Slashdot Mirror
UK Teachers Say Censor The Internet
Marlow the Irelander writes "The BBC is reporting that in response to a YouTube video of a schoolboy breaking his teacher's window (yes, this is a video), NASUWT, one of the teaching unions in the UK, is calling for legislation to control the internet. Could Britain, rather than the US, be the main front of the battle against censorship in 2007?" From the article:
"Unfortunately, any yob or vandal can now have their 15 minutes of fame, aided and abetted by readily accessible technology and irresponsible internet sites which enable such behaviour to be glorified.
[The general secretary of the union] said the union supported a zero tolerance approach in schools to pupils who used technology to abuse and undermine teachers, and called for more rigorous legislative control of internet sites which gave them license."
Why are the teachers mad about the video? Shouldn't they be more mad about the broken window?
Besides, whoever recorded the incident was clearly a by-stander (the person throwing the rock was in the video). I do not understand why this is bothering the teachers so much.
Video has been removed...
The BBC is reporting that in response to a YouTube video of a schoolboy breaking his teacher's window (yes, this is a video), NASUWT, one of the teaching unions in the UK, is calling for legislation to control the internet.
Just so we're clear, their logic is that the internet is a catalyst for youth vandalism?
Man, kids these days. When I was their age, we had to vandalize stuff the old fashioned way.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Making you think you're crazy is a billion dollar industry.
for giving everyone an equal opportunity to express themselves.
Maybe if teachers were more educators than prison wardens, kids would love them instead of hating them.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Remember this?
How can you have any meat if you don't eat your pudding?
Teachers, post a video of yourself giving the kid detention for a month.
Isn't this the country with all the spy cameras all over the place watching people?
Are they complaining because it wasn't an "official" camera that captured the act? I don't get what the Internet has to do with it.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
Having grown up as an English lad in the 1940s and 1950s, I can tell you that most teachers and headmasters weren't jerks for the sake of being jerks. They were harsh with us because many of us were stupid little buggers! We needed a good smack across the ass with the fanny paddle every now and then. It kept us in line.
But times have changed, and the teachers have gotten far softer. Look at English youth today as a whole. Many are nothing but scum. Look at just the chav subculture, for instance. They are criminals, plain and simple. They idolise crime, and not just petty crime like vandalism. Many of these kids are burglars, rapists, and in some cases, even murderers. They dress like third-worlders.
We weren't perfect youth 50 years ago. We were mischevous little boys and girls. But we never shot each other in cold blood. We never raped each other. We never slaughtered senior citizens. But these are things we see on nearly a daily basis with the teenagers of today. And we weren't like that because when we did fuck up, our headmasters let us know. We felt direct pain for our misdeeds, and thus learned to live in a civilised manner.
I hope they publically identify this vandal.
I hope he ends up being linked forever with this video so a name search comes up with it.
Shitheads like this deserve whatever karma comes to them in future.
anyway, back to bed.
liqbase
First of all, the teachers should be thankful that these twits happened to place their video on Youtube. This made their detective work in figuring out who were the perpetrators were much easier, giving them a huge smoking gun. Talk about shooting the messenger, sheesh.
I won't try and 'justify' wanting to see it - I mean, come on, it's a kid doing something really stupid. I'm just going to want to see that, especially when presented as something that might be censored.
A damn shame... I wanted to see it too. Nothing like broken windows and stupid kids to liven up a boring Wednesday night. As a consolation prize, here's another kid doing something stupid.
The fabled christmas tree jump...
You can't win, Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
It all comes down to treating young adults as children. Where I live, the last two years of high school are optional. As such, any bad behaviour on behalf of students is met with one response from teachers "You're not required to be here and I'm not required to teach you anymore, so if you wanna act like a jerk, get out." Personally, I don't think it goes far enough. At university, they would be saying "I'm not here to teach you. I'm here to provide the information you need for the exam. If you think you can pass the exam without listening to me, you're welcome to leave." This is exactly how schools should be run. The kids that fail their exams should be required to repeat their classes. If they continue to fail, they should be kicked out. The world will always need ditch diggers.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I'm a Network Manager at a UK school / college. I guess I'm perfectly placed to speak on these matters, so here we go...
I have a duty of care, in my role, to protect students from certain inappropriate material on the internet. The obvious ones are there; pornography, paedophilia, unmonitored chatrooms, unmonitored messaging sites, etc.
Myspace is blocked, because I can't honestly say that I can be 100% certain that students couldn't use the site and put themselves at risk. Porn websites are blocked, because the students are not 18. All chat programs, such as MSN/AOL/IRC are not installed on student profiles, and students do not have administration rights to install software either. Proxy websites are blocked, so that students can't bypass the restrictions and vew unfiltered content. All fairly common stuff. Ironically, the biggest complaints I get about myspace being blocked are from teachers, but thats another story altogether.
I use active content filtering to block access to inappropriate content on all other websites, such as youtube or google vids, which might contain any of the things I first mentioned.
However, I don't block anything just 'because I'm told to'. A teacher can request that anything in the world gets filtered out, but ultimately the decision lies with me.
If a teacher cannot control his or her students in a classroom, then it is the fault of the teacher, not the students are finding the material. And personally, I think that is the way it should stay. Technology shouldn't be used to simply 'restrict access' to material when that material doesn't fit within the narrow categories I first mentioned. If anything, teachers should be embracing sites such as youtube and google videos because they provide a wealth of material that can be used in the classroom.
If a video tape was mailed to the police department, would the postal service be abolished?
Governments can't be so repressive if their citizens are fully armed.
When did the U.K. embrace Big Brother?
I swear, both countries appear to be in a race to see which country can reach the bliss of fascism first.
To be honest, it's not clear to me exactly why this is. I mean, I understand why it's happening in the U.S.: the U.S. government is controlled by its largest corporations. There are various reasons for that, ranging from the chokehold on the media those corporations have to the campaign finance setup and lobbying setup that exists in the U.S. Fascism by definition is more friendly to big corporations than any other form of government, so it's easy to see why those who run the biggest corporations want fascism to rise in the U.S.
But the UK? Why is it going down that path? I was rather under the impression that the media wasn't a slave to the big corporations there, which means that the people there should have a somewhat less biased source of information on which to base their voting decisions. Money is power so I can see the big corporations having some influence there, but nothing like in the U.S.
And yet, the paths both countries are following are almost identical. What gives?
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Oh no, you can't do that, because then the kids' self-esteem would be hurt. After all, we want our children to be happy, right? Doing such mean-spirited things like holding them accountable and disciplining them would cause such stress to their developing minds.
(Excuse me while I put my bullshit boots on)
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
If you think you can pass the exam without listening to me, you're welcome to leave
I wish I had those kind of teachers in the states. Took Cobol my senior year. Straight A's on every assignment and test. The sweet old lady in charge of it had a stroke 2 weeks before final and the new substitute wanted to fail me because I'd missed half the lessons.
Had to lob him a real tearjerker line, but I aced the final too. Who woulda thunk it?
Sadly, the sweet old lady was the exeption in my college career.
Rather than censor teh Intarweb, here's a better idea. Let these punk-ass kids have their fifteen minutes of fame. Then videotape their fifteen hours of community service and put that on YouTube.
Have fun competing with those Mexican ditch diggers.
I guess you meant the world will always need prisoners.
It's no wonder they're turning out idiot students -- the poor kids are being taught by idiots of the first order.
John
Fuedalism has never gone away, it has never been "repealed" despite a lot of people thinking this happened somehow by some mythical all powerful world court of supreme justice and niceguy goodness or something. They, the alleged "aristocrats", the top of the two class feudalistic system, our economic and political "leaders" who still think of themselves and act as our "masters", just realised they needed to be a bit more sly about it so as to not lose their heads periodically in the traditional peasant/serf uprisings. And now they have a lot more technology to pull it off, that's it, just a lot more toys and a few centuries more psychological studies into how to control their herds of "human resources" more effectively, hence why I call the phenomenon technofeudalism.
You realize, of course, that the U.S. has gun control laws similiar to most European countries, and the image of the armed American is more a quaint stereotype than reality? The Second Amendment has largely been gutted - with Americans being allowed to own a .22 hunting rifle or a shot gun, occasionally a small pistal - but the kind of infantry style weapons that could actually be used for revolution (like in Iraq with their ubiquitous AK-47s), are strictly illegal.
The only people who could really overthrow their government are the Swiss, and since they have been at peace most of the last 400 years, have no standing military and a police force smaller than most U.S. cities, and one of the highest standards of living in the world, they don't really need to do that, now do they?
You're right about Britain not having a First Amendment. The question "Could Britain, rather than the US, be the main front of the battle against censorship in 2007?" suggests that the author has a very American centric worldview. In Europe in general free speech is much more limited. Yes they are more open in some areas; a couple of notable examples being tolerance of drugs and public portrayal of sex such as in advertising and on TV. However, in many other areas, note ably in political speech, they are much more extreme then the states and the root of it is related to the lack of a fundamental Free Speech right in their laws. A lot of people in the states dislike NPR or Fox TV, Rush or Air America but the fact is we have multiple loudly and publicly divergent views. In much of Europe the official view is presented by government tied organizations, or, as in France the people who run the government, major enterprises, and the media come over whelming from one school, give each other jobs as they move in and out of government and squelch opposing views. As much as I dislike the ultra naturalist Le Pen the deriding of all his supports as racists is a perfect example. His success was driven by the lack of an mainstream outlet in France for issues that concern a large portion of the population but rather then take them seriously the two, supposedly opposing major parties, joined together to ensure he would be kept from achieving any political win. Neither party moved to adopt, or co-opt any of his bases of support; instead they used their control of the government and media to push the issues under the rug. In the US by contrast Perot's Reform party had a few minor wins but has since been co-opted by both the parties, the Democrats taking the protectionist stance and the Republicans adopting the immigration concerns.
A much scarier trend is what is happening in Britain related to slander laws. In Britain there is no protection given to journalist and authors when they write about public figures. This means subjects of authors and journalists can, and do, successfully sue as a means of suppressing criticism. In the States it is very difficult for a public figure to win a slander suit against an author because you need to prove what was written was wrong, the author new it was wrong, the author had intentional malice in what they wrote and that harm was done. In Britain the prosecution need only show that what was published was wrong and that harm was done; there is no need for the author to have been aware of the mistake or to have had malice in their actions.
As a result of these laws publications in Britain are much more reluctant to write hard-hitting articles about individuals. Even more disturbing, a number of US authors have been sued, with some success, because there books were sold in Britain and now US publishers have said they will hesitate in publishing books that could be target of these suits, even in the US, because of the cost of limiting the publications distribution to North America.
Have you seen the climate there is around teaching right now? I just started teaching this year and I had to fight hard for my job. Up here in Saskatchewan there is declining enrollment and that means that there are a ton of teacher that are being cut from the school board budgets. So really as a beginning teacher I could be cut at any moment. Some people do fall into the category of those who can't teach but there is more to it than content. Have you ever tried going infront of a group of kids and tried to get them motivated enough to get them trying to learn. I'm a Math/Physics teacher and all I get is the stereotype that "math and physics suck." I tell ya its bloody hard to get them to do anything. The other thing is that you mention that teachers have no experience in having a "real job." Honestly a "real job" would probly have me working a lot less and living somewhere else. But you do it for the students and try and get people interest in your subject area. Well that and you are actually affecting the future and hopefully helping someone to find themselves and their passions. As for the civil service lifers that happens in about half the teachers you see and I have no time for them as they are rediculous. But there are some good teachers out there and I'm proud to say I'm one of them.
That right there is a good reason for why schools are failing at their job. I could care less if I pass or fail the final exam. I'm going to school to learn, and I want to learn about the subject I'm taking, not about the exam at the end of the year.
You can argue that if you can't pass the exam for whatever class you're taking, you haven't learned anything, and that's fair enough. But I vehemently disagree that the teacher's job is to solely prepare you for a final exam. I'd be demanding my money back from the university if a teacher told me that. I'd rather go someplace where I'll get a real education, thankyouverymuch.
While it's true that neither agency could stop such postings, you are rather naive to believe they'd try. In all probability, they would be punished for trying because every new beheading video is another bit of fuel for the "War on Terror".
GP: "I'm not here to teach you. I'm here to provide the information you need for the exam. If you think you can pass the exam without listening to me, you're welcome to leave." This is exactly how schools should be run.
You: Wut? That right there is a good reason for why schools are failing at their job.
Actually, that attitude is the same as the one presented in college, where America is the best in the world.
And, that is the exact opposite of the attitude in high school and below, where America is failing.
Together, they prove the point that students need to be held accountable for learning the material themselves and not be coddled by teachers attempting to force-feed information on students who don't want to learn and don't want to even be there.
There's too much of a sense of entitlement in high school. Students and parents believe that attending school for four years is enough for a diploma, regardless of the amount and quality of work. I say fail the bad apples who refuse to learn in high school and maybe they'll start taking high school and learning seriously. Then, we'll see improvements in our schools.
Please sit down and shut up. Take your issues that you had in high school, and treat them as your issues, rather than overly-generalizing them to make it appear as though you understand every problem ever related to schools and education.
I'm a teacher (math and computer). I'm also a tech coordinator. I wear both hats at my school. I've been studying, taking apart, assembling, and troubleshooting PCs for 12 years. And I take offense to anyone who says "Those who can, do, those who can't, teach." If you were to take the time and evaluate MANY teachers, you would see how much time and effort we put into helping students, as well as research how to better educate students in our discipline(often through professional teacher organizations...I myself belong to the MCTM...www.mctm.org).
Sadly, even at my school, I have seen and am upset with some teachers who do not give a rat's ass about the students they teach, and I wish that administrators and teachers got a lot more serious about evaluating teachers' behavior and teaching inside and outside the classroom. It upsets me a great deal to see how much time and effort I put into helping a student learn, both about a particular subject and about the world & life in general, in hopes that I can build trust with students and show them I care about their lives, only to have that trust destroyed by a teacher who makes rather damning comments to students demonstrating apathy to their profession. Yet while I have met and even work with a few teachers who behave this way in one way or another, I will not sit by and watch some stupid punk think that we teachers are a waste of space.
There are so many students that depend on us teachers for social and academic support. We don't just sit and twiddle our thumbs when kids ask us questions. We understand our discipline. (I, as well as the vast majority of teachers, majored in their discipline in college; if you want to discredit our education, you may as discredit your own, assuming you graduated from college, at least.) Most of us have a great passion for it, as well as for helping other students learn to love it as well. And if you wanted us to actually demonstrate that in a job, I certainly could do so. But I would find great boredom in, say, being an actuary, doing nothing but number-crunching for 8 hours straight. And I've tried tech support before, but to be quite honest, I don't like living an OfficeSpace-kinda life. I actually enjoy being around other people and talking with them, teaching them, interacting with them, and even watching them grow and being a part of it!
And it's teachers like me who help make the students who become a part of your work force. They're not just born smart, stupid.
As far as the control paradigm perspective is concerned I can understand their position. For all practical purposes I think these "teachers" need to be closely examined and revealed for the dog-trainers towards conformity they really are. The road towards authoritarianism we're heading down is getting steeper by the day. If you're interested in the subject read John Taylor Gattos books on the dumbing down of America.
... the powers that be try to blame everyone but the person/people responsible.
Oh no, it's the internet's/violent video games'/movies/ fault that these kids run wild and act like hooligans! It can't possibly be the kids themselves or their parents who deserve any of that blame.
It boggles the mind how a teachers' union could fixate more on the "15 minutes of fame" and less on trying to make parents or the kid accountable (even outside of legal remedies). Instead of whining about how terrible the internet is, they could turn around and warn his new teachers/neighbors in Canada about what he's been up to over there (and point them to the video). Make the parents look bad and make his life miserable wherever he ends up and see if kids don't start to wise up.
I suspect what they're really upset about (and the real point to the zero tolerance policy they mention) are the other cases where teachers have been caught on video doing things they shouldn't do (e.g. screaming at kids). This is just a convenient scapegoat because the kids were clearly the ones doing something wrong so now they blame the internet/cameras/etc...
It's funny how often the people who should worry the least about surveillance (teachers, cops, etc...) are often the ones who least want to be scrutinized by the very things they'd like to use on us.
You need to start earlier than that. We should start failing students in kindergarten, and every grade after that, if they are not up to moving to the next level. Waiting until someone is 8 years into their education before you require them to actually know something is both unfair to the student, and a recipe for mass failures in high school.
The debate about whether teachers as a group are crappy or not is a false dicotemy. The fact is, our (US) public school system broken on just about every level. From national public policy to a high number of crappy teachers we have. Just about everybody can recount 3 or 4 really good teachers they had over their 13 years in school. Most can remember twice as many actively bad teachers. The rest, would have been somewhere in between. The problem there is that after a student spends a year with a crappy teacher, and the next a mediocre one, you need more than one great teacher to get that student re-engaged, and back up to speed with where he should be. Unfortunately, there just are not enough great teachers to go around.
Add to that that our system is set up as a baby sitting service from the top down, you have a recipe for disaster, and no amount of money is going to fix it. When I was in school, I must have heard a dozen times the first day of class speech about how "If you try, I will not fail you." That speech was intended to try and engage the students that knew the class was a waste of time because it would be past them. What it told many of us that were not dolts was that understanding the material was totally irrelevant to passing the class. Of course, it isn't just teacher that are pushing age based advancement. The school administrators are right their pushing any teacher that does try to take a stand. Why would they do this? Because when they fail students, they have to deal with parents who are also pushing for age based advancement. Of course teachers and faculty don't really want parents to get involved. It is easier to deal with parents that push for age based advancement than it is to deal with parents that demand you give the child a proper education.
So, basically our education system is broken, starting with the parents, right through the teachers and administrators, all the way up to the President of the United States, who referred to the smart kids as the 'Nerd Patrol'.
This has lead me personally to give up on our public education system. At 2, my son is doing early reading, and basic math. What chance is he going to have in our public education system? By the time he even gets to kindergarten, it will be obvious to him that success in school has nothing to do with knowledge, and all about making the busy work motions.
Luckily, I am not alone, and this has lead to a boom in home schooling, and in response, a boom in businesses, and organizations that support them.
I'm currently reading the book "Not in front of the children" by Marjorie Heins, a very informative book on the history of censorship and censorship law (mainly in the US, but with UK roots and occasinoal references).
In the US, the Constitution's First Amendment allows for a strong defense to censorship. However, censorship of "obscenity" and/or "indecency" (in their varying and sometmies contradictory definitions) is allowed is a common-law exception to the First Amendment (see First Amendment/Obscenity). The exact nature, power, extent, and constitutionality of the exception tends to be at the centre of any legal/judicial or legislative debate on censorship, and has gone back and forth (as documented in the book).
Britain has no such explicit, written right to free speech as the First Amendment, and thus censorship has a better legal footing (I suspect CCTV is in a similar situation). While censorship in Britain may be more easily applied, the "battle" would be more one-sided than in the US, if censorship (i.e. of obscenity) were to have such a strong following as it has in the US.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
The real problem here is teachers using windows.
Would the students try to break Linux or OS X ?
Instead of seeking to make the Internet safe for children, why not simply ban children from the Internet?
After all, this is primarily an adult world. Childhood is a temporary phase. There are some things that are not, and never will be, suitable for children. That does not mean they are not suitable for adults.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
You're not kidding. In the primary school my mother taught at, they introduced a policy where the teachers weren't allowed to use red ink to mark a kid's work as red was a very negative colour and would make the kids feel bad. Blue or green ink only. They couldn't throw a crap piece of work back and tell the kid the work was appaling, oh no... they had to tell them what was good about the piece of shit work, and subtely hint at what could be improved next time. The poor little sweehearts then wouldn't get upset and feel bad over having spent 5 minutes on a piece of homework that should take an hour...
To add insult to injury, other policies were introduced such that teachers were paid in direct relation to how well their students performed in exams. Been given 35 children who refuse to learn? no bonus for you this year!
Finally, to save money and to prevent upsetting the kids more, sets were abolished. Smarter kids were no longer separated from the idiots. Of course, the smart kids of a class don't bring the standard up, the dumbasses mucking around in the back drag the standard down. Everyone loses.
http://www.frenchgeek.com/
but the yahoos who accompanied him got a good ass whoopin'
I take it you don't live in the UK then. More likely they got counselling and a nice holiday somewhere warm!
Yes, there are times when it looks as if schoolkids in the UK have been given a status nearly like medieval child princes, who had whipping-boys who got 'whooped' in their places when the princes did something bad.
The teachers' unions now seem to take for granted this world where bystanders and victims sometimes are made to pay for what delinquent children and youths do -- so when a union representative "called for more rigorous legislative control of internet sites" I have to wonder if this isn't the union selecting the internet service provider as next in line for the status of whipping-boy.
-wb-
While it's not what responsible for kids turning into little shits (I actually think kids have always tended to be little shits, the current crop might be worse than usual but I think a lot of the anxiety around today's youth is because their shitiness is better reported), I do think the "Ban It!" culture that has developed in the UK is making things worse, because the more stuff you ban, the greater likelyhood of somebody breaking the ban, and once someone breaks one ban, breaking other bans becomes easier, and for some people that means breaking bans/rules/laws becomes a normal way of life. And not just with kids - I think adults are getting worse too.
I don't understand why certain parts of society (and the media in particular) have become so afraid of personal freedom. Look at the reaction to the easing up of licencing laws - according to the media, the "world was going to end". That didn't happen, but any chance to bash the new laws is front page news, but any news that lends support to the new laws is a single paragraph, buried somewhere deep inside. The smoking ban is being wildly praised - but I bet that there will be some serious issues afterwards (such as having large numbers of drunk people hanging around outside pubs), that will just result in more calls for more things to be banned.
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
if, instead of attacking the rights of the entire society, people would insist that parents taught their children the difference between right and wrong. This is yet another side effect of the "we mustn't damage their esteem" child psychology crap. A good spanking or two would do wonders with most of these kids.
For "Youtube saddam execution". I bet that footage is making the government of Iraq rather uncomfortable right about now. They had some high level government minister on NPR the other day and he changed his story about three times when they kept asking him the same question over and over again. Those questions never would have been raised if this video hadn't surfaced.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?