Educators, duty, and the Obama back-to-school speech - Viscommed
By Jack ZiblukI was a little surprised when my fourth-grade daughter brought a note home from school from the principal informing us that the school will not show to Obama address.
The principal said she was getting a lot of calls about the address. It's a Catholic school, so I wasn't worried about church-state issues. We send Kate there for an education on values, we send her for the highest academic standards in our city, and I admit it, we send her there because the parents are mostly educated professionals and their children are smart, disciplined, well mannered and respectful. The school expels bullies. It's a good environment, in general.
So I was a little taken aback when the principal said the Obama address had become an issue. It was, to me a non-issue, and it should remain one. But it seems to be an issue that's growing in our national consciousness.
I also attended my senator's "town hall" meeting on health care Friday and it was as surly and hateful as one would expect.
I wondered what for a time what all this has to do with me, journalism educator, at first. But I realized today it’s about the whole philosophical concept of free speech and the First Amendment. I believe it's a "teachable moment," and we will discuss it in my FYE (Freshman year experience for the journalism dept.) class.
We'll talk about rights and responsibility. Yes, the rude people are indeed correct when they claim the First Amendment protects their actions and expressions. Free speech protects the right to be hateful and ignorant, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld that right.
However, Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said there is no right to scream "fire" in a crowded theater. There is a wide range of expression in between screaming fire and the discourses of Plato's Republic.Rights carry with them responsibilities. The whole point of free speech in a democracy, from Plato onward, is to express different viewpoints in a reasonable matter in order to head off conflicts and to come up with compromises. The practical point of free speech is to come up with the best, if imperfect, answers in a diverse democratic society. For that democratic society to work, free speech needs to be informed and respectful, even when it is passionate.
When you reduce it to a shouting match, volume trumps ideas. And that's dangerous. In 1923, a group of angry Germans, including many WWI veterans, started to break up town meetings in Bavaria with shouts and eventually violence. One of their leaders was jailed after such a disturbance. During his confinement, the former army corporal wrote an angry book much in the same tone of Ann Coulter or Glenn Beck. The author became a media star, and upon his release, a politician. The book, of course, was "Mein Kampf," and the author was Adolph Hitler.
So when Obama is compared to Hitler, the comparison fails on a hundred levels. The real analogue is Paul von Hindenburg, the German president who accommodated the Nazis and looked the other way, until he was replaced.
What does this have to do with journalism education? In a sense very little, but in a greater sense, it has everything to do with it.
Jack
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John B. (Jack) Zibluk, Ph.D.
Associate professor,
Arkansas State University
Department of Journalism
P.O. Box 1930
State University, AR 72467
(H) 870-931-1284
(W) 870-972-3075
(cell) 870-219-3328
http://www.clt.astate.edu/jzibluk2Tags: Obama, education, in, journalism, politics, school, schools, speech
