Filtering the ‘Net

Opening up the world at the touch of a keyboard, the Internet has considerably widened the reading and study horizons of young people not lucky enough to have easy access to a college library.

But ironically enough, guess where today's most aggressive young intellects again find themselves stymied in the pursuit of knowledge? Yes, the very same place which so many parents and taxpayers thought they were financing as an ideal font of learning: the public schools.

Trying as a classroom exercise to design a website for a dog adoption agency, high school students at the Southwest Career and Technical Academy found they could not download pictures of puppies because the school's Internet filter blocked access to sites such as Google Images.

Students in the school's marketing club had wanted to explore how the M Resort was using Twitter to promote its brand, but were precluded from participating in a national competition because filters on school computers would not allow access to social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, Southwest junior Victoria Cana reports.

The Clark County School District spent $104 million to build the Southwest Career and Technical Academy, on West Shelbourne Avenue near Rainbow Boulevard. Then, school bureaucrats, aiming to restrict in advance the ability of students to access naughty websites, proceeded to install such heavy duty filters that kids have to go elsewhere to freely use the Internet in their work.

Kelly Bucherie, the academic manager who oversees technical academies, says the public school district allows for exceptions to the Internet filtering system, but the protocol is apparently not user-friendly. Ms. Bucherie said she's looking for a happy medium where "we still have the watchdog effect but kids feel like they can explore their projects."

So is Red China.

Yes, there's a lot of weird, obscene and just plain nasty stuff available on the Internet. The instinct of administrators to avoid a situation where junior arrives home to regale his parents with tales of all the innovative pornography he viewed at school today is understandable.

But excessive neutering of the 'Net can also have the unintended consequence of driving away gifted students.

During a recent convention of the Association of Career and Technical Education here in Las Vegas, Gregg Betheil, executive director of school programs and partnerships for New York City schools, said Internet filters have the net effect of "telling kids there are other places where they need to go for their learning."

John Lock, chief executive officer of Project Lead the Way, a provider of science and math curricula, offered an even more disturbing observation: "The dropout problem is not necessarily a dropout problem. They are not dropping out of learning. They are dropping out of school, but they still want to learn. ..." School "feels like a prison because they're locked down."

As young people grow, their own judgment can mature only to the extent they're allowed to exercise it.

If necessary, computers can be set to log websites visited, and those use histories can be personalized by requiring students to log in with personal passwords. That would allow administrators to "trust but verify," as someone once said.

Southwest Career and Technical Academy Principal Felicia Nemcek believes students still need to be monitored and "know there are consequences," but agrees more Internet access is necessary.

When?