A recent survey of American high school students contained some shocking results. The two-year project, titled "The Future of the First Amendment," was conducted by researchers from the University of Connecticut. The study's findings, obtained from more than 100,000 students, indicate a bleak future for the First Amendment.
The survey found that 36 percent of students believe newspapers should get "government approval" of their stories before publishing, and 32 percent felt that the press enjoys "too much freedom." Only half of the students said newspapers should be able to act independently, without government restrictions.
The survey was not simply restricted to questions on freedoms of the press. After all, our First Amendment rights also include our freedoms of religion, assembly and speech. Unfortunately, our nation's youth proved equally uneducated on these freedoms as well. Three in four students said flag-burning is illegal (it's not, thanks to a Supreme Court decision in 1989). Half the students believe that the government can restrict material put on the internet (it can't). Yet a large majority of students said that musicians and others should be unfettered in their expressions of unpopular opinions.
Is this what our public education has come to? It is one thing to be guaranteed the right to free speech, but if three in four students believe that flag-burning is illegal, or that a blog post on the internet can be censored by the government, then these First Amendment rights are clearly in danger. Our nation's youth is about to graduate from 12 years of public education without a basic knowledge of their civil liberties - it's as if those rights were never there in the first place.
As a college student at Tufts, I am surrounded by peers who, I think, would agree when I say that the First Amendment, and the civil liberties it guarantees, is basic knowledge for young adults. Obviously, I was shocked when I learned that this was far from the truth. It should be as mandatory for students to learn about their rights as it is for them to learn about Math and English.
It is even more important to know your rights in a climate characterized by terrorism and a government's search for a proper response to it. With the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act in the weeks after Sept. 11, the administration wrought some fundamental changes to Americans' legal rights. The government may now monitor religious and political institutions without suspecting criminal activity. The government can also investigate your reading and research habits and monitor your internet traffic and email communications without furnishing probable cause that you are involved in criminal or terrorist activity. Furthermore, the government has placed gag orders on librarians and other school officials which prevent them from disclosing that they have been ordered to reveal your records.
The Bill of Rights guarantees us a right to a speedy and public trial. However, the PATRIOT Act allows the government to jail Americans indefinitely without charging them with a crime or granting them a trial. In the weeks and months after Sept. 11, over 700 Arab immigrants were unjustly imprisoned and unable to contact a lawyer, or even their families; many of them were never charged.
Most recently, in response to a legal challenge mounted on behalf of prison detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Judge Joyce Green wrote that "although this nation unquestionably must take strong action under the leadership of the commander in chief to protect itself against enormous and unprecedented threats, that necessity cannot negate the existence of the most basic fundamental rights for which the people of this country have fought and died for well over 200 years."
After reading the Judge's decision, I felt even more appalled at the results of the recent survey. How great a dishonor to those men and women who fought the battles years ago, to have a whole generation of Americans, of kids our age, not even know of our "basic fundamental rights." Would the illegal actions of the Nixon administration have ever been exposed if not for freedom of the press? Would the Civil Rights movement have achieved so much if not for freedom of assembly? Someday, kids of our generation may find an equally important cause. It is the nation's responsibility to educate its youth on these rights, so that when the time comes, they too can bring about change peacefully and contribute to the ever-evolving future of this country.
James Gerber is a freshman who has not yet declared a major.
