 million study. “Ignorance about the basics of this free society is a danger to our nation’s future.”
The students are even more restrictive in their views than their elders, the study says.
When asked whether people should be allowed to express unpopular views, 97 percent of teachers and 99 percent of school principals said yes. Only 83 percent of students did.
Where are the right’s shouts of fascist academia? Ah yes, in the grand scheme of things, those conservobots really do want a police state where they can monitor your obscene material consumption and “shoot to kill” when someone burns a flag in protest. I’m sure we won’t see any peep out of our handy defenders of FREEDOM and ~LIBERTY, i.e., Mr. Hannity and Mr. O’Reilly.
Maybe those kids deserve the trillions of national debt and putrified environment that the current lot would like to leave them with. Then, with rose-colored goggles on, they can decry the ways the libruls of the late 90’s helped to poison the sky and spend, Spend, SPEND that surplus. If the press hasn’t changed by then, I’m sure no one will pipe up with the truth. George Orwell, how did you know?
–whazz on