Editorial
Journal of the Virginia Society for Technology in Education

Values for Sale or Rent

by William Warrick

The explosion of the Internet and, in particular, its inclusion as a research and communication tool in our schools has given rise to a kind of hysteria. While the Internet has been favorably compared to the printing press for it's potential impact on global access to information and communication, it has also been touted as a haven for child molesters, pornographers, and bomb makers. The press became filled with tales, some apocryphal, of children learning to make bombs, being abducted, or abused. Administrators once anxious to exploit the Internet, now worry more about protecting the children from harm.

In the headlong rush to assuage the community and protect themselves from lawsuits, school systems purchased and installed filtering mechanisms. Very often these filtering services were purchased without much thought or care as to how they worked. School districts took on the task of filtering Internet content without pausing to consider the moral, philosophical, or educational aspects of these actions. As a result, we have introduced an arbiter into our schools to judge the relevance and appropriateness of all material found on the Internet. This arbiter is silent and undemanding and goes about its business without input from, or sensitivity to the values of, the community.

Teachers, administrators, school boards, and the community need to look closely at the systems that are put into place to regulate the information that flows into our schools. Upon close inspection, Internet filtering systems are found to have a number of serious flaws.

First and foremost, they don't work. Thousands of dollars are being poured into these systems and the companies that produce them admit that they are not 100% effective. No system has yet been devised that will filter out all objectionable material. With the number of web pages now approaching one billion, even 99% effectiveness would leave millions of web pages unfiltered. Conversely, they will sometimes work too well. Most of us are familiar with the 'baby with the bath water' scenario, where students are denied access to a page which contains the phrase "crack an egg" because of the word "crack".

Filtering software can be programmed to filter certain sites or content based on words or phrases. This puts the burden on school districts to define acceptable and unacceptable. It might be very obvious in some cases that a web site has no place in the schools, but what happens when it is not so obvious? Gay issues, religious information, alternative lifestyles - each of these can fall into a gray area that is difficult to define as appropriate or inappropriate.

An alternative is to let the filtering publishers define criteria for filtering. Rather than take on the task of deciding what is and is not appropriate locally, schools defer to a faceless company with its own agenda - which may go beyond simply the protection of the children. Typically, the list of objectionable words and sites that are filtered are kept secret from the consumer. When lists have been made public, they have been found to contain words and phrases which are designed to prevent access to information on political groups, religious organizations, and even competitors of the company providing the filters. In short, in the name of protecting the students from an ill-defined and rather nebulous threat, schools engage in 'renting' values and judgments from the Internet filtering company.

In this Information Age we put a greater emphasis on developing students' skills related accessing and evaluating information. If we are to filter/censor the information to which the student has access, then the importance of these skills is diminished.

When all is said and done, the rush to filter, monitor, or censor the Internet is largely due to media hype over the darker side of the Internet. It is not based at all on the likelihood that students will inadvertently access sites that are pornographic or objectionable. Students who are trained in the use of the Internet (as all students should be prior to being given access), and are using the Internet for school related tasks have a relatively small chance of encountering a site that is pornographic. They form a much smaller percentage than the news media would have us believe. Rather than expend time and money on reducing the already minimal risks of accessing 'objectionable' material, schools should concentrate on developing students who are able to evaluate the information resources available to them.