Book Banning is alive and well in the United States
The last week of September every year is deemed "National Banned Books Week". Classic novels like The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, along with staples of youth such as Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret, the Harry Potter series, Blubber, and Forever are unceremoniously challenged and subsequently removed from bookshelves citing various reasons including sexuality, religion, racial slurs, profanity, violence and more.
What is filtering in education?
In 2000 Congress enacted CIPA, the Federal Children's Internet Protection Act which provides funding including E-rate monies for technology discounts to schools and public libraries. CIPA requires participants in E-rate programs to use computer filtering software to maintain compliance. On August 11th, 2011 the FCC released a Report and and order requiring E-rate recipient schools to certify that they have updated their Internet Safety policies to incorporate provisions for educating minors about social networking and cyber-bullying awareness. (NCSL, 2011). Nowhere in the CIPA requirements does it state that schools must block content such as:
- Facebook and other similar social networking websites
- Google Docs and other collaborative web 2.0 sites and
- Gmail, Yahoo mail, and other web-based email systems
- YouTube and other video-sharing sites
- Amazon, Walmart, or other shopping based websites
- Dropbox and other file-sharing websites
- Flickr and other photo-sharing websites
In fact, with the new provisions, it stands to reason that many of these sites should remain unblocked so that students can be properly educated on their appropriate use. Many school districts block these sites for reasons other than CIPA, yet cite CIPA as their reason for blocking. Additionally, CIPA does not state anywhere that any websites must be blocked for staff, yet in most cases school staff members are bound by the same restrictive filters as students. Reasons for blocking websites include but are not limited to: sexuality, religion, racial slurs, profanity, violence and more. Sound familiar? I thought so.
The fact that these books were not available at my school's library didn't stop me from reading them, and the fact that these sites are blocked in my district does not prevent tech-savvy students from accessing them. A simple YouTube search on how to get around a school's filtering system returned more than 1,100 videos, and a simple Google Search resulted in nearly 4,000,000 results, with many of them coming from unblocked sites such as wikihow and ehow.
So I ask the question again. Are we simply reintroducing the concept of book banning albeit it with a modern twist? Would it not be more prudent to educate students on how to read these books appropriately and understand their context, then follow up with a conversation about the book that gives students the opportunity to reflect and share? Would it not be more prudent to educate students on how to use these websites appropriately and understand their context coupled with a demonstration followed by reflection and questions and answers?
I am not proposing that we begin keeping Playboy and Penthouse on the shelves of school libraries, nor am I suggesting that we make pornographic sites available in educational institutions, but when I am unable to bring up websites like the collections housed in the Louvre because there are depictions of nudity I believe we have cut off our nose to spite our face.
National Conference on State Legislatures(2011) Children and the Internet: Laws Relating to Filtering, Blocking, and Usage Policies in Schools and Libraries , [online] Available at: http://www.ncsl.org/default.aspx?tabid=13491 [Accessed: November 27th, 2011].
American Library Association (2011) Banned Books Week, [online] Available at: http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/bannedbooksweek/index.cfm [Accessed: November 27th, 2011].
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