I am in favor of removing the blocking software mandated by
the CIPA, at least for high schools.
Although I agree that children do need to be protected from things that
they aren’t ready for, I believe that almost all high school-aged minors are
old enough to merit less of this “protection”.
When a blanket software like this is used, it inevitably ends up doing
more harm than good to parts of the group that it’s being used on.
Take
the computer-related classes, for example.
If a student is working on a project in which specific images are
required, but those images happen to be blocked by the admittedly overzealous
filter, then they’re going to have a problem.
Because of that problem, the project could be delayed (if the student
waits until they’re at home and the school day is over to find the image) or
not completed correctly (if the student uses the tiny unblocked thumbnail
image).
The filter
even affects teachers. Last year in
German class, my teacher had arranged for the class to Skype with a friend from
Germany. Unfortunately, the filter
software caused Skype to malfunction and refuse to work correctly. When a solution was finally found, it
involved using a lower-quality application which was almost more trouble than
it was worth to use. This is just one
example of the issues with the filter – I’ve seen it block teachers from doing all
kinds of things that were actually related to the lesson they were teaching.
With
these issues in mind, I am not in favor of using the blocking software. Using a “protect ALL the minors!” viewpoint
when it comes to things like the internet is ridiculous. In that case, why don’t you just ban any
books with violence from all school libraries?
Or any book that mentions anything that’s even slightly
inappropriate? It would make the English
teachers’ jobs nearly impossible, but that’s essentially what the internet
filter does to computer-related classes.
High-school-aged minors (usually) have more maturity than elementary-
and middle-school-aged minors, and I think the internet filter (or rather, lack
thereof) should reflect that.
