Column by Emily Cedargren

Last Monday Mark Goodman delivered the State of the First Amendment Address to share what all those in the audience expected to hear: the First Amendment is not only essential to the United States, but also that as today’s student journalists’ rights are dying, so is the freedom of the people of our country.

As far back as the founding of our country, freedoms, especially those defined in the first amendment have been something our country has prided itself upon, but recently we are letting them waste away and moreover our courts are redefining laws in ways that prevent the amendment from fulfilling its purpose.

Anyone with knowledge of journalism history knows of the landmark cases Tinker v Des Moines and Hazelwood v Kuhlmeier. These are cases that resulted first in affirming that students retain their rights in school and then endorsing schools efforts to censor, a right that schools push to the limits today.

Educators are “teaching high school students to disregard fundamental American values,” Goodman said, “creating a generation that values these fundamentals no more than our government on occasion.” With censorship and prior review as commonplace, modern students do not understand what the first amendment really means nor what protection it provides.

As one student told Goodman during his tenure at the Student Press Law Center, “at my school, the First Amendment was a joke.”

Furthermore, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation conducted a survey that Goodman referred to which stated that only 51 percent of students felt that newspapers should be able to publish without government approval, and 21 percent felt they knew too little about the First Amendment to even offer an opinion.

It is figures such as these that show the true state of the First Amendment, a state that terrifies me. As of now, we can still criticize our government and for the most part write what we want. However, with the upcoming generations so woefully unaware of their rights it seems conceivable that these rights could easily be snuffed out without notice or concern. And this situation sounds alarmingly like that in China.

After living in China, a country with no basic rights, for the past two years, I am almost used to not being allowed to criticize the regime or access government information. Web sites like YouTube were blocked when any controversial news was posted, such as about the situation in Tibet. Currently, Facebook is blocked.

Any typical high school or college student living in China knows different proxy web sites to navigate around these blocks, making them no problem. However a second look at this blocking of basic social information, where the U.S. could be headed without our first amendment, is shocking.

The Chinese government chooses any and all information it will share with its people and works hard to prevent anyone from finding out anything hidden.

The scariest part of all is that China is now in a time where the vast majority of people living in the country have only ever lived under communist rule: a life with little or no basic rights.

Because of this, they do not even know what to fight for. In fact, in the past, the Chinese government would prevent their students from studying abroad because few wanted to return making it even more difficult for the Chinese to learn what life is like outside their borders.

I’m not saying the U.S. is becoming communist, and I’m not saying that China is a bad place; in fact I loved living there. Rather, I am pointing out that our students, and future generations, are being mistaught and misinformed in a country which values ensuring its people’s basic rights. Because children do not understand what protection they should have, they would not know if this protection was infringed or taken away.

What if someday there was a generation of Americans that never knew what it was like to be able to speak out against the president? Or access what information they want, be it government or school records, or a social networking site?

The possibility of losing Facebook would certainly send up red flags in any college students’ mind and in the minds of plenty of Americans, however we accept our First Amendment rights being infringed upon. If we keep accepting this then before we know it those rights will be gone. It is simply a call to action that the citizens of the U.S. need to stand up for our rights and make sure that we keep the government, and our school administrators in line, so that we don’t lose our rights before we even know what we’ve lost.