“What?”
“Go to a porn site!”
“I don’t know any porn sites,” was my response to the order from my high school principal to ogle nude women. Perhaps a bit of context might be appropriate.
During my senior year of high school, the IT department decided to install an internet filter that could not be easily circumvented by the students, unlike the previous one. All information in and out of the building was strictly controlled, and there was no way around it. Well, almost no way. I did my research and discovered a method of circumventing their expensive, new filter. When they found out a few months later, they were not happy.
As a senior with several study hall periods per day, I did what all seniors did: I surfed the Internet on the library computers. Except, unlike most seniors, I had something I wanted to accomplish. I was, and still am, a writer, and I wanted to use my free time in the library to work on writing posts for my blog and spreading those posts via social media. However, the government had decided that anything that was classified as a “blog” could not contain any valuable information and could not possibly be a good use of student time.
How the government decided that blogs are not educational, I do not know. Nowadays, blogs are one of the biggest sources of information on the Internet: some of the biggest websites in the world are blogs or are blog-driven. There has even been an interest in many school systems, complete with academic studies, to incorporate blogging into the classroom as a learning tool. Yet my high school had censored all websites labeled as “blogs and blogging.”
Why does the government feel they have the right to censor social media sites as well? Assuming that students could not possibly use social media in an intentional way is insulting, and it restricts the creativity and innovation of students. With business and marketing on social media sites exploding in this digital age, censoring them in school is not helping students succeed.
As someone who now makes his living as a blogger and Social Media Coordinator, I continue to succeed despite my high school education, not because of it. If we want our students to be able to learn and adapt in this new digital era, our public schools must stop this backwards-looking censorship and learn to embrace the Internet and all of the opportunities it provides.
I would agree with you to a point. I think there are some things that the schools should not censor like blogs however i do believe social media sites should be censored. Facebook, twitter, myspace, and any other media that is like that does not provide any educational tools. People would argue that they do but i would say that this is not a needed tool to learn but a "wanted" tool to learn. People have become so dependent on the internet and media that many children in school now can not do basic things without using the internet. I think we are becoming to dependent on the internet plain and simple. But i would say that they should not block certain internet sites from being censored.
Thanks for the comment and sharing your opinion, Justin!
But how can you be certain that Facebook and Twitter aren't providing quality education to students? I'd argue that they can help teach students the basics of marketing and how to survive in the digital world. They can also serve as a source for students to find good information that they may not have located otherwise. Social media could even turn into a possible job or career for students, as it has for me.
In order for Social Media to have these positive benefits, though, students would have to use it very conscientiously with those goals in mind, and I can see how the vast majority, like 99.99% of them, couldn't or wouldn't do that.
In my opinion some if not most of the filters school have do not work. Why not? I personally remeber some of my school days in wich we wanted to use internet. Sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Youtube and various others were completely blocked. This however, is not enough to stop completely bored children. Any kid can google "how to bypass school filters" or "information about filters." I simply asked one of the kids who was taking extra classes on programming, he told me how and I had complete internet access for the rest of the year.
It all depends on the filter. That's the way our filter USED to be, but the new filter even blocked searches like the one you mentioned, and all of the websites that those searches would lead to.