Scariest survey I've read in a long time.

[Ghoulish Delight]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6888837/

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.

[BarTopDancer]

Oy. :(

[Motorboat Cruiser]

That is very frightening.

[scaeagles]

Yikes.

[NirvanaMan]

Yikes! That is really scary. I hope that maybe it is just a reflection of their opinion regarding the irresponsibility of most mass media outlets? I hope? Yeah I know...I doubt it too. I guess when schools teach that certain ammendments are to be ignored as irrelevant in this day and age, the whole document goes into question. Or perhaps..they are just kids f'ing with a stupid survey.

:)

[Cadaverous Pallor]

:mad:

Grrr.

[scaeagles]

I've thought a bit about this.

I have long been of the opinion that the history of our great country is not taught well or at all. I do not believe the average Jr HS or HS student has any idea what sacrifices were made by those who colonized our country or why they did; they have no idea what the founders and signers of the Declaration risked or why they thought it important enough; they have no concept of why the common man would become a "minute man" and fight against the well trained British; they have no idea why our involvement in WWII was vital and what the Axis represented; they have no idea what living under tyranny means in theory or even by examples in our surrent world. This is a failure of the education system. I am not trying to criticize the individual teachers, but rather those who are in charge of selection of curriculum (sp?).

When it is forgotten from whence our country was founded and why the rights guaranteed in our constitution (by being a restriction on government - the constitution specifically says it is not an enumeration of rights) are unique in the world, then our country is doomed.

It saddens me greatly.

[Motorboat Cruiser]

I've been thinking about this story all morning, as well. I shudder to think that these same kids will be voting in a few short years.

I can't blame the teachers. I really think that, in most circumstances, they do the best they can with what they are given to work with. I'm not even sure who to blame but I do know that we do not take education seriously enough in this country. We are failing our kids.

[SacTown Chronic]

One thing to consider is that these are high school students. This means, for many of them, that George Bush is the one in power as they become active politically, or as they begin to pay attention to the world around them.

We have a president who treats the constitution like it was written in chalk on a blackboard -- to be changed on his whim. We have a president who argues that he should be allowed to hold people indefinitely without charging them or providing them access to legal counsel. We live in a climate where you cannot question the president's policies or the war in Iraq without being called unpatriotic, or worse, told that you hate America.

It's not surprising to see our young people disregard the rights guaranteed to us by the constitution. They are just taking their cue from the powers that be.

[Motorboat Cruiser]

You make a lot of good points, Sac.

[Cadaverous Pallor]

Both Sac and scaeagles make excellent points. I agree with both of them.

[scaeagles]

I fail to see the relevance of Sac's post. How many HSers do you think pay attention to politics? Not enough to make any difference whatsoever. Rather, form their opinions on what they are exposed to on a daily basis. What are they exposed to on a daily basis? That is the question that needs to be answered. I don't think I know.

When I was in HS during the Reagan years, I was completely uninterested in politics until I went to a reelection rally in Sacramento in 1984 for Reagan. I did not have friends who really knew anything or ware concerned about political happenings. Perhaps I am the exception.

So....what are HSers exposed to daily? School. MTV and the like. Video games. The mall. Sports or band practice. You think they're watching CNN or the Fox news channel? The cause is not information on current political happenings. It is a lack of historical knowledge.

[Claire]

Hhhmmm, I have an idea. Let's up the voting age to 32. Because no one pays attention to politics til they're 32. ;)

I agree that high schoolers aren't taught enough about U.S. History, world/current events or politics, but it doesn't mean that across the board that they are not interested. It's just assumed that they aren't, and then they're not exposed to it.

[Cadaverous Pallor]

I was very interested in politics in high school. I considered a career in political journalism. I nearly started a debate club. My friends always talked politics, even those that weren't in the highest of classes. I thought that students that weren't up on the issues of the day were idiots, and didn't really make friends with any.

I did take AP US History though, and that was an absolutely life-altering class for me. I give all the credit for that to my teacher, who truly fostered independent thinking. We had a textbook and two other texts that we studied, one liberal sided, one conservative. For every section, we compared and contrasted how each author treated the topic. We questioned all motives and debated everything.

Every student deserves such fantastic teaching, especially in such an important area.

I won't say that I was a standard student with regards to politics, but there were plenty of us around in the early 90's.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Even if individual students aren't interested in politics, the political environment shapes thought processes. It shapes what's taught in classrooms. Minimally, kids are exposed to it whent hey have to do a stupid current event report. No, they aren't all going to think about it and debate it extensively, but as an agragate, what's going on today does have an impact.

[SacTown Chronic]

So....what are HSers exposed to daily? School. MTV and the like. Video games. The mall. Sports or band practice. You think they're watching CNN or the Fox news channel? The cause is not information on current political happenings. It is a lack of historical knowledge.

But they are exposed to more politics than we ever were. CNN, Fox News, The Daily Show, MSNBC, web blogs, the internet itself, etc...this stuff is everywhere now. Combine the readily available political information with such earth-shattering events like 9/11 and the war in Iraq and you have the most politically aware teenage generation in forever. Maybe the highschoolers during the Vietnam War era were more politically active, but they didn't have the multimedia access to information that kids today enjoy.

[Motorboat Cruiser]

And as long as we are talking about the Constitution, it seems as a good a time as any to bring up homosexuality. :)

It's pretty easy to see that there is much more acceptance of gay students than there ever was when I was that age. Many high schools now even have gay/straight alliance clubs. My boyfriend was the president of the club at his high school and he tells me that being gay wasn't that big of a deal to anyone. That doesn't sound like the high school I went to.

Anyway, my point is that I'm sure that there were many students that took notice when George Bush proclaimed that there was an immediate need to change the Constitution to ensure that gay people may never have a state recognized marraige or civil union. It is the first time, to my knowledge, that a change to the Constitution has been proposed to exclude a group of people.

I would say that this is one example of how our youth see a disregard for this document from the leader of our nation.

[NirvanaMan]

Access and usage are two very different things. It was none too long ago that I was in HS. I was one of the only people in my class with any interest in politics despite easy access to CNN and the internet and the like. I was politically motivated by a president who, to me, was as frivilous with our precious civil liberties as guaranteed by the bill of rights as Bush is to most on this board. However, most around me did not care one way or the other.

Most people are busy going off and getting hammered and laid in HS. I was just a dork I guess. :(

[Prudence]

Here's my biased take on the matter:

I originally intended to be a history teacher -- high school level. But the teaching program at the state college (and not even one of the big names, just a regional state school) required a special application for anyone wanting to teach history. English lit? No problem. Math? Come right in. History/social studies? Fill out the 5 page questionnaire detailing your "multicultural experience." How racially mixed was your elementary school? How many non-European languages do you speak? In the words of Dave Berry, I am not making this up. "They," whomever "they" are, decided that they were not going to train white history teachers. (Apparently role models aren't as relevant in physics, as this wasn't across the board.) "They" wanted to train teachers who could provide a "more appropriate" view of "history."

I knew from my own high school years that the times, they were a-changin', but that was sort of slap in the face come the end of sophomore year at good ol' state school.

And how does that play out in the classroom? "They" are so concerned with making sure every group and subgroup gets their turn in the spotlight that the message is completely diluted. The basics of American and world history are ignored because they tended to involve white men. So rather than address why that is and move on with what those white men did, the white men are ignored for the comparatively trivial happenings of non-white or non-male people.

And inevitably at this point someone mounts their high horse and denounces me as a right-wing zealot. Which is fairly amusing, since most people who know me would be more likely to say knee-jerk liberal. (Including my father-in-law, who I think may have disowned me because my husband told him how I voted last election.)

So let me throw in an example using a class of people of whom I have some first-hand knowledge: women.

American lit class. And the new "revised" textbook has all sorts of self-congratulatory introductory crap about how enlightened it is and how it includes works by so many previously unpublished female authors. Do you know why many were previously unpublished? Because their writing was crap! Be honest and talk about schooling and social expectations for men vs. women. Highlight the few women who did succeed. Talk about women who published under male names. Heck, even throw in an example of the pulp nothings written by/for women to clarify the sociology. But don't fill college-level anthologies with crap just because you want to say that 30% of your content was written by females. How does this help? If anything, this reinforces the "women are crappy writers" thinking.

I was going somewhere with all of this.

Anyhow, I think the point I was trying to make is that curriculums -- at all levels -- are so watered down with trying to be representative of the infinite variety of humanity that the result is just mush.

And now I'm late for my public flogging.

[Prudence]

Urg. Curriculums? Curricula? I never took Latin.

[Cadaverous Pallor]

An amazingly informative post, Prudence. Thanks. I'm not surprised at all that crap, really. sigh :(

[DisneyFan25863]

Unfortunantly, at my school, it seems that both the students and the teachers agree with cutting our first amendment rights. I have a few friends on the newspaper staff, and they are always telling my how their teacher (who also is my English teacher) is silencing their opnions. Recently, for instance, they had an article that was slightly negative of how the school treated the band (which was written by someone in our band whos also on the staff). She spent a long time writing it, but as soon as the teacher saw it, he had her delete the parts which were negative, only leaving the stuff which said our accomplishments.


Its pretty sad :(

[Ghoulish Delight]

That's nothing new for school publications. It's a sticky combination of "minors don't have full rights" and "it represents the school, therefore the school gets final say." The same way a business would have the right to restrict what their employees published when representing the company. Of course, it gets muddy when you factor in that a public school is a government entity, however this isn't a law or legal enforcement, it's a policy issue that impacts the running of what's essentially a government business entity. It's not really the same thing as legislated or police-enforced 1st ammendment restrictions.

[Betty]

My history teachers were all so dry and boring. I recall the one guy who would wear short sleeved polyester suits in light blue (yes, really) and class always consisted of him copying the chapter word for word on the many chalkboards leaving blanks which we would then copy and fill in the blanks. That was it. Every day until test day which would be the same thing. Fill in the blanks... slightly different blanks but still. There was NO discussion at all. No understanding. Just copy and paste. Most boring class ever. Man did I dread it. With that sort of teaching by some teachers, it's no wonder that our youth isn't interested in history. Reading C.P.'s account of her history class, I know that I really missed out. It's a shame that all teachers aren't of that caliber.