U.S. Kids Don't Understand First Amendment

l4m3z0r writes "This rather alarming article discusses a study of high-school students in which they were asked about censorship, protected speech, and other aspects of the first amendment. The results are extremely worrisome: "Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories." and this "Three in four students said flag burning is illegal. It's not. About half the students said the government can restrict any indecent material on the Internet. It can't.".."

Comments

Re:Is it getting better, or worse?

[jrumney]

Inside me is a kneejerk activist who wants to point to this as evidence that growing up, as children have since 9/11/01, surrounded by authority figures who casually restrict freedom of speech in the name of guarding against terrorism, encourages children to pattern their thoughts and behavior along similar unfortunate lines.

But actually, I'd like to know what similar studies have been conducted in years past.

A large scale study was carried out in Germany, Japan and Italy in the 1930s and '40s. Whole nations patterned their thoughts and behaviour behind totally irrational megalomaniacs. More recently similar smaller scale studies have been carried out in Cambodia, North Korea and Microsoft, and one larger scale study in China has been going on for over fifty years now.