Authoritarians

By Crispin Sartwell

The indifference and ignorance of high school students with regard to the First Amendment ≠ as revealed by a recent study by the Knight Foundation ≠ does not bode well for our future, if any, as a free society.

But it should surprise no one and has, I propose, a very direct cause. American children spend seven hours a day in authoritarian institutions.

If for example a student posts a placard on a school bulletin board expressing a controversial political position, or a criticism of the authorities, it will be treated the way such things were treated by the government of Mao Tse Tung at the height of the Cultural Revolution. In our public schools, unauthorized publications, even subversive t-shirts, are repressed with the same gusto that mullahs or military juntas bring to such tasks.

Indeed, according to the Student Press Law Center, censorship of student publications is at an all-time high. To pluck an example at random from todayπs news: an editor of Fullerton, CA, Troy High Schoolπs newspaper was removed for running a profile of two bisexual students. Surely most such cases are never reported.

And the justifications for this approach are, again, the same as those of any authoritarian regime: the maintenance of order, the creation via repression of a desirable environment: desirable, that is, for the authorities themselves.

And by the time they make their way through this system and are re-forged by it in its own image, posting subversive placards or printing unauthorized newspapers are activities that would never even occur to most children.

Students who have lived much of their lives in authoritarian environments, who have been formed as subjects of an autocracy, are ≠ unless they are of an unusually rebellious stripe - likely to be merely flummoxed by the idea of freedom of expression.

The public school is where the government and the child intersect and in that interaction the child has no free speech rights whatever. It would be odd for that child to conclude that the protection of First Amendment-style freedoms was a function of government. Indeed, the demonstration of the reverse is continual and completely convincing.

A public high school must be an odd place to learn American history or read the Constitution. The tales of our battles for freedom and the words of our Bill of Rights must appear as empty abstractions, exalted noise with no connection to reality.

Surely no school administrator could possibly expect any student to take seriously the words of a Thomas Paine or a Patrick Henry: that would entail the immediate destruction of the institution.

We can debate whether children should have constitutional rights, or which, or to what extent. Personally I would extend First Amendment rights to children without any qualification whatever, and I think the arguments against that position are pitiful.

But whether or not the Constitution applies to children, indoctrination in authoritarian institutions is no education for a free citizenry.

Crispin Sartwell teaches political philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA.