While I haven’t sawn my Chromebook in half yet (shoutout to the guy who did that—you know who you are), I’ll admit that every time that infuriating cartoonish lock pops up I get pretty close. After having educational material blocked—things like APUSH review videos and team-working tools such as the chat feature on Docs (which apparently can’t be unblocked because it counts as a “social media”)—I’ve just about had it with government control of my internet access.
So why exactly is it that Chromebooks are so locked-down? It certainly isn’t because the district is worried about a 16-year-old reviewing for APUSH with a video that “may be inappropriate,” or going onto the BBC website at the beginning of the year to read about the immigration crisis in Europe. The answer, sadly, has nothing to do with our school district. Federal laws including the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) force Internet restrictions on any schools or libraries receiving government grants for Internet access. The fact is, our IT department has its hands bound.
Strangely, this simple and reasonable explanation is never really given to us, with administrators preferring to take personal credit for restrictions, touting how they “protect” students. This nonsensical claim gets brought up in some way or another every time I bring up blocked websites and services with administrators or IT staff. The fact is, restrictions have no intrinsic value—they certainly don’t keep us “safe”—and without external pressures such as federal monetary incentives or angry parents, the only reasonable stance would be to leave the Internet uncensored.
To understand this, let’s look at the “worst-case scenario” that everyone likes to bring up: pornography. Nothing seems to scare the government more than the idea of kids viewing graphic images and videos on computers provided to them by their schools.
At this point, every student reading this will gently facepalm with a good deal of skepticism—who in their right minds would watch porn on a Chromebook when over 90 percent of teens have a smartphone or access to another computer? People are so worried of being spied on by the district that stickynotes over webcams have become a common way to personalize district tech. Are we seriously catering policy around the 1 percent of students who would watch porn? I think not.
“But wait!” cry our school’s administrators. “What about the profound damaging effects that porn has on children?” While this claim can certainly be backed up by some studies—the California Coalition Against Sexual Assault (CALCASA) provides one study from Child Abuse Review 2008 that found a relationship between porn use and intensified sexist attitudes and increased rates of sexual assault—the fact is that no scientific consensus has been reached and there is no reason to believe that porn is unhealthy or damaging. Indeed, CALCASA also presents a meta-analysis (a synthesis of all major studies on a certain topic) from Aggression and Violence Behavior that suggests the evidence of an association between porn viewing and sexual assault is weak in all studies, this association being alternately found positive and negative from study to study. They conclude that “it is time to discard the hypothesis that pornography contributes to increased sexual assault behavior.” According to The Scientist, “No correlation has been found between exposure to porn and negative attitudes towards women.” Furthermore, a Danish study published in Archives of Sexual Behavior of over 600 men and women found that “porn did not yield any negative mental or health effects”, and a variety of research shows that masturbation can decrease risk of prostate cancer by one-third in men, decrease risk of erectile dysfunction, reduce period cramps, dampen cravings for unhealthy foods, and boost immunity. Perhaps instead of taking cautious measures to the point of literally blocking google.com, the district should be encouraging students to masturbate.
This, of course, is not to mention the fact that right now anyone can access porn on Twitter, which for some reason the district deems acceptable. This is not conjecture; it’s a veritable fact that porn accounts on Twitter are totally unblocked on Chromebooks. Sure, it’s porn, but Twitter is educational, right? This foolproof logic is brought to you by the same district that also treats the chat feature on Docs as an unsafe social medium.
The other major concern that administrators have with an unfiltered Internet is the distraction posed by video games. The district is so worried about this that they went so far as to block the dinosaur game, an easter egg in Chrome that lets you jump a dinosaur over cactuses while the Internet is down. Every student in the district can see the stupidity in this: the very notion that the district could prevent us from playing games such as Tetris, Pokemon, or The Binding of Isaac is laughable. The efforts of the IT staff to censor games is futile since you can add the word “unblocked” to a Google query and play just about any game you want. As for the notion that these games could provide a distraction in class, I would argue that most teachers in the district can tell when students are playing video games and can stop them fairly quickly.
Finally, there are a number of clear benefits the district gains by removing restrictions. Firstly, far fewer students would feel a need to hack their computers (which I’m told is costly and difficult to undo—luckily the district is solving this issue with a genius, high-tech solution: stickers to prevent the removal of screws), saving the IT department time and money. Secondly, never again would teachers and students have their learning disrupted by blocked educational websites, which have derailed my teachers’ plans quite frequently this year. Lastly, and quite importantly, monitoring Internet usage without forcing students to access certain websites will give the district better insight into Internet use problems faced by students. If kids play games on their Chromebooks instead of their phones, teachers can see this and do what they are paid to do: teach good habits about time management and Internet usage. If students are indulging in unsafe behavior on their Chromebooks, administrators can find out and get that child help. If, on the other hand, students did the same thing on their own device due to Internet restrictions, the district would never be able to find out or get that child help. Mistakes are necessary to learning, but under the current status quo, the district is preventing a valuable conversation from taking place by limiting freedom and choice. When it comes to the safety of our students, the decision is clear: let them watch porn.