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Why a diminished regard for the First Amendment?

By Philip Meyer

Every organized society, from the most libertarian to the totally repressive, shares one goal: raising its children to believe in its institutions and ideology. If our values matter, they need to be passed on.

It's getting harder to do.

One of the problems is the breakup of mass media that has been taking place since World War II. They are being replaced by many specialized messages aimed at small, targeted audiences.

My generation grew up reading the same newspapers and listening to the same news broadcasts that our parents heeded. Advertisers today have created a cacophony of entertainment for teenagers that distracts them from the world's serious side.

Two political scientists at the University of Connecticut surveyed high school students in 2004 and '06 and made an alarming discovery: Regard for the First Amendment to the Constitution declined between the surveys.

Did you know?

I'm sure you know everything that's in the First Amendment, but the next person to pick up this newspaper might not, so here is the list. The guarantees are:

Freedom of religion.
Freedom of speech.
Freedom of the press.
The right of the people to peaceably assemble.
The right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Four out of five high school students felt they knew enough to give opinions on this 215-year-old list of rights. And among them, 55% thought the First Amendment goes too far in granting rights.

That's a turnaround from two years ago, when 57% expressed support for the First Amendment and its enumerated rights.

This reversal is so surprising that you want to find a flaw in the question wording or the methodology. But they were big samples: more than 100,000 in 2004 and nearly 15,000 in '06. The question was in a self-administered form that replicated the wording of the amendment and reminded students that it "became part of the U.S. Constitution more than 200 years ago."

The researchers, David Yalof and Kenneth Dautrich, are old hands at studying attitudes toward the First Amendment. They started focusing on young people with a grant from the Knight Foundation.

The decline in support for the First Amendment as a whole came despite an apparent increase in the number of students taking high school classes that cover First Amendment issues: 72% in 2006 vs. 58% two years ago. Dautrich acknowledges that some of that could be testing effect. All 34 of the high schools in the second survey had participated in the first, and that might have motivated them to teach the First Amendment before Round 2.

Even so, Dautrich believes a stronger factor is the national debate on security vs. liberty. Teachers who relate their lessons to the news can find more reasons to bring up the First Amendment.

He also agrees with David Mindich, author of Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don't Follow the News, that high schools have reduced the time devoted to teaching civics. If colleges would make civics courses an entrance requirement, that might change.

Music, on the other hand

Meanwhile, we can take small comfort in the fact that a bare majority of high school students, 54% (up from 51% in 2004), believes that newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of a story. They are more interested, however, in freedom for raunchy music: 69% agreed that "musicians should be allowed to sing songs with lyrics that others might find offensive."

Maybe it's not so surprising when you figure that they spend more time listening to the songs than they do reading newspapers.

Hey, geezer, want to help? When you finish this newspaper, don't throw it away. Give it to some young person you know. Or, if you are reading this online, send the kid a hyperlink.

Philip Meyer is a Knight Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Research for his book The Vanishing Newspaper was supported by the Knight Foundation. Article taken from USA Today, 9-27-06.

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