The mother of a fourth-grade boy has criticized her son’s school for not preventing exposure to pornography on school computers.
The woman, Noelle Radosh, said her son, Zach, who attends Grandin Catholic Elementary School, and his friends have been viewing pornographic content on the school’s computers for at least a year. “I think it’s important everybody knows about this,” Radosh said, adding that it was Zach who told her about his viewing habits.
Radosh immediately alerted Principal Robert Martin of the situation. Martin tried to access the Web site Zach had been viewing, but he was denied access – until Zach showed him how to get to the site using the Google search engine. Martin “was appalled,” Radosh said. “He was just shocked. He said, ‘I didn’t know that.’”
Though the school’s teachers are usually present with students when surfing the Internet for school projects, Radosh maintains that, “They can do this under supervision. There’s always a teacher there, but they just minimize their screens when she comes over.”
While one might assume that schools employ the use of filters to prevent access to inappropriate sites, that is not always the case. The Edmonton Sun reported on Friday that Edmonton Catholic Schools spokesman Lori Nagy said blocks were in place, but were removed when teachers at another school in the same district asked that the filters be removed for a special project. “Unfortunately,” according to Nagy, “the block was never put back on. It’s back on now.”
But, while many private schools do indeed utilize such technology, many public schools do not. The Edmonton incident prompted coverage of the topic in the nearby Fort McMurray Today paper, in which staff writer Jeff Morrice quoted the Fort McMurray public school district’s Educational Technology Coordinator Leon Bevans as saying that schools in his district do not use Internet blocks. “We do not employ any kind of Internet filters or content filter,” Bevans told the paper.
“I guess the rationale is based on the nature of our business, which is to educate students in being good citizens,” Bevans went on to say. “And that includes being good citizens of the information age as well as the rest of society.”
While some might applaud such statements, not everybody is in agreement. “That seems to be a noble goal, but I’m not so sure about the way he is going about it,” adult entertainment attorney Clyde DeWitt told AVNOnline.com Friday in regard to Bevans’ explanation. “Does he have alcoholic beverages in the cafeteria—presuming that the fourth graders will be good citizens and not drink them? How about having guns lying around, or leaving the keys in the ignitions of cars in the parking lot?”
DeWitt conceded that “society is profoundly too oppressive with respect to sexually oriented expression,” but he also maintained that, “It strikes me that is a little shortsighted to give 8-year-olds unfettered access to the Internet – and not just sex sites, but also information about wars, crimes, violence, hatred, and all kinds of other things that children that age are not emotionally equipped to deal with – and to trust them to use their good 8-year-old judgment as good citizens to not look at what isn’t healthy for them.”
Bevans also said the considerable amount of money used to employ filters could be better spent in other areas, since the technology is often imperfect. But, as DeWitt challenged, “The locks on guns, alcohol, and automobile ignitions are not perfect technology, either.”
One issue that comes to light as a result of the Edmonton incident is the willingness of adult webmasters to place hardcore content on their front pages, instead of limiting it to members-only pages where students would not be able to access it without a password. Adult entertainment attorneys have been pushing webmasters for years to change the practice, to no avail. DeWitt says asking adult webmasters to police themselves is only one facet of the problem. “Yeah, I recommend to Internet companies that they have some kind of a [members-only] password to keep children out, just to be a good citizen,” he said. “But that’s not going to stop sites in other countries, and not all webmasters will do that.”
