by Tom Karlin

Created on: January 27, 2009

More and more schools are being offered the opportunity to educate students using low-cost and sometimes even free lab top computers. Whether the equipment is donated or purchased relatively inexpensively, the question many parents and educators have is how much freedom of Internet usage should students have access to. Obviously it is important to take into consideration the age of the children involved, as this could be the determining factor when it comes to knowing whether they are mature enough to make wise choices.

There is an inherent problem with allowing students to use any device which connects to the Internet. The problem being that there is a lot of pornography as well as many disturbing images easily accessible by doing searches using Internet browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google as well as others. Naturally there is an dilemma on what images and materials that youngsters should be able to view. Parents will have differing opinions and so will teachers. Who's to say what is right and what isn't and what should be seen and what should be censored.

Remember this is not an issue that deals with a single family matter, it involves public opinion. If it were simply a matter of a family decision, then parents can monitor and filter what their children are allowed to view. Of course, parents have that right, and should exercise it diligently. On the other hand, it becomes a little more difficult when it involves multiple families as a variety of opinions, of what is obscene, will inevitably clash. This scenario is magnified exponentially as we look at the enormous size of the public education system. It is very hard to censor the Internet without loosing access to other information that is perfectly innocent and harmless, since a lot of filtering is done by using keywords. Sometimes if a pornographic term is used in a domain name then that site will be "blacklisted," however many perfectly safe and harmless educational pages can be blocked as well.

It is a controversial subject, the issue of what children should be allowed to view and what should restricted. The point is; if teachers are providing assignments in the classroom then they should have some say in what their students have access to and not just legislators and censorship boards. Teachers shouldn't be expected to police their students but we should have enough trust in their ability to know what they think is educational and what shouldn't be allowed in the classroom. Let's not forget to include parents in this question as they play a key role, in ways more than teachers do and they need to speak to their children about access to questionable content on the Internet.

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