Net Nannies: No Pagans
Wednesday October 17, 2007
Middle school students in a Massachusets school use the internet for schoolwork. Unfortunately, their internet is a smaller, restricted version of the one the rest of us has access to- and conveniently, this internet has no pagans, no mythology, no occult, and no pesky liberal politics.
The school agrees that the software it uses is too restrictive, but protests that less restrictive filters will cost too much.
Comments
Great little article, way to go for these students to be pulling for the changes they think need to be made. The last line unsettles me a little though:
“but you want to make sure they are seeing things they should be seeing”
This statement by a High School Principal smacks of bad news. Personally I think the only thing a public school should be able to censor is illegal/adult material. Beyond that, filtering large portions of the web for content is an egregious support of institutionalized knowledge, where only “approved” knowledge is real and valid. I’m not an alarmist, but these types of things have the flavor of China about them.
This is frightening. Censorship on what people are allowed to know about. Communism and Nazism used censorship. Just before they killed or imprisoned the journalists, writers and intellectuals, not to mention politically outspoken. This is terrible news. I’m still mad that no one told me we were at war in 1950 with Korea, and I was 5 and I had a right to know what was going on in the world. Why protect children by keeping them ignorant?
If the rinky-dink little town I went to high school in can afford filters that aren’t that restrictive, so can these people. Honestly…