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Sherley Ramos
Natalia Scarpetti
English 102
15 May 2018
Are you expressing how you feel?
As we start to grow, we start to learn how the world around us works. We start to analyze
people and actually see that we aren’t handed everything like our parents make it seem. The
perspective of the way we see things start to change our mindset is different, we start to act more
mature. We go to school to be able to study what we want and be able to speak freely on our
opinions. Everyone sees things differently and this is where disagreements start to begin, people
tend to not listen to ideas that they don’t agree on and start arguing. This is happening on college
and universities campuses; faculty and students are disinviting guest speakers and not allowing
their own students from speaking publicly. They are taking away our First Amendment which
gives us the right of freedom of speech. We should all be allowed to voice our own opinions, we
shouldn’t separate ourselves from people because of the disagreements that they possess. At the
end of the day we are all human and we are just trying to make it somewhere. In this essay I will
be showing how people get easily offended towards difficult topics and tend to not listen to other
sides and just want to argue and how this is causing problems on school campuses.
As I was growing up, I was always told by my parents to not to let your emotions in and
always talk about how you feel. I believe that as a society that’s starting to see a lot of violence
that we need to be up front with what we want to say. There’s no reason behind, letting our
voices from not being heard. Going to a public university where free speech is allowed makes
me wonder why other places aren’t doing the same. Recently this has become a problem on
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college and university campuses, and Trump has put in an executive order that protects free
speech on college campuses. Trump’s order doesn’t make a great change, but it allows for
Universities to ensure that they are following the law and their own policies to promote free
inquiry and debate. From an article called “Trump signs executive order on free speech on
college campuses” he explains how his order is to help defend American students from others
not letting them speak. They stated, “Trump told the students that people can have different
views, “but they have to let you speak.” (Svrluga 1). Trump is explaining how it’s okay for
others to have different opinions on certain topics but overall, we should all be able to speak
upon it. It’s never a negative thing to communicate with your peers. It’s okay for students to
have different perspective on ideas but we all need to let one another share them. You don’t have
to actually agree but it’s good to listen to new information and learn something new every once
in a while, and you never know it might change your view on it. I believe that there’s a fear in
many of them that their peers will turn against them or get offended, that’s why they close
themselves off. Trump tweeted out saying, “If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and
practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view — NO FEDERAL FUNDS?
(Svrluga 2). Trump was upset with one of the incidents that had happen on a college campus, he
felt the need to start a change after students were using violence to show their disagreements. I
know that this order didn’t make a drastic change but its definitely a start on allowing students to
respect one another. I believe that we should be allowed to say how we feel because what’s the
point of living in a community where you aren’t able to share your thoughts.
With this being in mind, being in a generation where everything is now on the internet
it’s hard to not find out what’s going on in our society. Society is making people really sensitive
to topics but when they want to defend their opinion they want to just argue and not listen to
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what others have to say. From an article called “Are Millennials Too Sensitive?” they explain
how younger students are starting to become sensitive because of how older ones are treating
them. They mentioned, “Our TA requested that if we are planning on showing any “graphic
images” we get them checked prior to putting them into our visual for our assignment. This is a
ridiculous sign of how sheltered this generation is” (Clement 1). I believe that the new generation
are not being taught what the real world is actually going to be like. Children are all on social
media and are all aware of the violet things that are happening around the world, but their
parents/teachers are playing the blind eye to them. They say it’s to protect them but not showing
them images or informing them of what’s happening is not going to solve the problems that are
causing them. This is how students become delicate to certain topics because they don’t know
how to react. Parents/teachers should be more open about topics like this, it’s not like they going
to disappear and not know about it. It’s easier for them to hear it from someone they can count
on and who are able to ask questions to but when finding things out yourself doesn’t make it easy
to understand. Many of this comes from the amount of exposure parents are letting their children
have. The more a person is exposed to them are more likely to understand these ideas and are
able to speak upon them.
This generation believes that the world around is perfect and when something negative
occurs they don’t know how to handle it. They have been hidden from the violence and sadness
of the world and when something does happen it leads to people to believe that they have a
mental illness. In the article they reported how “depression has increases by 6% in just a year,
the rate shows that the recent generation cannot handle the pressure that society has put upon
them because they were not trained to handle stress.” (Clement 1). People are not being prepared
to experience negative outcomes when it’s the reality of things. I believe that our parents need to
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stop trying to protect us and allow us to experience things that eventually are going to be brought
up. This comes right back to the exposure parents are allowing their children, many of children
are vulnerable to all the negativity going on because on social media and how advanced
technology is now.
When it comes to students being inside of the classroom many of them are censoring
themselves for many reasons and one mainly being them not wanting to offend others and
because they feel like they will be judged. An experiment was done at the School of Social Work
in Boston University that surveyed 243 students on reasons as to why they felt uncomfortable
expressing their opinions and raising questions also for reason as to why they think other
students may feel uncomfortable expressing their opinions. In the article called “Do Students
Self-Censor” in the study it showed that students in classrooms were just are agreeing with the
