The Schoolhouse Firewall

Tara García Mathewson from The Markup discussing online censorship on school networks, mentions Aleeza, a high school student in California:

When she was taking a debate class, she ran into the blocks regularly while researching controversial topics. An article in Slate magazine about LGBTQ+ rights gave her a block screen, for example, because the entire news website is blocked. She said she avoids her school Chromebook as much as possible, doing homework on her personal laptop away from school Wi-Fi whenever she can.

Wide-sweeping, totalitarian decisions made on behalf of students and families is certainly nothing new. We need to do our due diligence in providing an appropriate and safe learning environment for our students, and that is not solely exclusive to the physical world. But when schools begin to disrupt the academic realm, preventing students learning about their world, is where things begin to break down.

Learning is, by nature, an uncomfortable affair. We cannot astroturf our way around the sensitive topics that reality brings. Once students step outside the artificial school bounds, they will become keenly aware that what they are learning in school does not align with what their eyes see.

It is complicated, it is uncomfortable, and that's the sweet-spot where learning truly occurs.

We need to embrace the grey and provide a space for students to learn in an intellectual playground. When we put up synthetic barriers to our students' learning, we actively limit their potential to think. It is difficult for teachers to do this in the same way that it can be difficult to manage a classroom, but this does not mean that it is impossible.

Quite the contrary, teachers can be actively equipped with the proper tools to help students investigate meaningful evidence on a topic. If students are to have any semblance of a productive academic discourse and students' critical consciousness to be engaged, open access is the only way to make it happen.

Without transparent internet block rules, teachers lose one of the most vital assets in making their students think at the highest levels. All for what? Trying to push the existence of the LGBTQ+ community to the back of the network closet?

Students are not oblivious to the outside world. With technology always at the palm of their hand, many are able to have full access to the internet without limits every second of the day. Clearly schools need rules on what is and is not appropriate, but once network administrators begin to make decisions fueled by the culture wars, they violate a clear tenet of intellectual freedom that academic institutions should embrace.

Subverting the firewall

Obviously to get around this, make friends with your local IT department. They are underpaid and always talk to people at their worst moments -- You'll have a lot in common. Then, when you are planning a lesson with and article by Slate or whomever, just send an email asking for the block to be lifted.

But let's say you are in a bind in the middle of a lesson, and won't hear back quick enough. What can you do?

Here, I highly encourage you to visit Archive.org's1 Wayback Machine. Simply copy and paste the URL of the article you are trying to access, and more often than not, there will be a recent archive of the site, virtually identical to the one blocked on the network. For student research, I'll typically have students email me their link, and I send them a working Archive.org one back. Works like a charm.

As the culture wars continue to heat up, and academic institutions face greater scrutiny, the battle against academic censorship will continue to be at center stage.