Internet access in schools

A few months back, my father attempted to buy tickets for a festival from his computer at work. But becuase of the filtering system, he was unable to access the website as there was something to do with credit cards on it. Whats funny is that becuase of this, my mother (a teacher at my local school) had to buy the tickets instead. Now, would you expect a school to really allow people to buy things on their IP? Well no they don't. But they do have proxy servers.

Every kid in my school knows the proxy. Hell, I bet the new year 7's know. But whatever, the point I'm trying to make is that the filters became useless as I and my fellow pupils were quickly able to access whatever the hell we wanted. The fact I had my laptop in school meant that I was able to browse NME or download something off of PirateBay while I coloured in a map of Venezuela in Geography (I joke of course, Geography is not just colouring in. It's an enjoyable subject which has had me pointing out annoying facts about destructive waves whenever I go down to Hengistbury Head. Cheers Mrs. B)

So if everyone knows how to access everything, why is there a need for a proxy? Because I'm sure most of the teachers get annoyed when they have to type their code in every morning. I know I got bored of switching between Opera (yes, don't laugh) and Mozilla (once again) then going home to use IE. Still, I think there is a need for a filtering system in school.

ECDL and Computer design lessons would be disrupted by students playing games or doing whatever else year 8s do these days. Then there is the unavoidable thing in that no-one wants to see a kid looking at pornography in a lesson or at a breaktime. It would make school like a second home, but with several hundred more people and some older people wearing suits and yelling at you.

But there are drawbacks to filters.

I had to do some technology coursework recently. I decided to cop out and do the food technology course, in which we had to design a product to a specification and create a factfile. While doing this, I wanted to get a picture of some pancetta bacon. Apparently the SWGFL are under the assumption that an image of pancetta bacon could; "contain crude language and indecent imagery". Oh ok, a little bit counter-productive perhaps but I won't complain, I'll just use normal bacon. Oh wait, that's filtered too.

Once again, while doing Geography coursework, I was trying to find an image of a random house in Sandbanks. But apparently that contains indecent imagery and crude language as well. I know how a filter works, if it has any swearing on any page then it's filtered. Which is fair becuase you shouldn't subject small children to seeing such awful words. But if I want a picture of a packet of bacon then I'm not planning to click on every link, go to every page and scour the internetz itself in a quest to find a curse word.

Well I pose the question, do you think (some) filters should be lifted? Obviously not to the crazy excess where games and pornographic images are unfiltered, but where things like newspapers and blogs (mine for example) are filtered because a few words are thrown around.

Cheers for reading.

-Steve