One Big Room

The educational blogosphere is alive with concerns about measures and methods to control children's and young adults' access to the Internet. Andy Carvin has set up a RSS feed on DOPA news and Miguel Guhlin explains the limitations of a proxy filter on a home computer.

Sorry folks - anyone who thinks he or she can control kids access to online information or experiences is spitting in the wind. We are not facing a simple technical challenge. We are swimming against a cultural tide.

Neil Postman explains why in his book The Disapperance of Childhood (1982). It's been awhile since I have read this book, but as I remember, Postman's arguments go something like this. Childhood is a social construct. Before the Industrial Revolution, children were simply treated as small adults. They dressed like adults, they worked like adults, they lived where adults lived, and they saw what adults saw. Adults and children before the second half of the 19th century all lived pretty much in one big room.

The rise in industrialization gave rise to the concept of "childhood." Society started treating children differently than they did adults, separating them by dress, by activity and especially in experience. We kept kids in their own rooms with very limited access to adult rooms. For their own safety, of course.

Postman argued that with the ubiquity of mass media (pre-Internet days), society no longer has the ability to keep children away from adult venues and sights. We are all back into one big room, as it were. Kids will see and experience again what adults see and experience.

When I first started arguing against filtering back in 1994, I'd ask workshop participants if they felt these were appropriate materials for children to be seeing and reading:

• Sex After 35, Why It’s Different, Why it Can be Better
• Men & Sex - Their 7 Secret Wishes
• How Our Sex Life Was Saved
• Major New Sex Survey - What You Don’t Know...
• The Sexual Games of the American Male
• He Want’s What? Men’s 6 Biggest Sexual Fantasies
• The Sex Skill Men Adore (& How to Do It Well)
• The Hugh Grant Syndrome - Why Guys Pay for Sex
• Five Total Turn-ons Men Can’t Resist

Everyone agreed that these were not materials suitable for kids. And they should be denied access to them.

Too late, I'd say. Each of these were headlines splashed on the front cover of popular magazines easily found near any grocery store checkout lane (and last I checked things have not become less explicit.)

This cultural shift that is removing the wall between the kids' and adults' rooms is unnerving to say the least. Our natural inclination as parents and educators (and even politicians, I suppose)  is to shelter and to protect. But responsible adults also recognize that it is in their children's best interest not to shelter, but to teach children how to protect themselves in the big, bad world.

As we are all pushed further and futher into the one big room, we don't have a choice. By blocking access to blogs and chat and other Internet resources in schools and homes, we are only denying access to kids in places where any actual adult instruction may occur. So just how ironic is that?

Home - sort of...

Back from vacation for a week now. At least the body is - the mind and spirit are still in Ireland. Wonderful trip, wonderful place, wonderful people both our hosts and fellow travelers. 

Tough getting the motivation to get back up to speed.  This week at work involved a major WAN upgrade, an e-mail server change, and jump-starting the installation of mounted data projectors and interactive white boards in 102 classrooms. Sort of boring. Still have not had the heart but to peek at the waiting backlog of blog entries I should be reading.

The trip to Ireland led me to re-read Thomas Cahill's marvelous short history, How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995).  A few interesting bits.

In discussing the fall of the Roman empire, Cahill writes (again from 1995):

There are, no doubt, lessons here for the contemporary reader. The changing character of the native population, brought about through unremarked pressures on porous borders; the creation of an increasingly unwieldy and rigid bureaucracy, whose own survival becomes its overriding goal; the despising of the military and the avoidance of its service by established families, while its offices present unprecedented opportunity for marginal men to whom its ranks had once been closed; the lip service paid to values long dead; the pretense that we still are what we once were; the increasing concentration of the populace into richer and poorer by way of a corrupt tax system, and the desperation that inevitably follows; the aggrandizement of executive power at the expense of the legislature; ineffectual legislation promulgated with great show; the moral vocation of the man at the top to maintain order at all costs, while growing blind to the cruel dilemmas of ordinary life - these are all themes with which our world is familiar, nor are they the God-given property of any party or political point of view, even though we act as if they were.

 Cahill also quotes William V. Shannon:

Supreme egotism and utter seriousness are necessary for the greatest accomplishment, and these the Irish find hard to sustain; at some point, the instinct to see life in a comic light becomes irresistible, and ambition falls before it."

I am a quarter Irish - what's your excuse?

And this delightful translation of a poem written by a 9th century scholar-monk:

I and Pangur Ban my cat,
'Tis a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.

'Tis a merry thing to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.

'Gainst the wall he sets his eye,
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
'Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.

So in peace our task we ply,
Pangur Ban my cat and I;
In our arts we find out bliss,
I have mine and he has his.

Good to be home. 

On vacation

The LWW and I will be bicycling in southern Ireland until July 22nd. Talk to you on return.

If you have a severe case of insomnia and need an old Blue Skunk posting to help you fall asleep, some of my favorites can be found in the link at the right, Popular past posts. Last year's Head for the Edge columns can be found here.

Don't let anything exciting happen while I'm gone...