In my senior year of High School, after successfully publishing a bizarre, Edina specific horror story in the student newspaper and almost getting away with a satircal article where the whole joke was the word “horny,” I decided that the paper really didn’t care what I wrote, so I went ahead and compared the school’s administration to the late 19th century Russian Monarchy. I succeeded in the sense that no one suggested I get suspended this time, but it did lead to an awkward meeting with the school's media specialist. If you want to support the school paper by reading it on the actual website, here it is.
The Edina tech policy everyone’s currently up in arms about is the new cell phone confiscation rule. And, while I think it’s absurd that Edina is trying to saturate the student body with technology, then trying to exact total control over those devices, that isn’t the issue I’m going to tackle today. No, today I’m going to talk about an issue that’s been around as long as Edina computers have: blocking websites.
It’s a good idea, in theory. Anyone who’s ever gone through the comments section on YouTube knows that the internet is often an ugly, hateful, inappropriate place, and Edina High School is an institution charged with educating young people, most of whom are legally still children. Providing some sort of internet safety is a basic necessity. I mean, we can’t have students pulling up pornography on learning devices.
The problem is, the internet is often hateful, ugly, and inappropriate, but also unbelievably large and complex, so trying to toe the line between too much freedom and total censorship has lead to some strange results, especially when certain classes deal with adult themes. In Film and Literature class, for example, there are assignments that are impossible to do on school owned Chromebooks because of restricted mode on YouTube.
Then there are totally banal sites that the school insists on blocking. If I want to read this morning’s Pearls Before Swine comic strip, check the Ask.fm account for the literary magazine I work for, or see the newest Magic: The Gathering spoilers, I have to go out of my way to get around the firewall. I could get it if the school blocked all social media or game sites, but they allow Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, and other time wasters way more dangerous than GoComics.
And, in its ultimate goal of keeping students from adult content, the firewall fails. It is possible, on school wifi, to access an image of Jesus, Moses, Ganesh, and the Buddha all having graphic sex with one another. But it would be simply awful if they blocked the site this appears on, because that is The Onion, an excellent source of political satire with enormous educational potential.
This example really underlines the essential problem with blocking websites: there isn’t some binary designation between safe and unsafe sites. School is a place to learn about the real world, and sites that display how the world works will inevitably have borderline inappropriate content.
And Edina Public Schools doesn’t really have a problem with adult content (The God of Small Things, The Color Purple, and Slaughterhouse Five are all required reading for some classes, after all). What they really fear is a lack of control. In the end, the firewall operates on the same principle as the new, wildly unpopular rules concerning cell phones in classrooms. They’re operating like the Russia in the late 19th century, when the monarchy wanted to urbanize without the social progress that inevitably comes with urbanization. The EHS administration wants the benefits of technology without the costs, namely the lack of control of information.
I’m not saying that it’s wrong to strive for that, I’m just saying that it’s futile quest.
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