A Boston Globe article, "High School Seniors Back War - But Not so Fast," reports on the Hamilton Collee Patriotism Poll:
Two-thirds of high school seniors surveyed this month said they support a war in Iraq, but more than half viewed President Bush as too hasty about going to war.
The poll of 1,001 seniors nationwide, designed by sociology students at Hamilton College in New York and administered by Zogby International between March 12 and March 18, measured high school students' attitudes toward patriotism, military service, and the then-pending Iraqi war.
In many ways, the students' responses about Iraq mirrored those of American adults surveyed in recent weeks. Part of the survey occurred in the days before President Bush signaled that war would begin within a few days. Later responses appeared to be only modestly affected by the imminence of war, researchers said.
Despite that, the support for the war registered by high school students surprised Christopher Abram, 21, of Danvers, one of the Hamilton College students who helped design the poll.
"What you see in the media and what you see especially on a college campus is people against the war," he said. "Their opinions can't necessarily be dictated by what's going on in the media or what their parents are telling them."
More than half the students thought Bush was "too anxious to go to war," while 37 percent said he was trying to "avoid war unless there is no other way to protect the security of the United States."
...Perhaps most interesting, said Dennis Gilbert, the professor leading the survey, was that 63 percent of the seniors responded that war protesters are patriotic. In phone surveys, the students were asked whether they believed demonstrators were unpatriotic because they took the side of another country against the United States or patriotic because they exercised their rights as citizens to protest policies they don't support.
"That is really a classic question, can you be a patriot and not be pro-war?" said Gilbert, professor of sociology at Hamilton College. "I was kind of proud of the high school seniors on that one."
... "There's a little evidence there that chivalry is dead," Gilbert said. Sixty-five percent of male students favored a coed draft, he said, compared to 55 percent of women.
More than 40 percent of students said that in the event of a draft they would try to get out of it, a response that surprised researchers for its candor. "Usually people try to give you the socially proper answer," Gilbert said.
