Alright, so, this might come off like I am on a high horse. When it is in word form, the emotions are lacking, but this is something as a teacher I feel strongly about. When I was growing up my mother went, not extreme, but out of her way to keep me from watching or experiencing content that was adult. I wasn’t sheltered, but I was able to remain innocent to a degree.
The internet has sort of destroyed that.
Not at my current job, but at one of the schools I worked at, one of the preschool kids was watching porn on their I-pads when their parents were asleep. There are no safe spaces for children anymore, they are not profitable. The guiding light for all businesses, profit, so now kids are throw onto websites with adults. And adults can be everything. They can respect kids or they can mock kids. They can create things like Garfield without Garfield or celebrate it. They can be cruel to kids or worse, they can be predators.
The Internet is not Television, unrestricted access to it, can lead to dangerous things. You can even find videos of people being decapitated, not easily, it’s harder, but give a person unrestricted access to a chat room, and they could find it.
I think there needs to be a moment on a societal level, and not one of forcing the Internet to change. Mainly because that will never happen. I believe that adults have the right to be adults, that it falls more on the parents and those that work with kids to do this. That includes the cities and towns. There needs to be places for kids to congregate and have fun offline. Though, even adults should have that luxury as well, to be honest. It is frustrating that the town that I live in has very little to do for people of my age group. There aren’t even bars in this town. There is the lake, fire at someone’s house or we play board games, or a movie. That’s sort of it. But, that’s my own frustration, and to bring it back to what we need to do with kids, we need to stop letting kids have devices with unrestricted access to the internet.
Now, I know that parents want their kids to have phones. I agree, but we still have flip phones. I think, until they are at least 13 or maybe 14, they don’t need a smart phone. There is also the added bonus of trying to prevent online bullying as well. Kids that are online do suffer more from being online just from that. Parent’s have the final say, that I also agree with, but like at the school I work at all the websites are blocked. Yes, you can block just the naughty sights, but kids can get around that, and they do. The kids two years ago showed me how they could get around the block on their chromebooks.
Never assume you are smarter at technology than your children, for they grew up with it, and have the incentive to get around it.
I don’t know, with the death of the kid friendly internet, I just know that we have problem that will not go away. And that parents, educators, government officials have to find a solution. And not one that takes away freedoms, that I am against, but one that can teach responsibility. I watch kids abuse their chromebooks all the time, and I realize it’s because they don’t care, because they don’t respect the technology. Making them earn it, by starting them with a simple phone instead of a miniature computer might be a simple solution in the right direction.
Again, I don’t want to be on a high horse with this, these are just some thoughts and advice. We all have to work together to find a solution, and talking about it is one way to start to figure it out.
To be fair, this Defranco episode sparked this, but it wasn’t the only thing. I have been having conversations with other teachers about this for a while now.
Matthew William Lindquist 