Religion in Public Schools

Religion is a very controversial topic that many people have different views on. Most people have a strong opinion either for or against it. Whichever opinion they have, it’s a good chance they passionate about it. Because of this most schools are against teachers, and sometimes students, expressing their opinions on such a controversial subject.

The Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 states that employers must allow their workers to fulfill their reasonable religious practices, as long as it doesn't interfere with the job. This can really conflict with the U.S. Constitution's Establishment Clause. That clause keeps public schools from allowing teachers from advocating a particular belief in front of students.

The conflicting elements of these can make it difficult to enforce rules regarding religion because of the balance that needs to take place.

It can be hard to figure out what is acceptable and what isn't. Schools are allowed to talk about the history of religion, in fact in most schools it's a standard. Nearly every school agrees that books like the Bible and the Torah have had a huge impact on the world. However, showing devotion or a singular truth of a sacred document is not permitted.

It is hard to know not to cross the line because sometimes it isn't always clear where the line is. A lot of times people need to make their best guesses on what is acceptable and what isn't.

There has been a recent case in North Carolina recently that has helped to have a new law passed specifying what is accepted in public schools. A 6 year old girl in an elementary school was told to remove the word "God" from a poem for Veterans Day. She wrote "He prayed to God for peace, he prayed to God for strength". She wrote this referring to her grandfather, a Vietnam veteran.

This new law helps to clarify just what can be done by public schools and what can't. There will always be blurred lines in this situation but at least this provides some structure.

Choice

Choice is a huge part of our lives. We make many little decisions every day, even if they aren’t big ones. We don’t know a life without any choice, but we don’t know one with free will either.

Choice is very necessary but too much can lead to bad results. You need to have some sort of structure or rules. You can't grow up without rules or nobody can help you make decisions in your life at times where you aren’t yet capable to make them yourself. A persons decision making skills don't develop fully until age 25. Because of this, we need people to help us make decisions until a point in our lives.

Even though we know that people can’t have full choice, people can’t have no choice either. Without choice, people would fight for it like in every dystopian novel ever. People need to make their own choices, even if it will be the wrong one. We need to make the wrong choices to learn from them. Bad choices help us see the good choices more clear.

Free will is completely impossible. Nobody will ever make a decision all by themselves. There will always be consequences and restrictions that influence your choices. You will never have a blank slate, to make any decision you want.

There is also no way to make a decision on your own because your brain makes the decision before you even know it. There’s a difference between making a decision and your brain making a decision.

What we do now is make decisions based on the very small spectrum of options we actually have to choose from. A lot of times you have to choose the lesser of two evils. We sometimes don't even know these are evils but because they are both choices we are glad to have them.

I don't know if it would be better if we had more freedom. If we could make more decisions by ourselves would we be happier or overwhelmed by the responsibility?

The Future of Journalism

I think that journalism is going to continue on forever, but will change over time. I don't think that journalism can end because of my definition of journalism. I believe that journalism is communication between two or more people. With that definition, communication would have to end for journalism to end.  That is impossible.

Even though journalism won't end, it can still change and evolve. This is obviously already happening. The difference between journalism in my generation and 50 years ago is huge. So much more of journalism is online than ever before. Soon nearly everything will be.

Coming up with the idea for newapp was very difficult for one main reason. This is an invention for the future, but we don't know what will be most appealing to people, even 6 months from now. We didn't know much about what the future, but we did guess a few things. We assumed that we would evolve over time and be able to do more things. However, we seemed to go off of the assumption that people would still have the same interests and like the same things.

People are lazy. A successful source of news will understand this and adapt to this. They will have short and to the point news. We tried to make this happen by having people submit their own things. They would only write what they would want to read.

Another reason we have submissions by the public is because we think that a main part of journalism is communication and communication isn't a one way street. That was one of the most important parts of our project and what we decided to focus on.