Citizens in training: young people don't care much about government. But some groups are out to change that.
State Legislatures › Vol. 29 Nbr. 7, July 2003
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Citizens in training: young people don't care much about government. But some groups are out to change that.
In Barbara Dupre's seventh grade language arts class, the students have decided that it was OK for a neo-Nazi group to march through a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Skokie, Ill., in the late 1970s.
They also decided that anti-gay demonstrators at the funeral of Matthew Sheppard, a young man who was murdered in 1998 because of his sexual orientation, was an expression of freedom of speech. "It may have been in really bad taste," remarks student Jade Rivera-Armendarez of the funeral protestors, "but no one has the right to tell someone else they can't say what they feel." This youthful tolerance even extends to the remarks of a World War II veteran who told one of the students that, if it were up to him, he would not allow people to protest the United States war in Iraq. "I tried to understand his point of view," says student Kyle Mathewson. "He fought in a war and has a different perspective. Even though I disagreed with him, I thought he had a right to say what he said." If the students at Jefferson Middle School near the University of New Mexico campus in Albuquerque seem particularly intelligent and insightful for seventh graders, it's because they are. But if they also seem s...See the full content of this document
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