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Fixing Internet Censorship In Schools
jcatcw writes "Schools and libraries are hurting students by setting up heavy-handed Web filtering. The problem goes back for years. A filter blocked the Web site of former House Majority Leader Richard Armey because it detected the word 'dick,' according to a 2001 study from the Brennan Center of Justice. The purpose of schools should be to teach students to live in a democratic society, and that means teaching critical thinking and showing students controversial Web sites, says Craig Cunningham, a professor at National-Louis University. He quoted from a National Research Council study: 'Swimming pools can be dangerous for children. To protect them, one can install locks ... [or] teach them to swim.' Web filtering also leads to inequities in education based on household income. Students from more affluent areas have access to the Internet at home and, often, more enlightened parents who can let them access information blocked in schools and libraries. Poorer students without home access don't have those opportunities."
think.....of......the.......children.......
Won't somebody think of the lock makers!
...because denying knowledge is such a great idea.
Living With a Nerd
'Swimming pools can be dangerous for children. To protect them, one can install locks ... [or] teach them to swim.'
I'm tired & slow today... someone please explain this analogy with respect to internet porn (which is the context from which the quote was taken). The possibilities seem endless.
...it is to protect teachers and adminstrators against religious zealots.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Many kids I know nowadays have a phone with web access enabled. Why bother trying to block facebook when they can just simply browse over their cell phones?
Heck when I was in high school I had a teacher use a wireless air card to get onto youtube since the district tech staff were blocking so many websites for no reason whatsoever.
Doesn't let children under 8 enter the pool without an adult accompanying them. and staying close by. Seems a fair enough analogy.
...from someone who doesn't work for a school district, nor will be crucified by the politicians, school board (who are politicians), parents, and news media when little johnny pulls up something "objectionable".
actually people loose their actual careers over this kinda stuff.... you have to at least *try* to filter.
THL phish sticks
Do a search for "yiff" or "yiffing" on a filtered computer or search engine. It'll glide ride past to some pretty amazing stuff. Also try going to rangarig.net on a filtered computer. You'll be stunned.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I disagree with your premise.
Schools definitely need highly restrictive filters since any inappropriate content displayed on school computers is unacceptable. Basically, the filter set needs to satisfy the most restrictive church going mothers.
If you really want a kid to learn how computers work, put a filter between them in the internet. They'll figure out a way to circumvent it if they're smart. And if they're too stupid to break out, think of it as a your-kid filter for the internet and not an internet filter for your kid.
Everybody wins!
Children aren't taught critical thinking because they might grow up to be... critical thinkers.
Unthinking, uncritical people are easier to control and/or coerce to your will.
No single solution will be perfect in a "for the children" argument.
Here is what I would do/suggest.
1) Make a sensible AUP for school computers. No Porn, etc.
2) Have sensible punishments for breaking the AUP. (No cops, no expulsions. Detention sure, suspension/parental notification, if you have to.)
3) Leave the net _wide open_ for each student.
4) Log all activity so that in the event it is suspected a student broke the AUP you can verify the infringement took place and apply a sensible punishment.
5) Break the AUP too many times and you can only use school computers under strict filters, or under direct supervision (read: someone watching over your shoulder) in addition to normal punishment.
Don't coddle. Don't expell. Don't freak out. Just teach the kids what is and isn't acceptable and let them learn how to deal with rules and sensible punishments.
Yes, this means kids might get exposed to hardcore porn from time to time. Big f'in deal. For me the net wasn't around and I saw good ol' VHS tapes. It happens whether you threaten death as a punishment or cookies as a reward. It will still happen.
But in my opinion. School is there to learn, not stifle. Teach and use the full brunt of the tools we have to do it.
Sadly, probably won't happen because little miss perfect's perfect mother will sue the school because her daughter heard that another student might have seen a naked picture on a school computer.
In order to receive Federal E-Rate discounts, public schools are required to have filtering mechanisms in place that meet the standards set by the Children's Internet Protection Act.
I've administered K12 networks with internet access for over 15 years (both pre-CIPA, and post CIPA)... I personally preferred not having to filter and teaching personal responsibility, especially with high school students. Usually a couple times a semester a student would make a bad choice, and would be made an example of.... which would usually keep the rest of the students on the straight and narrow.
But for now, CIPA is the law of the land, so if you want free choice and thinking on your school's internet connection, contact your senator and congressman, because local admins really have no choice in this matter.
I like how a blog post that simply states, without evidence, that web filters lead to income-based educational inequalities is simply asserted in TFS as a fact. Also how TFS chooses to copy text directly from said blog post without using quotation marks.
Kids in poorer homes probably miss out on a lot of opportunities. Are you going to legislate that away too ?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
It may be all about lawsuits. If some precious snowflake sees another looking at some illicit site at school and tells his parents, the school would almost certainly face legal repercussions because it was "preventable" on some level. Block 'em all and you don't have to deal with that.
The purpose of schools should be to teach students to live in a democratic society, and that means teaching critical thinking and showing students controversial Web sites, says Craig Cunningham, a professor at National-Louis University.
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/03/25/teachers-leave-boy-stranded-tree-school-policy/
That is a story about a 5 year old being stranded in a tree. The teachers "watched from afar" because of a school policy. A passerby stopped to help, and now faces possible legal action. That example happens to from the UK, but there is plenty of the same sort of thing going on in the US. We are being conditioned to not to do anything without the approval and assistance of the government.
The Nanny state would not like it if people could think critically all on their own without the government there to make sure they don't hurt themselves.
"The purpose of schools should be to teach students to live in a democratic society, and that means teaching critical thinking..."
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hmm, I just learned to be sneaky enough to get admin access to the network at school, and relevant passwords to bypass the filters. Perhaps they're really just teaching the students how to be sneaky?
Just another ignorant American.
Internet filtering is a false promise. It provides a false sense of security: no one will be able to look at naked women and Goats.cx with filtering on. Its a business function completely based upon a false premise.
Many tools exist that even kids can understand to bypass filtering. For example, Circumventor. Totally simple way to bypass lots of security filters. URL obfuscation. Sites exist to HELP you obfuscate URLs.
In the vein of the article... assuming you MUST use filtering (and many libraries must in order to get state/federal funding... ) its entirely correct: the decision on what is obscene and what is not should not be made by a system admin or more specifically, by a software developer who may exist in a completely different community with entirely different views on what is obscene and what is not.
Oh, and I AM thinking of the children. I don't want my kids growing up to be afraid of swear words, naked people, or other obscenities, and retreating from society to hide in a Pakistan cave... Technology cannot cure society ills. At least not until we can effectively erase free will and turn everyone into automatons...
Teach children to think? No! We have a book and computers to do that for them.
My mother used to teach Biology at 6th form level (~16-18 year olds.) STDs are really important parts of the syllabus and she found that it was impossible for her students to research the topic on the internet in her college because of proxy filtering. Whilst porn is not appropriate in schools, it is clear that "sex" doesn't mean porn.
Caveats:
1. I am an anonomous coward
2. I have read only half the summary and not the article (normal here no?)
3. Long time lurker; Never bothered to post before
My wife is an Art teacher and runs in to this problem all of the time. She tries to show her students famous works of art, the easiest way being through Google Image Search. Of course, this doesn't work, since you could possibly get something bad. For now, she uses Bing's image search, but it's only a matter of time before this is killed, too.
How about just leaving the libraries and schools for learning reading, writing and arithmetic and letting the parents determine how their kids are raised socially?
LEAVE THE FILTERING IN PLACE!!!!!
That I just finished reading this.
An inaccurate story, as it turns out. It didn't happen that way at all.
As usual, Fox is a source of negative information.
Anyway, isn't it kind of odd to claim that the neglect of a child (which, I repeat, did not actually occur) means the promotion of the "Nanny state"? Aren't nannies supposed to be protecting children, not neglecting them? But I guess that would require some thought about just what a "Nanny state" means, and it's clearly not a phrase meant to provoke thought; it's just a right-wing shibboleth.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
The reality is that we generally try to put some level of protection so that kids don't happen upon information that they aren't prepared to deal with until they've been taught. Unfortunately, you can't teach anyone everything all at once.
We don't generally leave poisonous chemicals or boxes of matches laying around where uninformed kids will get to them. We've found that it's not practical to teach them all about the dangers of everything all at once, especially when they're too young to understand the dangers. We protect them from some things for some period of time, until they're ready to handle the responsibility.
Information can be just as dangerous, when handed out without the proper training., I believe that some level of protection from some types of information on the internet is justified to protect those who haven't yet learned enough to use the information responsibly.
"Swimming pools can be dangerous for children. To protect them, one can install locks ... [or] teach them to swim."
If you fill one swimming pool with chlorinated water, and another with beer, which one will the kids want to be around? And what will they do when they get there?
On the other hand, you need lifeguards at both, until the kids are sufficiently mature to not drown so easily. Which will happen much later at the beer pool. You'll need a curfew and age limits.
So much for analogy.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Children don't learn critical thinking in school because critical thinking can't be learned in a controlled environment.
Let's be honest. Filtering is about not getting sued. Kids go home and see way worse. Then they come back to school with that URL, and they would leave it on a screen for all to see. I know; I did it. Stupid, 8-bit gifs of boobies, because I could. If the wrong person sees that, someone gets in trouble. If a parent hears though that whitehouse.com is available without a reasonable measure of protection, all holy hell fire and brimstone is comin' down on your terrorist school for those boobies. But don't forget; you can't unsee goatse. You sure you want a 9 year old going there? I'm all for freedoms, but let's just be a little careful.
Guys, seriously? Everyone agrees filtering can be bad and blocks good/legit websites! But think about it from the administrations perspective. You see schools getting sued all the time and teachers getting fired for mentioning different religions, sex, drugs, evolution in Texas. The problem isn't that there isn't a need for the hard filtering, we need to prevent these dumb as shit lawsuits from going anywhere and let teachers teach.
Parents, take responsibility for your dumbass kid and spank his 17 year old ass when he looks at porn at school, don't complain that he was able to.
~Mekkah
Some laws says that libraries must trun it off request.
Poor guy. Not only did he serve under Bush, he's also the single most filtered guy on the Internet.
So I actually work in a school as an Americorps VISTA. My job is to help expand our after-school programs and find grants and opportunities for our kids. The webfilter at my work is maniacal and idiotic.
It blocked me from researching gang prevention programs simply because it had the word "Gang" in it. For ages, it kept me from accessing google docs, for so called "productivity reasons" I can only assume that the webfilter was designed to keep those using it from actually being productive. I can get access to blocked websites, but I have to wait weeks as our Central IT office processes my HAND WRITTEN PAPER REQUEST FORM to gain access.
It keeps our teachers from accessing YouTube, which would otherwise allow them to show footage from documentaries and videos relating to politics, nature, science and anything else useful.
The children at our school (preK-8) only use the computers in our computer lab, where they are under constant surveillance, so why bother with the webfilter? They can be easily controlled and monitored by the teachers themselves, and so the filter only keeps people like me from being able to do their job at the office.
It is possible to educate kids about dangers without leaving access to that "danger" uncontrolled. Personally, I like to teach my kids to swim, AND lock the gate to the pool when it's unsupervised. It keeps really young kids out (who haven't yet learned to swim), and it's a discouragement to elementary-age kids to help them "remember" the rules, and the older kids know where the key is. I teach my kids not to talk to strangers, but that doesn't mean I'll leave my 4-year old alone in the mall (or playing on the internet).
Stop fucking calling it that.
There is a time and place for everything, and random browsing of whatever you want is not something that you do at school.
If you think keeping students focused on school work and not dicking off reading slashdot, digg, or screwing with facebook is censorship then you are, in fact, a freaking moron.
Stop calling everything censorship just because you don't get your way.
There was a time when saying something was censored meant something, now it just means some douche bag on the Internet could spout his mouth off or do whatever he/she wanted to someone else.
When you run into someones house and call them a cock sucking faggot and then you get your ass beat by him and his boyfriend, you didn't get censored, you get your ass beat for being a fucking moron, and thats exactly what this is.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
... Chinese! Or Chavez as his timezone is closer and he can adopt his schedule for some webex work.
http://opencm3.net, http://www.nongnu.org/gm2/
I've found OpenDNS works really well, and has enough setting levels that an appropriate one can be chosen by each school or district.
I'm an undergrad student in computer science.
90% of the time when I have a coding problem or error that I have to fix, I google it to try to find solutions or people with similar problems. The same thing applies whenever something goes wrong with a computer program/application/game/driver that I'm using.
Hell, most professors will tell you that the goal isn't to teach you how to do everything from scratch, the goal is to teach you how to use what's already there (a.k.a. google it and steal/use other people's code).
Doing stuff like that would be almost impossible behind a typical High School filter. The net was basically unusable for anything except specifically approved sites that the teachers told you to go to.
I think preparing students for their future studies/the real world is a much better goal than stopping them from using youtube.
Why bother trying to block facebook when they can just simply browse over their cell phones?
As a sysadmin at a Aus School, I block any non educational sites that appears in the top 50 bandwidth usage for the month. Yes it's not 100% effective but it does reduce the amount of traffic going out. Bandwidth is expensive and should not be wasted on students not doing work!
A nanny state is a place where the rules of the land overwhelm and common sense, as happened in the scenario presented.
It is ironic, is it not, that the 'Nanny' which is supposed to protect can in fact lead to situations where people are neglected.
I have now read two accounts of the story (the one you posted and the one from idle) and as they don't match, I'll choose not to believe either of them. If I cared more I'd look for more evidence.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
My school censorship is, to say the least, strange. It will happily show whatever thumbnails Google Images with safe search off comes up with, Fail Blog - rather "un-educational" and Youtube, but block sites such as slashdot and even php.net. Really don't know what is evil about that site.
Browser Extensions such as Deepnet (http://deepnet.us) are one tool students can use to battle internet censorship. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vSu15E26Ms&feature=player_embedded
As a classroom teacher I have run into the filters at my school and have felt frustration as to what I was being filtered from let alone the more restrictive student access. I have discussed this issue with several of our IT people and there are several good reasons to filter: 1. Inappropriate Material - While many people focus on the porn issues this is not the main reason for filtering in our district; rather it it to help the teachers from having to monitor all the computer activity all the time and to keep the focus on teaching and learning. While many appropriate sites do get blocked and people claim censorship; if it is an appropriate site it can be put on the white list in under 24 hours for all students to access and teachers can use a bypass code on the student computer for that site until it is. If districts don't have a system like this in place perhaps they need to look at the quality of IT people that they higher. From what I have noticed the best and brightest IT people don't always go into a school system. The average school just doesn't pay what industry pays. 2. Bandwidth - Streaming media is taking up more and more of our school's bandwidth. There are so many great things for student's and teacher to use but adding more high speed bandwidth is not anywhere close in cost to what you pay in your home. Our district has been falling behind in keeping up with the demand for only 3 years and to catch-up it is going to cost $10,000 - $30,000 a dedicated fiber line is not cheap. (If this price seems high let me know so I can call 'BS' on out tech department and to tell them to stop being lazy)
where is Sergey the pious when you need him the most?
I have to agree, Internet censorship rarely works in practise. One place where it has become extremely stupid is at public schools in NSW, Australia which block everything apart from Wikipedia, Google and a few websites they haven't got round to blocking yet (but if you go to them, it is almost guaranteed to be blocked with in the week). Blocked sites include yahoo, bing, AOL, askjeves, altavista and any Google website that is not www.google.com.au (the au and the www are required).
This basically makes it impossible to do research on a topic unless Wikipedia has detailed information on in, or unless no one else in the state has researched it recently (it's a black list not a white list). Also interestingly all of slashdot apart from the politics sub-domain is unblocked.
null
Dick Armey? Who's his wife, Vagina Coastguard?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Students from more affluent areas have... often, more enlightened parents... Poorer students without home access don't have those opportunities.
WTF?!?!?! Poor families are less enlightened, as a rule? So poor equals dumb, and rich equals smart. Huh. Yeah. That totally makes sense. Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton must have been the smartest kids in school!!
there is no spoon. or fork. there is a butter knife, and it's dull.
I work at a rural k12 school district. I would have to say I have an ecclectic internet pattern and Ive only run into a blocked page a handful of times. I have to say I ejoy the filtered internet as I dont see ads or get distracted by the other parts of the internet.
I've never hit a blocked political, wikipedia, religous, or academic page. Social networking, and video services are blocked but thats more of a bandwidth issue than censorship. It really comes down to CiPA which says no porn for children. This is not inconsistent with a bunch of other laws on the books (ie, 18 to buy a playboy? i mean come on thats tame compared to the stuff on the net).
It really comes down to this; angry repressed white folk dont like the idea of children viewing naked human bodies. I think, they think, everyone will go plum crazy and fuck like rabitts in the street. if a majority of young people get exposed to their sexuality at a early age. This will cause them to be viewed as prudes, and will seriously impact their getten any.
Even if you DO teach the kids to swim, that doesn't necessarily mean its safe to allow young kids to swim without supervision.
Please make sure my kids can see all the anal porn, racism, bomb-making instructions and meth recipes possible. Thanks!
Futurist Traditionalism
My old teacher had a good approach; "i don't want to see anything you wouldn't show to your grandmother".while keeping the filter open. he did catch some pornsurfers during break, but they understood the name of the game when they found themselves writing everything during two following lessons by hand.
During classes he had the killswitch on all the time, he opened the net only when an assignment required a bit of ACTUAL research.
(hmmh.. my english sounds so broken when i write drunk. apologies)
Public and Charter schools and libraries get a federal subsidy for their internet connections.
Its based in part off their free/reduced lunch program percentage.
If a school has 45% of their kids on Free/Reduced lunch, then they receive a 45% subsidy on their internet access costs.
So, a $2000/mo a month fiber connection is really only $1100/mo.
One of the caveats of this subsidy is a reasonable effort to filter objectionable and inappropriate content from the internet.
May IT managers/tech coordinators in Public Education take this overboard with massive heavy handed filtering with a fair amount of finger wagging.
Someone should set up a demonstration. Get a computer, place it behind the best and most expensive filtering system money can buy. Demonstrate how easy it is to bypass the filter and access blocked content. Demonstrate that the filter does not block anywhere near all the "bad content" out there. Demonstrate the filter blocking legitimate content (content which even the most conservative parents would have no objection to and which has genuine educational value).
Show the politicians and conservative parents that the filter is totally useless and that kids who want to get to porn will do it anyway.
If they say "we just need a better and more effective filter", point out that the filter you used for the demonstration is the best filter money can buy and that there IS nothing better.
Also point out just how much of the limited resources of underfunded school districts has to be spent on buying, maintaining, upgrading and administering these filters (and list a bunch of other educational things that could be bought instead)
The problem is, we are talking about people accessing the Internet that do not understand the toxic nature of a nice friendly text article that has (snuff, cannibalism) in the title.
Do you think that pre-teen boys will find this stuff, understand that maybe any story like this is just too utterly gross for them and skip it? No, sorry, they will not skip it. When the parent then is complaining to the school about the nightmares because of this exposure what happens?
There are clearly three levels:
Until you get to the last level, you are dealing with people that think because they see an email about getting a free phone if they forward a chain letter. So of course they do it. You have the pre-teen boys that spend weeks grossing each other out reading snuff fantasy stories, and then one budding delinquent thinks it might be fun to enact one of them. We are talking about people that do not have control over their own minds and do not understand what they are letting themselves in for.
It is like the people that believed AOL was asking them for their passwords and then were surprised when people were calling them idiots.
Children, especially in groups (like a school) need to be protected from themselves and what others in their peer group are trying to egg them on to doing.
Sure, a lot of filters can be circumvented pretty easily. This is a problem and the solution isn't to turn every child (and immature, uneducated adult) loose upon the world. And the problem as far as I am concerned has nothing to do with pictures of naked women. It has to do with concepts that will utterly frighten beyond all reason. Movies with live-action rape and snuff enactments. Stories about people deriving pleasure from rape, murder and torture. Worse yet, stories about people that derive pleasure from being tortured. Exposing children (and immature adults) will absolutely result in reenactment, especially when egged on by peers.
When I was a small child there was a cartoon show about Hercules. In this show he would jump off Mt. Olympus while yelling something about how he was coming to some mortal's rescue or something. This cartoon is not shown anymore and one reason is the number of small boys that would jump from various heights while yelling something similar. Broken legs, broken arms and death resulted. You can say all you want about how the children should have known better, but they didn't. You can say all you want about how it was their parent's responsibility to ensure their children did not reenact such actions, but it didn't happen that way. Putting the idea of jumping off a mountain into the child's head was the foundation of the problem and repeating and reinforcing it with multiple viewings per week just made sure it would happen in every community.
So instead of saying filters don't work, scrap them how about thinking how we can protect the Internet from people that think they want to get the latest botnet infection? How about thinking how we can have children not exposed to snuff fantasy until they understand that some people write this sort of stuff without any intention that people will actually do it? Sure, as a parent I know enough to have a chat with a child that responds to a rape video with "Cool!", but what happens when it is four boys in the school library?
I'm still at college. I'm very anti-censorship. However, this is not a case of censoring material that is ethically objectionable. This is a case of actually getting kids to do what they should be doing. Our college employs a rather heavy-handed filtering system that will block a LOT of stuff that it is not intended to. While I was doing a project on euthanasia about four years back, I found it impossible to do any research while at school because the word 'suicide' - as in 'assisted suicide' - would result in a blocked webpage. However, while this may be an example of poor implementation of webfiltering software, it's incredibly easy to see that it's there for a reason. This is a respectable private school, yet I would hesitate to say even that 10% of the students attempt to remain on task while given a lesson to do something on a computer. It turns into a session of communication via web-based email or IM services, playing flash games and searching for proxies that remain unblocked in order to access other censored material. I can guarantee that if it weren't for the filter, nothing would get done by these 17 and 18 year old kids who are supposedly going to be the future leaders of Australia. So when it's their downtime and they're at home, I agree absolutely that the web should remain both neutral and unfiltered. But in a school situation, there need to be boundaries set so that they'll actually do something useful.
This is what proxies are for. Set one up on a dynamic IP and they have no way to block it.
I care not for your karma and your mod points.
People these days have gone off the deep end in the search for 'equal rights for everyone'.....including children. It's quite ridiculous.
The true purpose for filtering or keeping anything away from a child (sex, the internet, mobile phones, guns, the ability to drive, etc, etc, etc) is to protect them from hurting themselves until they are mentally and physically capable of handling those things, and making wise decisions regarding them. The majority of these potentially life-altering and harmful subjects aren't things that children are able to adequately handle until they are likely 16-18 years old or even older. Yet people keep trying to convince themselves that children are capable of dealing with these things properly....treat them like adults....and we end up with poor-decision making pre-teens that act like entitled 30 year olds.
It's bad for our society's present and future. Everyone else ends up paying for it (literally and figuratively). It needs to end.
This is missing the point.
Schools apply filtering, not only to protect children but also to protect themselves as organisations. If you have no filtering then all it takes is a overzealous parent and a lawyer or journalist. The school's reputation is sullied affecting intake of students, funding and in all likelihood the long term viability of the school without being put into special measures and having control taken from the governing body running them.
Schools pay £000's to filter traffic because the consequences of not doing it are worse for the school and therefore the students that they do manage to educate.
Students from more affluent areas have access to the Internet at home and, often, more liberal parents who can let them access information blocked in schools and libraries.
FTFY
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife