Government Mandated Morality

Doing some background research for their own TED - style talks, several of the students in my class have run into the filter. I wrote not that long ago about my first experience with it, and my surprise at even finding it. Now the kids are running into the wall. One of my students is doing a project on animal cruelty and has decided to focus on the fur trade in China. She has found several gruesome videos online but was very surprised after running a YouTube search to have many of the videos blocked. She had never seen the screen before and called me over asking of course, "What is this?" After I tried to explain she was shocked, saying that there was nothing wrong with what she was looking up and that she was being denied basic research. The people who organized the filter and who chose what to block were getting in the way of her learning. "Do they not want me to learn about this stuff?" she asked*

Combined with hearing one of our highschool teachers asking our technician about the filter since he had found a resource at home that he wanted to use and then came in and found it was blocked in the building, this has me thinking again.

I am still vastly against even the idea of filtering. Filtering content is a messy, inexact, and inappropriate solution to their being "bad things" online. I find it offensive and pure and simple censorship; something democracies should abhor. But as I think about our situation more, I am also worried. The Internet service that our school is provided with comes via a Manitoba government service called MERLIN. They provide highspeed service to many hospitals, libraries and schools. So in the end, it is my democratically elected government that is restricting the access of my students to information and content.

Far too big brotherish for my liking.

I am not suggesting a conspiracy at any level, but it is disturbing. My government is deciding upon the morality of the content that we are able to access. The filters are set up and run from a central location before the service reaches local computers. As much as I am against it, it is different if these decisions are made locally in response to actual problems (not perceived problems, or in the name of potentially protecting someone), but when the service is filtered at a provincial level by a government service, there is something very wrong with this picture.

* (The student in my class also found it very amusing that although she could not directly access the content she wanted through a search, if she found the videos she wanted in the YouTube related search sidebar, she was able to watch them. How long do you think it will take them to figure out how to beat the system?)

Tags: filters, school, MERLIN, Manitoba

Comments

[Doug Noon]

I've been running into this filter more and more. The first time I saw it was on a day when it blocked the kids from their own website! Since then, it has inexplicably popped up on searches for information about philosophy topics. The "reasoning" in the category almost never correctly describes the content in the site I'm trying to reach - except for one time - when it said "Personal websites; blogs." I asked the librarian to call the tech center about that one, and it was taken care of immediately.

Filters are not smart. And neither is filtering. The teacher in the room should be trusted to do it with the computers, as we do with every other information source.

[Jason]

I am running into the filter more recently. They are changing filters which will work out better in the end I hear. Fortunately my IT guy is willing to make some adjustments to the filter. But now I have to jump through hoops to access my blogs at school. Don't really like that, but it is part of the package when you accept federal funds (e-rate) in the US. If you don't comply with CIPA you don't get funding.
I guess it is the nature of the beast.

[tim]

It's true that in the US we are required to filter as a trade off for receiving e-rate funds. However, the law is pretty general and most school systems, block far more than they are required to.

Our district, like Clarence's, turns the actual job of blocking over to an outside organization that has some kind of mysterious formula they apply. The result is a similar message where the eye in the sky lets you the site just beyond is just too evil to be viewed.

The bottom line is that our administrators don't trust teachers to manage use of the web in their classrooms. And they're deathly afraid of some student finding something "bad", whatever that is. But we don't want to spend any time or money training teachers learn to manage the internet. And there's certainly nothing in the curriculum for teaching kids to do their own "filtering" of what they find.

[Clarence Fisher]

The "personal filtering" is essential. When kids run into something that is inappropriate in our building, we expect them in our building to call us over, show us what they have found and explain how they got to this place. Anything found on the history files of machines that does not match up with one of these times of explanation is investigated and kids are held to account. While so far the filtering has been mild, lets hope these situations for dialogue continue t exist. They are VERY teachable moments.