You're Not Allowed to Read This

An article by Suzie Boss on Edutopia.org discusses the tricky debate that happens in every school and Board regarding internet filtering: whether to block or not to block.

These discussions often have all the passion of a religious war, with both sides convinced of the blasphemy of the other.

Those wanting to block see paternalistic protectionism as the duty of educators, and that the risk of stumbling upon the some of the unsavoury and dangerous elements of the web outweigh the inconvenience of lacking access to sites with genuine educational value.

Others argue that the impossible task of a perfect blocking system - namely one that allows each and every needed site while blocking all universally objectionable material (whatever that is!) - means that a better and more realistic strategy is to focus on educating students about net citizenship and safety and how to use this ubiquitous technology appropriately.

I'm clearly a disciple of the second approach, which in my view makes more sense educationally and practically.

First, in terms of education, it is our job to prepare our students for the future, not to help them ignore it. What better place than the safety of school, where there is supervision and instruction, to come to terms with the dangers of the internet when they are discovered? Second, in terms of practically, in an age where thousands of new web sites are born every second, where proxy servers can spoof any domain, where Mobile Computing devices have instant access to the full internet... there is no possibility of winning the battle.

It is education that provides a protection that avoidance cannot.

Incidentally, I checked the first link in Boss's article "Stumbling Blocks: Playing It Too Safe Will Make You Sorry" at my school. The link was to a copy of the United States Congress' Children's Internet Protection Act hosted on the Internet Free Expression Alliance site.

It was blocked.

So I read it on my iPhone.