"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless,tempest-tost, to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"1 These words are,of course, inscribed in bronze at the base of the greatest symbol of Americanfreedom, the Statue if Liberty. These words were also a call to the entire world,exclaiming how our nation of freedom wants to take in all of the earthsdowntrodden and oppressed people so they may live a life of liberty, and followany beliefs they choose without persecution. Obviously, the world consists of avast amount of varying people and societies, each with their own religions,values, and ways of life. In the United States, the melting pot of the world, wepreach the fact that everyone is safe to live these ways of life any way theywould like. With the lieutenant-governor of Maryland, Kathleen KennedyTownsends essay, Not Just Read and Write, but Right and Wrong, she makes aproposal to force a universal set of a values upon all public school children, whichcould be conflicting with the very ideas that this nation was founded upon.By citing her conversation with a crowded classroom, her daughtersexperience on an all male soccer team, and on obscure survey which samplesa mere one-thousand people to represent all those aged fifteen totwenty-four in the entire U.S, Kathleen Townsend draws the conclusion thatthe children of this generation are very immoral and have few values. Beforemaking such a bold generalization, she should have gathered a little moreevidence than what she did to prove her accusation. It is not accurateenough to use little more than one-thousand people to judge several million. The most accurate surveys, like the A.C. Neislon Company for example,surveys several thousand people in each region of the whole country togather television ratings2. To say the least, television ratings are trivialcompared to the importanc...
