The paper covered a story (can’t link, sorry) about a North Raleigh mom who’s upset that she was able to figure out a way around the school’s Internet content filters. Mom Carolyn Homan has launched a crusade against this vile material being accessible from school computers:
“Kindergarten computers have access to porn,” Homan said at Tuesday’s board meeting, as she held up photos of graphic images she said came from Brassfield’s computers. “Filters filter out only a few sites such as Playboy, leaving billions of explicit videos and sites.”
Um, yeah. Just because you as an adult may have a dirty mind and the wherewithal to find porn on the Internet doesn’t mean the students are doing it in the classroom. Yes, there’s no shortage of dirty pictures on the Internet and that will almost certainly never change. However, the extraordinarily rich research resources provided by the Internet far outweighs any negatives. The resources it provides for research are worlds apart from the moldy old encyclopedias that passed for reference tools when I was a kid (yes, we read them each night by the light of oil lamps).
I don’t have specific knowledge about what the school system uses for its content filtering but I have worked with similar systems during my IT career. I’m sure the school system’s content filtering is some of the best around. I’m also sure the system logs every webpage visited and can track who went where. This is as good as it gets.
Will the filters prevent every site from being seen? No. Will it track everything one sees? Almost certainly. That’s a conversation with the principal I’m sure Little Johnny would rather not have.
This seems to be a case of a prudish busybody making much out of nothing. I hope our school board politely thanked her for her comments and left it at that.