As I network with other teachers I am amazed by the amount of censorship happening in our schools with regards to the Internet. Sites of immensely valuable educational value are being blocked because of the fear students may come across indecent content.

YouTube is blocked from all government schools in the Australian state of Victoria. Tens of thousands of students are missing out on an educational gold mine. Hundreds of teachers cannot access the endless library of resources provided on YouTube. I rarely go a week without showing something to one of my classes that I discovered on YouTube.

A high school down the road from me has instituted a policy barring any references to Wikipedia in student assignments. Why? Because the administrators feel that Wikipedia cannot be trusted as a reliable source. So they banned it. The zillions of incredible entries contained on that site have no educational value to the students at this school. Instead of teaching their students about critical literacies and verifying facts through multiple resources, this school took the easy road and banned Wikipedia.

I do not envy the position our administrators are in. They have to safeguard our students against the smut, dangers and mistruths contained on the Internet. They are responsible to parents when children encounter questionable material.

However, censorship and overzealous Internet filtering only add frustration to students and teachers trying to find legitimate information. We shouldn’t have to censor the web in schools if we are supervising our students’ Internet activity. If we log all visited websites in our students’ accounts and actually pay attention to what they’re doing on the computer, they will not have the opportunity to misuse the Internet. If we provide ongoing education in cyberethics from a very young age, students by and large will not use school computers to visit unsavory sites.

I work in a school that provides limited Internet filtering. All of our students’ Internet activity is logged, and they know it. Whenever students use computers, they are under direct adult supervision (as it should be). Cyberethics is revisited many times throughout the year. As a result, I average one or two incidents per year where a student intentionally violates our acceptable use policy. Students are just not game to try anything because they know they’ll get caught.

Blocking sites and heavily filtering the Internet is the easy thing to do. Educating our students to become ethical, responsible, self-regulating users of the Internet requires a lot more effort. I guess we must ask ourselves, how can we best prepare our students to become the leaders of the 21st century?