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Margaret Renkl: Student Journalists Reveal a Changing World. Let Them.

It wasn’t exactly news when a principal in Nebraska censored a high school newspaper,

canceled the school’s journalism program and abruptly disbanded its student newspaper. I

mean, it’s news news, but it’s not surprising news. Red state 1 bureaucrats and politicians have

been at war with the First Amendment 2 for a while now.

5 Even school officials’ reason for shutting down The Viking Saga, the award-winning 54-year-

old student paper at Northwest High School in Grand Island, Neb., wasn’t exactly a shock.

When the school principal announced a new edict requiring student journalists, including at

least three transgender staff members, to use bylines that match their legal names, the Saga

staff members responded in its June issue with two opinion pieces on L.G.B.T.Q. issues and

10 an article explaining the history of homophobia and the origins of Pride Month 3. [...]

Administrators at Northwest High School have offered no explanation for their decision to

disband the student newspaper and remove journalism from its curriculum, nor have they

provided a legitimate pedagogical reason for the administration’s action. Their real motivation

is clear anyway. [...]

15 The travesty at Northwest High School is only the latest episode in the increasing efforts to

censor student publications across the red states, particularly when students are writing about

L.G.B.T.Q. issues.

Even if you accept the argument that parents, not schools, ought to decide when and how

children should learn about gender issues, shutting down a high school newspaper in which

20 the writing and editing are done by the students makes no sense. Critical thinking and clear

communication are two of the chief skills that secondary schools are charged with teaching,

and the school newspaper is a crucial tool for cultivating both.

Student journalists practice formulating arguments and expressing them in written language.

They are obliged to recognize that different people hold different opinions, and they practice

25 listening closely, word for word, to what other people say. They learn how essential it is for

every word they write to be true. And they do it all in a real-world context that no ordinary class

assignment can approximate.

Working on my high school newspaper was the single greatest formative experience of my

writing life — never mind that I have a graduate degree in writing. Like most high school

30 students, I wasn’t a great writer, and some of the opinions I held then are opinions I repudiate

now. But writing for my school paper taught me the power of words. It taught me to respect

them and to be careful with them. I came to recognize their power in part because the adults

in charge of my school so often feared them.

The first time I got in trouble as a student journalist, it was for writing a poll designed to discover

35 how many teens in my high school were sexually active and in what ways. A poll of the student

body was a regular feature of the paper; each month English teachers distributed the printed

check-the-box questions, and each month I collected the answer sheets and tabulated the

results. But that month the principal confiscated the poll from the school copy machine and

refused to release it.

40 I still don’t know what that poll might have revealed, and neither does anyone else. But the

adults at my Bible Belt 4 school clearly expected it to be something they didn’t want to know

about teen sexuality in 1977.

Too many adults still don’t want to know what high school students really think about the world

they live in. Too many high school students have good reason not to want the adults in their

45 lives to know those things, either. Agreed-upon fictions can benefit both sides of a generational

divide.

What adults know about teenagers is only what teenagers choose to divulge. Parents may

believe their children aren’t having unprotected sex, aren’t drinking or experimenting with

drugs, aren’t struggling with thoughts of self-harm, aren’t driving too fast with eight other kids

50 piled in the car, aren’t cheating on tests, aren’t bullying somebody online and aren’t being

bullied [...] but they have no way of knowing for sure. Teenagers have always been able to

make themselves inscrutable.

It’s a time-honored tradition for parents to be terrified of the changing world their children will

one day lead, but student journalists are not the ones who created that world. Student

55 journalists are only reporting on it. Faithfully and fearlessly, they are showing us what they

observe and what they experience. They are telling us what they think it all means.

The high school newspaper is not the enemy of frightened adults. It is one of the few windows

they will ever have into what is actually happening in their own children’s world, perhaps in

their own children’s hearts. Isn’t that what a parent is supposed to want?

795 words

Renkl, M. (2022). Student Journalists Reveal a Changing World. Let Them. The New York Times. 5 September, 2022.

1 red state – a US state where most people usually vote for the Republican Party

2 First Amendment – an amendment to the US Constitution that protects freedoms concerning e.g. religion, speech, the press, assembly

3 Pride Month – commemoration and celebration of the LGBTQ community’s fight for equality and acceptance

4 Bible Belt – a region of the Southern United States where many people have traditional Christian beliefs

1 Outline the different incidents and causes of censorship in student journalism as presented in the article. (20 %)