What About Web Filtering In Schools?

from the still-there dept

So forcing web filters in libraries has been ruled unconstitutional, but it's still completely legal in schools? I'm not quite sure how that works. I certainly can understand that parents and teachers don't think it's appropriate for students to access certain sites, but the filters have been shown to be almost useless. They don't block plenty of pornograhpic sites, while they do block lots of sites that never should be. As an example, they talk about a school in NY whose students couldn't research "terrorism" because all pages with the word in it were blocked. Instead, they had to go home and do their research at home. Also, let's face it, most of these kids have access at home without filters. Wouldn't we be better off teaching kids how to actually deal with all the crap that's on the internet instead of pretending it doesn't exist? Obviously, for very young kids it's a problem, but very young kids shouldn't be using the internet unsupervised in the first place.

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