Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
by Steven M. Andrews
It’s easy to be apathetic when you’re young. Why worry about the future of Social Security when you’re not even employed? Why bother to worry about the estate tax when you’re not even out of high school? Or, as a recent poll showed is a growing trend amongst teenagers, why bother to learn about the First Amendment to the Constitution at all?
A survey of nearly 100,000 students, which was conducted by researchers at the University of Connecticut in 2004, gave some alarming answers to questions concerning not only what students know about the First Amendment, but how they feel about it in general, according to CNN. More than one in three of the students felt that the amendment went “too far” in its promise of guaranteed rights.
This statistic is alarming to me not only as a newspaper editor, but also as an American. The right to have a free press and be able to publicly express your opinion is the most powerful right we have in this country. People have the unalienable right to be as educated as they want, which includes reading everything that newspapers can legally publish. There is no reason that a government should be able to censor it and limit the spread of knowledge when the media is within their rights. The only reason an organization would want to prevent truthful information from spreading is because they fear it and fear the repercussions of public knowledge.
It seems that this idea is foreign to high school students. Half of those surveyed said that the government should have the right to approve newspaper stories before they are published. On the other hand, ninety-nine percent of the school principals polled responded that people should have the right to express unpopular ideas, and only 83 percent of students agreed. For a generation that has been raised on the Internet, a bastion of free trade and information, the idea that they would approve of this massive censorship is perplexing.
I think the reason that people feel so apathetic is because they rarely have their First Amendment rights challenged. The poll backs this up, as students who worked in media organizations such as newspapers or television supported the amendment more than others. I think that teenagers see their rights of speech and religion as so basic and intrinsic that they don’t even realize that people had to fight and die to put them in place. Not only do people not recognize its protections, they undervalue it. The schools polled said that they think the indifference is a result of too little education about the amendments.
This is evident right here on Fairfield’s campus, where people are completely disinterested in the school’s government as a result of knowing very little about it. Apathy is a dangerous condition. If you don’t support a free press which can disseminate knowledge and spread the truth about issues you would otherwise know nothing about, you lose out on one of the very best parts of living in this country.
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