This is old news, but it’s new to me (which just shows how out of it I am!). Back in January the Knight Foundation published a study of over 100,000 US high school students which found that these kids (who will be in my classes over the next several years) didn’t understand the basic U.S. constitutional guarantees of freedom and (perhaps worse) really didn’t care a whole lot. Over 1 in 3 felt “the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees”, which doesn’t bode well for the rest of us. As Knight Foundation President and CEO Hodding Carter III said
These results are not only disturbing; they are dangerous. Ignorance about the basics of this free society is a danger to our nation’s future.
Subsequent analysis of the data also suggests that comfortable suburban kids were “less appreciative of the First Amendment” than their rural and urban counterparts. While depressing, this isn’t totally surprising. Sadly, it’s not obvious that Our Fearless Leader would find any of this to be cause for concern.
Today we (largely) enjoy the freedom of the Internet and I can ramble on about things that strike my fancy without, for example, worrying (overly) about the implications of criticizing the government. We’d best hope, though, that these kids come to better appreciate some of these freedoms before they run the show. This Knight Foundation is obviously thinking along similar lines, as they’ve set up FirstAmendmentFuture.org specifically to address these kinds of concerns.
As a simple step, I might suggest an idea my wonderful mother brought up last year (when we were still reeling from the disappointment of the ’04 election): Read the Bill of Rights out loud as part of your Thanksgiving celebration. It’s a fine and wonderful thing to celebrate and give thanks for (a whole lot better than a striped piece of cloth), and reminding ourselves what those amendments actually say and mean in our lives can’t be a Bad Thing. Conveniently, they’re mostly quite short, so getting through them no problem. If memory serves, we got so into it last year that we went through the entire set of Constitutional amendments, not just the first 10. And this with WeatherGirl not even being a U.S. citizen or growing up with Thanksgiving as a holiday! :-)
(This all assumes you’re in the U.S. and do this whole Thanksgiving thing, of course. If you’re not or don’t, then I still recommend reading the Bill of Rights, though, as it’s a fine little document. I’m all for exporting [and importing!] ideas, I just prefer not to do it at gunpoint.)
I seem to remember that this resident space alien was the one who had the idea of reading the US Bill of Rights at our UN-thanksgiving meal. We even wrote a letter to the editor encouraging our neighbours to do something similar.
We’ll do the same this year. Perhaps we should add Magna Carta to the mix too?
OK, so I’m not completely clear on the specific chain of events (thus calling into question everything I post…). I’m pretty sure this all started because my Mom had takent to reading the Bill of Rights to some of her friends because they clearly didn’t know what it said. (Thus suggesting that the problems in the Knight report aren’t limited to kids, but also extend to educated, upper-middle class adults.) Now that Our Resident Alien brings it up, though, I’m not sure whose idea it was to read the Bill as part of our Thanksgiving celebrations. We (mostly WeatherGirl) did write a cool letter to the paper, though, which it might be fun to reprint if we can find a copy. There wasn’t much response to it, though, so I’m not convinced we changed the world, but it was still worth the try :-).
I like the idea of including some relevant highlights of the Magna Carta in the event, since it’s obviously a crucial pre-cursor to important parts of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. I should also point out that the Wikipedia article on the U.S. Bill of Rights (which I forgot to link to above) is quite useful for this sort of activity. Their more general article on “Bill of Rights” is also useful and has pointers to articles on number of related documents, including the Magna Carta, the Virginia Bill of Rights, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Reminds me of a casual conversation I was having with a colleague in which I mentioned that the Bill of Rights provided some protection for everybody, even middle-aged-white-guys-from-Wisconsin. He wasnt sure. I reminded him that he had guns, and I wasnt required to go to church on Sunday.
The light bulb did go on. For that I give thanks (pun intended).
It’s disturbing to think how a country whose government requires all of its citizens to attend school until the age of 18, don’t know the basic rules put down by said government. I’m proud to say that even though my high school was very poorly funded, they made sure we all read the Bill of Rights at least once. Let’s just cross our fingers and hope that those too jaded to care about our right to free speech also don’t care enough to vote.