FIRST AMENDMENT LESSON PLAN INTRODUCTION

Since its founding over two hundred years ago, America has stood for the promise, if not always the practice, of freedom. On our best days, we are a nation committed to the revolutionary proposition that more freedom, not less, is the key to a vibrant, healthy, equitable democracy.

Central to that proposition is the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. More so than any other part of our shared national creed, the five freedoms of the First Amendment-- religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition-- define what it means to be an American. Properly understood and applied, they are the tools of democracy that allow us to expand the promise of freedom more fairly and fully to succeeding generations of Americans, and forge unity in the interest of our diversity, instead of at the expense of it.

Yet in January 2005, a national study, "The Future of the First Amendment", suggested that America's schools are leaving the First Amendment behind. Researchers funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation interviewed over 100,000 students, 8,000 teachers and 500 administrators at 544 high schools over the course of two years. Their purpose? "To determine whether relationships exist-- and, if so, the nature of those relationships-- between what teachers and administrators think, and what students know about the First Amendment."

Overall, the news is discouraging. In fact, write the study's investigators, "it appears that our nation's high schools are failing their students when it comes to instilling in them an appreciation for the First Amendment."

Among their findings:

  • Students lack knowledge and understanding about key aspects of the First Amendment. 73% say they don't know how they feel about it or that they take it for granted;
  • Students are less likely than teachers or principals to think that people should be allowed to express unpopular opinions;
  • The extent to which students are exposed to and involved with exercising their First Amendment freedoms has a direct impact on their attitudes and tolerance toward the First Amendment. Yet nearly 90% of the students polled do not participate in any media-related activities at school. Even worse, 3 in 10 administrators feel that student learning about media and journalism is "not a priority," and of the high schools that do not have a student newspaper, 40% have eliminated them within the past five years;
  • Perhaps most disturbing, more than a third of students think the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees.

These results would provide a cause for concern at any time in our history. Against the current backdrop of a war being waged both at home and abroad in the name of America's founding principles, they are particularly troubling.

But how much freedom should an open society-- and a public school-- allow? How can we learn to live with our deepest differences? And isn't the First Amendment part of the problem? After all, imagine almost any conflict in a school community-- dress codes, speech codes, school prayer, etc.-- and it's likely a First Amendment issue.

These are such delicate and incendiary subjects because they relate to notions of identity and conviction, issues about which people are least willing to compromise. But the end result needn't always be a lawsuit. It needn't mean turning the asylum over to the inmates, either. There is a difference, after all, between being authoritative and authoritarian.

To find common ground, communities must stop being reactive-- and start being proactive -- to First Amendment issues. That means creating consistent forums for open, respectful exchanges of ideas, it means encouraging students to encounter and analyze different perspectives, and it means teaching students to debate their differences respectfully and become more comfortable with the discomfort that accompanies a true marketplace of ideas.

In his 1983 book How to Speak, How to Listen, Mortimer Adler wrote: "The enforcement of [the First Amendment] may guarantee that public discussion of public issues goes on unfettered, but it does not and cannot ensure that the discussion is as good as it should be, either by the people's representatives in Congress or by the people themselves when they assemble for the purpose of political discussion. This cannot be secured by any constitutional enactment or any act of government. Improvement in the quality of public discussion and political debate can be achieved only by improvement in the quality of the schooling that the people as a whole receive."

That's where you come in.

The Knight Foundation's survey provides an important wake-up call-- and we must be willing to answer it. Otherwise, our tendency to take the First Amendment for granted will not just endanger the quality of our nation's schools-- it will endanger the future of our nation's experiment in liberty.

For these reasons, Channel One and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation offer the following series of First Amendment lessons-- "One Voice."

For more information about "The Future of the First Amendment" survey, visit this link.