THERE'S NOTHING NEW HERE. U.S. students say press freedoms go too far.

One in three U.S. high school students say the press ought to be more restricted, and even more say the government should approve newspaper stories before readers see them, according to a survey being released today.

(Via Villainous Company.) Mitch at Shot in the Dark rounds up the usual suspects.

The temptation is to say "thanks for nothing, liberals - your speech codes and a monolithically leftist educational academy and education system have finally done what the right has been warning you about for decades; created a generation of students that have no idea about this country's civic traditions, beyond an ability to regurgitate key facts about the civil rights movement.

I suspect that if students knew the key facts about the civil rights movement forward and backward, the hip-hop culture would wither and die.

On the other hand, surveys of citizen attitudes have for a long time revealed discomfort with the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. During the 1960s, the "whiff of fascism" (with genuine fascism still too real a memory for most of the population) manifested itself in surveys, often breathlessly hyped in collegiate American Government texts, suggesting widespread misidentification of the aforementioned documents as so much Communist propaganda.

Yes, there are problems with the way the common schools do things. But providing fertile soil for fascism?