Censorship is rearing its ugly head these days in Halifax schools. Picture this: A high school teacher trying to give a science lesson on cloning wants to use animated, interactive websites to illustrate it. But half a dozen of them are blocked when students try to call them up on their classroom computers. It gets worse. James Murch, who graduated last year from Sir John A. Macdonald high school, says he was supposed to represent Ghana in the Model United Nations, but was denied school access to the Ghanian government’s official web site because it was classified as “extremist.” “I was also doing research on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.
I tried to access Al Jazeera and found it was blocked at certain times as well.” Murch, a first-year arts student at Saint Mary’s, who plans to major in International Development Studies, says that last year, he had to do most of his internet research at home. “Basically, the only information you can access now in high school is things which show a Western view on the world,” he says. “I don’t think our public school system is really geared to teaching people how to think anymore.”
A teacher confirms that alternative news and information sites are often blocked including Harper’s Magazine, the Village Voice and the Earth Island Journal. When the teacher recently tried to gain access to an alternative news and commentary site called Novakeo.com, a message popped up: “Access Denied. The site you have chosen has been categorized as: Occult.” “So much for free speech and the free flow of ideas,” the teacher says, adding that access is routinely denied to websites with blogs or journals.
“I find the situation frustrating,” another teacher tells me. “Extremely frustrating.” The teacher says science sites on cellular division have been blocked. Incredibly, the 3,500 teachers who work for the Halifax school board have the same severely-restricted access to the internet that their 54,000 students have. The same rules apply from grade primary right up to Grade 12, which means that internet filters designed to protect very young children are being applied to senior high school students and their teachers.
But spokespeople for the Halifax Regional School Board don’t seem very sympathetic to the frustrations of teachers or students like James Murch. In fact, they seem obsessed by the dangers of the internet and the need to protect young students from its horrors.
Gerard Costard, the board’s co-ordinator of information technology says that teachers should be doing their lesson planning and internet research at home where their servers aren’t affected by school censorship. “If a teacher finds a site that they feel is useful for their curriculum, they should let their principal know and the principal should email the tech department (at the Board) and say “I’ve looked at this and I would like to have this unblocked’ and we would look at the site and if it’s good, if we determine that sure, that site should be used, we’d unblock it.” Costard says the unblocking would probably happen “within a week.” Great! So much for the joys of instant internet access. So much for the educational effectiveness of an internet system that Costard says is costing taxpayers almost $700,000 a year.
The Board is also paying $10,000 a year for Netsweeper, the internet filtering system that is routinely denying students and teachers legitimate access to scientific sites and news sources. Netsweeper, based in Guelph, Ontario, boasts on its web site that it uses sophisticated “artificial intelligence” to construct its filters. It also offers educational institutions “silent tracking” so that technical administrators “can determine which users are accessing which sites.” Beware teachers and students. Big Brother School Board may be watching!
When a high school teacher tried to gain access to The Coast’s website last week, this message popped up: “Access Denied. The site you have chosen has been categorized as: Profanity.” Fuck!
Send your inappropriate thoughts to brucew@thecoast.ca even if they’re NSFW.
This article appears in Sep 27 – Oct 3, 2007.
Last weeks editorial reflected a failure of the Halifax Regional School Board educational mandate and a great disconnection from current reality. We are living through a revolution that is arguably more consequential than Gutenberg’s press and historians may look at the beginning of this century as the onset of the Information Age. Text, media, knowledge, art, science, all is now data, all free flowing, unshackled, exponential. The days where we could hope to restrict our children’s access to all sensitive material are gone forever. There is a legitimate issue here, greatly deserving of our attention but the HRSB, with its current policy is forsaking the privileged strategic position it occupies.Our responsibility as parents and educators is to accompany our children in their discovery of the world. We marvel with them at its beauty but it is in the face of horror that our presence is most crucial. Previous generations had the luxury, with dubious result, to wait for adulthood before being confronted with the more challenging aspects of our human culture. No more. The world is as is, bared before our collective eyes for better or for worst by the power of our technology. Kids will read the words, they will see the images, regardless of our efforts. Ignoring the problem with a masquerade of censorship avoids the opportunity of a serious search for adaptive solution. Meanwhile, kids are out there being confronted with material they lack the intellectual toolkit to integrate soundly to their emerging worldview . Schools and parents must initiate honest and open discussions with children about the world they inhabit. What better place for this than the engaging environment of our schools? We are forced by history to instill at an ever earlier age this moral maturity that permits us to adequately deal with the various facets of humanity. As a society, how we choose to adapt to this new stage of our development will have a crucial impact on our social health.The benefit that we stand to gain from this age of knowledge reach far beyond the visible horizon of any one of us. For this however, we must bear to look at our own reflection, and that is all you will ever find on the Internet. We, us, people.Let the zeros and ones flow!Marlo LemieuxHalifax