Local authorities have loaded up with Net filters to ensure pornography and violence dont get into the classroom. But is nannying children the best way to let them learn about the World Wide Web?
| The quest to safeguard childrens moral upbringing may have gone a step too far. |
Doug Brown is a man who makes IT sound exciting. Im responsible for the information communication technology strategy across the whole city, he beams. To be sure, the scope of his work at Birmingham City Council is impressive: Were working with 500 educational institutions, plus all the offices; nine thousand teachers, in total 220 thousand young people.
However, taking schools with one lumpen BBC computer in a dark corner of the science lab and accelerating them onto the information superhighway has given the council and headteachers alike an almighty headache. Head-teachers all over the country would be curling at the thought of students accessing pornography in their school and that getting into the papers, admits Chris Maitland, Head of Media Studies and Drama at Bournville School in the south of the city.
But the quest to safeguard childrens moral upbringing with centrally controlled filters may have gone a step too far. Missing from the access debate are the views and experience of its younger users, and it is pupils and their teachers who complain the filters inhibit learning.
Grumbles from pupils using the Birmingham Grid for Learning a specially created network of educational sites, the like of which are being created across the UK include being bounced out of parts of The Guardian newspaper site and sports sites. Teachers using the network have reported being blocked from accessing information about Silverstone race track (the sports ban again), yet finding themselves all too readily at online ouija boards.
Its not that pupils and teachers are against filtering of any sort. But some approaches to screening appear to be too blunt. I personally think that particularly harmful things for young people might be things such as the occult, Satanism for example. People messing about with ouija boards is a very very bad idea. Its been proven to be a bad idea, says Chris. But all these things are freely available on the Net. None of them are filtered.
He also questions whether the sports ban, thought to be introduced to stop kids clocking up expensive telephone bills, is self-defeating. What are teenage boys going to be most interested in looking at? Football. The way I learned about the Internet was through basically surfing around and looking at things Im interested in. So yes, sports sites, film sites and odd little sites that you hear about and that catch your eye sites that become kind of trendy for no good reason, like The Dancing Baby and The Dancing Hamsters.
Doug Brown concedes theres room for improvement: We know that some sites were immediately banned for being too violent and yet they were directly related to the Second World War and aspects of the National Curriculum. Immediately we have a problem because those sites are very valid. We should be releasing them. I would be extremely irritated if I wanted to access something sensible like The Guardian and I was stopped.
He admits it was a mistake to think a universal set of criteria for the filters would both block undesirable sites and stimulate interest, promote learning and exploit the potential of the Net. He says, Im setting up a group to look at the sites currently protected by the filtering system and they will have the final say as to whether those sites will be available of not. But he maintains that it was better to begin cautiously. I do think there is a level at which authorities and schools have to take some decisions about what is morally acceptable and what isnt in terms of the community.
The good news is that many schools have it within their means to release any sites that are blocked centrally. And officials like Doug are actively encouraging schools to involve their pupils in decisions about which of these should be available.
Meanwhile, young people can take consolation in the fact that theyre not the only ones boiling up at the bans. Its not just something were saying to students," says Doug. Were making a statement that says whats inappropriate for anybody in an educational environment.
About the team
This article was produced by Ian Kennedy, 18, Nigel Nyumbu, 17, and Michael Kalam, 15. It was published in Internet Monthly.
