Ignorant By Design

Chart on Study Findings
Originally uploaded by Kelly Cooper.

Monsieur Stiggie brought this article to my attention, which lays out a fairly grim portrait of the level of enthusiasm for the first amendment among our nation's youth. The conclusion of the study in question seems to be that, "Schools don't do enough to teach the First Amendment. Students often don't know the rights it protects". Of course, every so often somebody decides to fund a study on the intellectual wherewithal of high school students. There's nothing unusual in that, nor in the alternately hilarious and panic-inducing results. Generally, people who like to feel smart will dust off old studies (or create new ones) to prove that some shocking percentage of high school kids have no idea what state they live in, or who George Washington was. What is often ignored in these studies, however, is that high school kids have never known all that much about the world - that's why they're in school. That said, there's a revealing statistic in the study nonetheless (albeit one that mainly reinforces what we already know):

Newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories. [51% of Students Agree, 80% of Principals Agree]

Students should be allowed to report controversial issues in their student newspapers without the approval of school authorities. [58% of Students Agree, 24% of Principals Agree]

See? While the students are pretty uniformly wishy-washy, the principals have a crystal-clear sense of proprietary power. That's what growing up will get you: not utilitarian wisdom, but a Machiavellian sense of how to manipulate your inferiors.