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Students Banned from Blogging
wayward writes "Students at Pope John XIII, a Catholic high school, were told to take down their blogs from sites like Xanga and MySpace or face suspension. Rev. Kieran McHugh, the school's principal, said that he was trying to protect students from online predators. Not too surprisingly, free speech advocates got more than a little concerned.
Blog anonymously? That should solve the problem.
If you want to protect students from on-line predators, have some adults that hang out in the online chat rooms. Just one lurking, trusted adult can put an end to a lot of crap in a chat room. Chat rooms aren't the only places to talk to kids on line though. Most on line games have a chat/messaging component. Because of some of the things that we've observed, our gaming clan has enacted really strict rules about this for our "junior league" members. Have adults that are privvy to all the conversations during on-line game play. Tell parents not to put the computer in the kid's bedroom. Have the parent install monitoring software and check up on what junior's up to on-line.
Major Super-Important Point - THE COMPUTER IS NOT A BABYSITTER. YOU MUST INTERACT WITH YOUR CHILD.
There are dozens of way more effective steps than taking down a blog or two. Explain to kids that real names and real places don't get used in blogs. Using someone's real name, or telling where they live, etc. should be cause for suspension.
2 cents,
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
Which is a good reason not to go to a private school and actually work to improve your public school system. Of course, exactly the opposite is happening as people have lost all concept of community.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Want to convince a kid that religion is bullshit, and make an atheist of him? Send him to Catholic school.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
A School acting in loco parentis doesn't trump the actual parents. When the kid's not at school, he's the parent's responsibility, not the school's.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Joking aside, I think it is a bit unfair to suggest that a Catholic institution has no stake in protecting its students from online predators. This is like suggesting that a community (like say, a state such as MA) has no stake in protecting its citizens from murderers because the state has a certain percentage of murderers in it. Yes, there are predatory priests, but that does not define the Catholic church, nor its members.
Furthermore, Free Speech as provided by the First Ammendment, like so much of the Constitution, is completely misunderstood by a large portion of Americans, and a great deal of the rest of the world. There are pleanty of examples, not the least of which is the Dixie Chicks crying foul (and using the term censorship) when other free citizens decided to boycott their product. Free speech is for everyone, good and bad, and I'd argue that it is more important to protect the bad, since it needs the most protection. Having said that, and digressed, in this case the body silencing the speech is a private organization silencing its membership. That membership is neither a right, nor involuntary. They may do as they please legally, and the membership that doesn't like it can certainly leave.
Be careful what you wish for. If the fed gets control of what private organizations can do in every regard, its only a short put to your front door...your living room...your bedroom.
But hey...at least the term SPLOG wasn't used...
Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate
There are two important things here. First of all, this is a private high school. The First Amendment does not apply to private organizations, and even more so to religious private organizations *. Nor should it have to. If there is a problem with free speech, they can go to some other, possibly public school.
Even if the student is not going to a Catholic school by choice, the First Amendment does not apply. Although the government cannot restrict the free speech of a minor, the parent can. Parents are all-powerful with regards to their children, with the exception of a few things like abortion.
All in all, if I were running the school, I'd be far more worried about the clergy molesting the children than some outsider reading a web site.
*: Religious organizations, or more accurately non-profit organizations in general, really do have more freedom with their views. You can't fire someone from a normal job for saying "there is no heaven" (or another inoffensive but heretical statement). But you can certainly do that to your clergy. Freedom of speech and freedom of association both work this way.
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
I am a Catholic, president of the finance committee for my parish, occasional technical consultant for my diocese and frequently write about religious topics on my own blog. The principal is a tool and this has little to do with Catholicism. In fact, it can quite easily be criticized on the grounds of interfering with parental rights (did you see any parental input at all in this policy?) and discouraging evangelization. From a Catholic perspective, this is poor pedagogy and a bad example for our youth.
If I were at this school, I would immediately start a Catholic evangelization blog and provide reflections on my personal religious life. For an extra twist of the knife, I'd call it St Isadore's Shrine. If this is going to go to court, let "religious discrimination" be the grounds for the 1st amendment suit. If the blog didn't get shut down, the school has other problems in that it's not enforcing its rules evenhandedly and providing a bad moral example for the students.
Wrong. That's NOT what the article says. The principal has prohibited the kids from having blogs at all, regardless of what they discuss on them. He is not just telling them not to reveal information about their school schedules that might conceivably put them in harm's way.
In any case, blogging is not what gets kids in trouble on the net. All of the cases that I've heard of of serious problems involve kids, mostly girls, getting involved with predators in chat rooms. If he were really concerned about the kids, that's what he would warn them about. This guy is either more ignorant about the net than a school principal in this day and age should be, or concern for the kids is just a pretext and he's really trying to prevent the kids from posting anything critical of the school.
You need to improve your analysis of the system. Follow the chains of control and the chains of responsibility, and you will soon find that the public school system as it is implemented is designed to fail. Community has little to do with it. Emotional commitment has little to do with it (though parents with both commitment and a lot of time can overcome many structural problems).
The key decision was the moving of funding (and fund raising) from the local level to a combination of the state and federal level. From that point on the public school system deteriorated, though changes were implemented gradually, and you will still find some local schools that perform well. (The criteria is that the local area has enough money to raise sufficient local funding to subsidize the schools, and thus to regain control.)
I'll grant you that the justifier (fairly distributing the school funding) was plausible, but the effect was that the control of the system moved from the local area, where people were individually concerned with how their children were doing, to the state and federal level where the concern was "How can I present this well". Some believe that the schools were intentionally sabotaged, with malice, but I feel that an analysis of the system shows that this is an unnecessary hypothesis. The system was changed to give the central government control, because governments like to control things. This inherrently resulted in the schools doing an increasingly poor job, because the feedback loops were either broken or had long delays inserted into them.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Stopping blogs or chatting or other online behaviour won't stop that. It will only teach them that they need to hide what is going on in their life from you - destroying trust may very well prove to do far more damage to their safety than not by stopping them from telling you about worrying things before it develops further.
What's wrong with being anti-religious?
Despite being an atheist, I strongly believe that I should treat others as I would want to be treated. And that includes ramming my religious beliefs down other people's throats. I would prefer that they don't do it to me, and thus I don't do it to them, even if they do do it to me.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
... protects citizens from GOVERNMENT-IMPOSED restraints on speech. Private institutions such as Catholic schools and private employers are immune.
Seriously. Look it up and then stop complaining about how CowboyNeal* is infringing on your rights.
* not a federal institution
No, not at all. That's a ridiculous (although not uncommon) caricature. I won't deny that occasionally Christianity has become a tool of the state, and in those cases it has become one of a number of means by which the state attempts to control its population, but control over the masses is really foreign to the Christian ethic. It's far more about the individual learning to control himself. When it becomes about controlling others, it devolves into a mere cult.
It indeed is intended to draw focus away from earthly things -- or rather, one earthly thing: the self. The only path to heaven is on earth, by doing good for others, treating them the way you would wish to be treated, giving what is needed. It is all about serving others. Most Christians do not forget the admonition in one of the Epistles that faith without works is dead.
If this is "population control", then so be it.
And the brethren went away edified.
Keeping a blog on the internet is to school as swearing at home is to your resteraunt.
Sorry, as a parent, I think this letter is wholly appropriate. Instead of substituting his judgement for a parent's, he is asking parents to use their judgement about what is right for their kids. He's also putting parents and students on notice that those who might represent the school can be held accountable for their actions. That, in and of itself, is not unreasonable. If some kid gets bumped from the cheerleading squad for calling a teacher a doodyhead, then you can complain.
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
Well, at some point in the past, a community didn't think of the gov'ment as some abstract higher power, but as an agreement among the community about how to do things. Think of public schools as 'community run public schools', (which they are!) and your comment doesn't make very much sense. The problem isn't over-reliance on government, it is forgetting exactly what the government is supposed to be and supposed to do.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Anyone else think that a policy like this would be horribly easy to abuse?
Student: *create new blog*
"hi! My name is (name of person that cut in front of me in the lunch line yesterday). My school sucks and the principal is a gay child molester."
Principal: "What you say?!" *expel*
Whilst we're talking about "rights", it's a shame people don't seem to think we have a right to education.
A school, even if it is entirely private, is not the same thing as a private organisation that people can choose to go to such as a restaurant.
We live in a society where school is not a choice, but compulsory (indeed, here in the UK parents have been sent to prison for their children playing truant). It ought to follow that any organisation wanting to receive the status of "school" - even if it is totally private - should abide by certain rules (otherwise you could label anything a "school", and therefore avoid sending children to a proper school).
This particular case isn't even about admission policies, it's about kicking students out whilst they are already there. It's all very well saying "Don't like it, go somewhere else", but doing so will severely disrupt their education (not to mention causing problems if the only other schools are further away, or if other schools refuse to take them because they were "expelled" and labelled as troublemakers).
Therefore, in my opinion it follows that a private school most certainly does not have the right to do what it likes, if that causes disruption to a child's education.
Well, at some point in the past, a community didn't think of the gov'ment as some abstract higher power, but as an agreement among the community about how to do things.
YES! That's EXACTLY the concept that's missing these days. I would say "Mod parent up", except that that always sounds so dumb.
Maybe we need smaller communities, so that EVERYBODY can be involved in the decision making.
Also, with smaller communities, it might become more obvious that taxes are the way that we all pool our money to do something for all of us. It's pretty common to think of taxes as going to "them" somewhere (who then waste them), and that money for projects we want also comes from some benevolent "them". We need to get it through our skulls that it's not "them", it's "us". WE pool OUR money, and then WE, through our representatives, spend it. It's not their money to do with as they please. It's not someone giving us a gift of a library from above, it's our money and our neighbours' money.
I once read a book which said that a major factor in the way the Soviet Union was dysfunctional was that nobody felt that they were doing something for anyone. You didn't make shoes for some customer that might be your neighbour, you made shoes for "the system", for some giant warehouse "out there", that had no connection to actual people that you know that might be buying them eventually. You didn't grow potatoes to feed your family, or to sell to your neighbours in exchange for the fruits of their labour, you grew potatoes for "the system", which would in all probability ship them to some totally inappropriate place and let them rot while your neighbours go hungry. And if the world is like that, then why make any effort to do a good job? Why NOT steal whatever you can get away with, since everybody else is doing the same thing. It's not like there is someone you would hurt by that, you would only hurt "the system", and Lord knows it owes it to you.
I think that this is part of the mentality that allows looting during natural disasters or, for that matter, simple power outages. It's not Mr. Smith who lives two doors over that you're hurting when you break his window and take stuff from his store; it's some nameless, faceless corporation, who is insured anyway, and who owes it to you by now anyway, so why not take whatever you can get away with? It's just "the system".
No, we need to get things back onto a human scale, where we're interacting with each other, instead of each interacting with "the system". Where the "government" is just US who are making agreements about how to do things (including how to spend OUR money).
I really think that the United States was founded on principles like these, but they have gotten lost over the last few hundred years.
Whilst we're talking about "rights", it's a shame people don't seem to think we have a right to education.
:)
When one describes a right in terms of the things (implied) that others must give you, then assuredly it is not a right.
Conversely, if one describes a right in terms of things that others must not take from you, then quite possibly it is indeed a right.
One cannot have a right to education, a home, or medical insurance, without forcing others to pay for them. One can have a right to pursue an education, purchase a house on the free market, and so forth, without intruding upon others. One set of things are probably rights. The other set of things probably are not.
There are probably other angles you can take on your private school has public school responsibilities tack, though. I don't see your opinion as wrong, really. I'm just objecting to the whole "right" thing.
C//
Agreed!
I think the problem with this discussion is that people are arguing two different issues.
Position A: It's wrong for an institution to do this.
Position B: No, it's perfectly legal.
But B isn't responding to A -- A's position isn't that it's illegal, but that it's wrong. And B isn't saying it's right, but that it's legal.
Legality and morality are two separate issues that happen to intersect in a number of places (murder being both immoral and illegal) but differ in others (it's perfectly legal to cheat on your girlfriend, but few people would claim that it's moral to do so -- and many would argue it's immoral to be sleeping with her in the first place).
Back to your post, I've never understood the blind faith in private enterprise that big-L Libertarians seem to have. The idea seems to be that the corporations will save us from the government. That's kind of like hoping that a tiger will save you from a lion. I say throw the lion and the tiger in a pit and let them keep each other busy.