Knight Foundation Column

Journalism education crucial
to respect of First Amendment

By Dennis Cripe, IHSPA executive director

News Flash: The majority of high school students assign little or no value to the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment and the main reason may be a lack of good journalism programs that teach democratic values.

Headlines last week over a study of 112,000 students in 544 highs schools called the results “surprising” especially when these same young men and women may be asked to risk their lives fighting for concepts they don’t understand or often agree with.

While this revelation may be surprising for many, journalism teachers across the country might be forgiven a collective, “we told you so.” The exhaustive survey by the Knight Foundation adds that, “too many students have little access to journalism programs that teach the value of constitutional rights of free expression.”

Since the Supreme Court decided in 1988 to limit First Amendment rights of high school students and allow principals the power to censor most student expression, the role of journalism in today’s school curriculum has deteriorated rapidly. School officials given to authoritarian rule anyway quickly seized the Hazelwood case to justify censorship of student publications for reasons often beyond the Court’s intent.

It’s prophetic to consider the words of Justice Brennan who wrote in his dissenting opinion 17 years ago that the Hazelwood decision “would undermine the respect children would have for a diversity of ideas that is fundamental to the American system.” The real tragedy lies with the mixed message schools send to students who study the U.S. Constitution in a history class but can’t practice these same ideals on their own school publications.

But none of these arguments are new and even in the light of the Knight survey, it’s unlikely school officials will suddenly begin supporting journalism programs they routinely have censored. Hazelwood is less the illness and more a symptom of a larger concern made worse by the massacre of students at Columbine High School and the events of 9/11.

The public’s concern that the world is out of control prompts Americans to shore up the framework of our institutions. Ellen Goodman, a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group, wrote that, “Anxiety about the future, that vague sense of the national slippage and hard times ahead, gets reflected in a mandate to shape up the young.”

Though I’ve fought for a free and responsible student press for more than 30 years, I understand the pressures on today’s administrators to “run a tight ship” out of concern for student safety. I can’t help but applaud Joe Clark’s highly publicized story of school reform. Clark, the former principal at Paterson New Jersey’s tough Eastside High School, whipped this underachieving, dangerous school into shape with a bullhorn and baseball bat. I can empathize with principals who want power over the messages going to the young, especially in their own schools.

But as a citizen, I wonder about how easily we dispatch the values of a free society in exchange for control. How quickly we embrace authoritarian habits. And our ambivalence appears to be undermining a generation of young people who may be our first line of defense against an enemy who despise American values and the free exchange of ideas that fuels democracy.

Journalism in the high school curriculum may occasionally irritate school officials and mistakes in print can seem irreversible. But when those same school officials hire qualified journalism teachers and allow them to do their jobs, our young people are afforded an opportunity to experience what Justice Brennan called “a living reality, not parchment preserved under glass.”

This “living reality” is achieved, I believe, in three critical ways when free and responsible journalism programs are part of a school’s curriculum:

• Journalism makes learning real. Journalism students learn early on to stand behind what they say. They learn from synthesizing words and pictures –making sense of the visual and verbal aspects of the story -- and allowing others to respond. This “test of publication” is unique among academic disciplines.

• Journalism mirrors liberal arts education. Journalism students aren’t learning for the future. They are learning for the “now.” Good stories need a meaningful context. To provide this, student reporters must weave into their factual presentation background information that requires knowledge of history, the sciences, sociology, fine arts or economics. Good journalism requires a broad knowledge of the world and each story is a test of what a student understands about the larger world.

• Journalism is a great exercise in democracy. The school is a microcosm of the larger society. This scholastic world is complete with its own political and social structure. It is here students learn about the bureaucracy and how things get done. It is here students form their first attitudes about leadership and how authority, power and position are handled. It is here students decide if democracy is a living reality or “a parchment preserved under glass.”

School administrators who deem the cost of a free and responsible student press too “risky” might consider the cost of denying students these opportunities. The best high schools when they work are a lot like adolescence. They’re a place of transition from childhood to citizenship, a time when the controls are handed over.

When three of four high school students in this country have no feeling about the First Amendment, maybe its time for schools to get serious about producing graduates who are equally ready to be good citizens.

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