Attention young people: Shut Up!

[elfs]

In what has to be one of the rather less well thought-out moments in history, the principal at a junior high school in Vermont has banned blogging. To be fair, he blanned it only during school time; students are free to go home and continue their blogging activities. His rationale for doing so was that "blogging is not an educational activity."

I'm sure there are other things that a student does with the school computer that are "not educational." Given that schools spend a lot of time trying to convince a student to "express himself" in one fashion or another, to "keep a record" of his life in a journal, the idea that on-line journaling is an unworthy exercise must be cover for some other conceit.

The principal does say that whenever a student puts his name and info on the 'net, he puts himself at risk for on-line predators. This may be true, but I see no evidence that this increased risk has actually materialized, and his further recommendation that parents monitor their kids' activity by going in after the fact and performing forensics on the household's browser cache, history, and cookie files doesn't seem to me to be the kind of activity that fosters trust between parent and child. Household rules about what is and is not permitted, and up-front discussion of the use of household filters, would much better serve the needs of a family.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

"You have to remember, you're a highly educated and intelligent individual who believes by default that other people are as educated, rational and logical as you are. While this can be true, it isn't, and most people make illogical, irrational and really strange choices."

And stupid ... don't forget stupid.

[fallenpegasus]

Funny, when I was in Jr High English, the constantly running year long assignment was "write. write about anything. but just write." We had to generate N pages of written text every week.

Sounds like blogging to me.

[sarekofvulcan.livejournal.com]

That article actually says that they blocked MySpace.com, rather than banning blogging as such.