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UK Teachers Say Censor The Internet
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Jan 03, 2007 09:45 PM
from the how-can-you-have-any-pudding-if-you-smash-my-window dept.
from the how-can-you-have-any-pudding-if-you-smash-my-window dept.
Marlow the Irelander writes "The BBC is reporting that in response to a YouTube video of a schoolboy breaking his teacher's window (yes, this is a video), NASUWT, one of the teaching unions in the UK, is calling for legislation to control the internet. Could Britain, rather than the US, be the main front of the battle against censorship in 2007?" From the article:
"Unfortunately, any yob or vandal can now have their 15 minutes of fame, aided and abetted by readily accessible technology and irresponsible internet sites which enable such behaviour to be glorified.
[The general secretary of the union] said the union supported a zero tolerance approach in schools to pupils who used technology to abuse and undermine teachers, and called for more rigorous legislative control of internet sites which gave them license."
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I'm Confused (Score:4, Insightful)
Besides, whoever recorded the incident was clearly a by-stander (the person throwing the rock was in the video). I do not understand why this is bothering the teachers so much.
Dumb criminals, not bad youtube (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Dumb criminals, not bad youtube (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Dumb criminals, not bad youtube (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Schoolkid criminals almost immune in UK (Score:4, Insightful)
I take it you don't live in the UK then. More likely they got counselling and a nice holiday somewhere warm!
Yes, there are times when it looks as if schoolkids in the UK have been given a status nearly like medieval child princes, who had whipping-boys who got 'whooped' in their places when the princes did something bad.
The teachers' unions now seem to take for granted this world where bystanders and victims sometimes are made to pay for what delinquent children and youths do -- so when a union representative "called for more rigorous legislative control of internet sites" I have to wonder if this isn't the union selecting the internet service provider as next in line for the status of whipping-boy.
-wb-
Parent
Re:Dumb criminals, not bad youtube (Score:5, Insightful)
Uhhh, why? This incident makes the perpetrator look like a fool. Why does having a vandal break a window make the victim look foolish?
Parent
Re:Dumb criminals, not bad youtube (Score:5, Interesting)
Uhhh, why? This incident makes the perpetrator look like a fool. Why does having a vandal break a window make the victim look foolish?
It makes the student into kind of a "hero" who stood up to a bully. And so, like most bullies, this teacher is lashing out in an unintelligent manner.
Parent
Re:Dumb criminals, not bad youtube (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Not all of us are slack asses (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Do me a favor... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a teacher (math and computer). I'm also a tech coordinator. I wear both hats at my school. I've been studying, taking apart, assembling, and troubleshooting PCs for 12 years. And I take offense to anyone who says "Those who can, do, those who can't, teach." If you were to take the time and evaluate MANY teachers, you would see how much time and effort we put into helping students, as well as research how to better educate students in our discipline(often through professional teacher organizations...I myself belong to the MCTM...www.mctm.org).
Sadly, even at my school, I have seen and am upset with some teachers who do not give a rat's ass about the students they teach, and I wish that administrators and teachers got a lot more serious about evaluating teachers' behavior and teaching inside and outside the classroom. It upsets me a great deal to see how much time and effort I put into helping a student learn, both about a particular subject and about the world & life in general, in hopes that I can build trust with students and show them I care about their lives, only to have that trust destroyed by a teacher who makes rather damning comments to students demonstrating apathy to their profession. Yet while I have met and even work with a few teachers who behave this way in one way or another, I will not sit by and watch some stupid punk think that we teachers are a waste of space.
There are so many students that depend on us teachers for social and academic support. We don't just sit and twiddle our thumbs when kids ask us questions. We understand our discipline. (I, as well as the vast majority of teachers, majored in their discipline in college; if you want to discredit our education, you may as discredit your own, assuming you graduated from college, at least.) Most of us have a great passion for it, as well as for helping other students learn to love it as well. And if you wanted us to actually demonstrate that in a job, I certainly could do so. But I would find great boredom in, say, being an actuary, doing nothing but number-crunching for 8 hours straight. And I've tried tech support before, but to be quite honest, I don't like living an OfficeSpace-kinda life. I actually enjoy being around other people and talking with them, teaching them, interacting with them, and even watching them grow and being a part of it!
And it's teachers like me who help make the students who become a part of your work force. They're not just born smart, stupid.
Parent
Re:Do me a favor... (Score:4, Insightful)
Furthermore, people do well by their own efforts, and that typically has very little to do with teachers in modern western society (though it is unfair to blame teachers for this predicament). Once you can read and write, you are basically on your own - those who want to learn and have the ability to do so will rise (or not) largely as a result of the effort they put in.
Very few programmers (outside of the army of cookie cutter Java enterprise developers who don't have an innovative bone in their bodies and who tend to develop the least elegant and barely 'serviceable' software) are taught the relevent skills or knowledge they rely on in formal education - they are predominantly self taught - something that's almost synonymous with being a good developer in the first place.
The highschool education system specifically (particularly in the UK and in the US, and I'd wager much of Europe) is so broken I'm am amazed that the small number of very good teachers in each school (and larger number of potentially good teachers) even bother to remain. Bullying, distrutive pupils, bad teachers, bad management, inequitable treatment of pupils, and a poor curriculum are the norms! Outside of the very best schools, neither teachers nor board of governers at schools are willing to tackle these issues.
I am not susprised teachers in the UK might see censoring the internet as a solution, but the problem is with society in the UK, the way we treat offenders and the way schools themselves are run. We ought to tackle the parents about their child's behaviour and teach those who can't or won't behave in seperate faclilites that are appropriately equipped - and there needs to be a process by which parents can escalate concerns and school's be punished for failing to act with due dilligance in dealing with concerns raised by pupils or parents.
Parent
Re:Dumb criminals, not bad youtube (Score:4, Insightful)
No...most of the teachers I had were good. They enjoyed the students who challenged them and were enthusiastic about learning.
Parent
Re:Dumb criminals, not bad youtube (Score:5, Insightful)
Those who can, do, those who can't, teach.
This is an slanderous and discriminatory statement, breathtaking in its scope that, quite frankly, any normal person should find deeply offensive. Literally, it makes something like "all blacks are lazy" - itself a singularly racist and small-minded insult - little more than a mildly critical observation. Yet it is frequently bandied about as nigh-on "common sense".
And remember we aren't talking about "karate kid" style mentors here, we're talking about civil service lifers who for the most part have never had a job where they were required to be productive and / or competitive. In other words, a real job.
Why attack not only an entire profession but, indeed, anyone who has ever passed on the knowledge and experience they have to another, when all you really mean is "just like any profession, teaching has some bad apples" ?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The reason why the teaching profession is so bad is many-fold, but the main one is that nobody respects anyone.
The kids don't respect the teachers. In turn, the teachers don't respect the kids. In the British comprehensive system, the few parents who do respect their kids don't respect the teachers. And the teachers don't respect the parents in turn. The school administrations don't care about anyone, and the department of education is even worse.
The thing about the teaching profession is that everyon
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Those who can, take a higher-paying job.
The next time a pay raise for your local teachers is on the ballot, vote for it. Even if it's a sales tax increase. Your kids will thank you for it. Civilization will thank you for it.
Education is the world's most important profession, because without it, civilization would never propagate its knowledge to the next generation. And schoolteaching is a crucial yet underrecognized part of this.
Re:I'm Confused (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Video has been removed... (Score:4, Informative)
Just so I get this right... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just so we're clear, their logic is that the internet is a catalyst for youth vandalism?
Man, kids these days. When I was their age, we had to vandalize stuff the old fashioned way.
Re:Just so I get this right... (Score:4, Interesting)
I tried checking out a bomb making book from the library as kid, they wouldn't let me. They had no problem with me checking out the books on witchcraft and demonology. Go figure.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Just so I get this right... (Score:5, Informative)
Sadly a common theme. It reminds me of when a guy [wikipedia.org] with a breathplay fetish was convicted of murdering someone, at which point there was a campaign to ban the porn sites he looked at (sites such as Necrobabes [wikipedia.org]). The Government was unable to do this - because the sites are entirely legal and the US presumably wasn't willing to listen - so it has now responded by saying that anyone who possesses "extreme" porn will now go to prison for three years [backlash-uk.org.uk].
So if this follows a similar pattern, after realising they can't regulate the Internet, it'll instead be a criminal offence for UK citizens to view or possess images of schoolkids breaking windows.
Parent
typical over-reaction (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:typical over-reaction (Score:4, Funny)
Shut up and eat your meat!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
-uso.
Damn those irresponsible sites.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe if teachers were more educators than prison wardens, kids would love them instead of hating them.
Re:Damn those irresponsible sites.. (Score:4, Funny)
(yeah, cheap, I know...)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
and maybe if the yob who through a brick through a plate glass window didn't behave like he needed a warden more than a teacher he would be easier to love and to easier to teach.
British teachers have always been jerks (Score:4, Funny)
How can you have any meat if you don't eat your pudding?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?
It was good they were jerks. (Score:3, Insightful)
But times have changed, and the teachers have gotten far softer. Look at English youth today as a whole. Many are nothing but scum. Look at just the chav subculture, for instance. They are cr
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Kids today huh?
"They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers." -Socrates (420 BC)
Yeah... so much worse than the used to be.
In all honesty, you're looking at the past through rose-coloured glasses. Kids are kids. There will always be a minority that act up. Physical pain may work on some, but it won't work on all, and has the two disadvantages of teaching some of them that violence is the way to respond to things
Be like starbucks (Score:4, Funny)
Wait, don't they have cameras everywhere? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are they complaining because it wasn't an "official" camera that captured the act? I don't get what the Internet has to do with it.
Self-Censorship? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a duty of care, in my role, to protect students from certain inappropriate material on the internet. The obvious ones are there; pornography, paedophilia, unmonitored chatrooms, unmonitored messaging sites, etc.
Myspace is blocked, because I can't honestly say that I can be 100% certain that students couldn't use the site and put themselves at risk. Porn websites are blocked, because the students are not 18. All chat programs, such as MSN/AOL/IRC are not installed on student profiles, and students do not have administration rights to install software either. Proxy websites are blocked, so that students can't bypass the restrictions and vew unfiltered content. All fairly common stuff. Ironically, the biggest complaints I get about myspace being blocked are from teachers, but thats another story altogether.
I use active content filtering to block access to inappropriate content on all other websites, such as youtube or google vids, which might contain any of the things I first mentioned.
However, I don't block anything just 'because I'm told to'. A teacher can request that anything in the world gets filtered out, but ultimately the decision lies with me.
If a teacher cannot control his or her students in a classroom, then it is the fault of the teacher, not the students are finding the material. And personally, I think that is the way it should stay. Technology shouldn't be used to simply 'restrict access' to material when that material doesn't fit within the narrow categories I first mentioned. If anything, teachers should be embracing sites such as youtube and google videos because they provide a wealth of material that can be used in the classroom.
Re:Self-Censorship? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Call me stupid... (Score:4, Interesting)
Thank God for the second amendment (Score:4, Insightful)
When did the U.K. embrace Big Brother?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The only people who could really overthrow
Instead (Score:5, Interesting)
And once again... (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh no, it's the internet's/violent video games'/movies/ fault that these kids run wild and act like hooligans! It can't possibly be the kids themselves or their parents who deserve any of that blame.
It boggles the mind how a teachers' union could fixate more on the "15 minutes of fame" and less on trying to make parents or the kid accountable (even outside of legal remedies). Instead of whining about how terrible the internet is, they could turn around and warn his new teachers/neighbors in Canada about what he's been up to over there (and point them to the video). Make the parents look bad and make his life miserable wherever he ends up and see if kids don't start to wise up.
I suspect what they're really upset about (and the real point to the zero tolerance policy they mention) are the other cases where teachers have been caught on video doing things they shouldn't do (e.g. screaming at kids). This is just a convenient scapegoat because the kids were clearly the ones doing something wrong so now they blame the internet/cameras/etc...
It's funny how often the people who should worry the least about surveillance (teachers, cops, etc...) are often the ones who least want to be scrutinized by the very things they'd like to use on us.
Britain has no First Amendment (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm currently reading the book "Not in front of the children" by Marjorie Heins, a very informative book on the history of censorship and censorship law (mainly in the US, but with UK roots and occasinoal references).
In the US, the Constitution's First Amendment allows for a strong defense to censorship. However, censorship of "obscenity" and/or "indecency" (in their varying and sometmies contradictory definitions) is allowed is a common-law exception to the First Amendment (see First Amendment/Obscenity [wikipedia.org]). The exact nature, power, extent, and constitutionality of the exception tends to be at the centre of any legal/judicial or legislative debate on censorship, and has gone back and forth (as documented in the book).
Britain has no such explicit, written right to free speech as the First Amendment, and thus censorship has a better legal footing (I suspect CCTV is in a similar situation). While censorship in Britain may be more easily applied, the "battle" would be more one-sided than in the US, if censorship (i.e. of obscenity) were to have such a strong following as it has in the US.
- RG>
Teachers Windows (Score:4, Funny)
Would the students try to break Linux or OS X ?
Better One Innit (Score:4, Insightful)
After all, this is primarily an adult world. Childhood is a temporary phase. There are some things that are not, and never will be, suitable for children. That does not mean they are not suitable for adults.
Re:Teachers have a tough job (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Teachers have a tough job (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh no, you can't do that, because then the kids' self-esteem would be hurt. After all, we want our children to be happy, right? Doing such mean-spirited things like holding them accountable and disciplining them would cause such stress to their developing minds.
(Excuse me while I put my bullshit boots on)
Parent
Re:Teachers have a tough job (Score:4, Interesting)
I wish I had those kind of teachers in the states. Took Cobol my senior year. Straight A's on every assignment and test. The sweet old lady in charge of it had a stroke 2 weeks before final and the new substitute wanted to fail me because I'd missed half the lessons.
Had to lob him a real tearjerker line, but I aced the final too. Who woulda thunk it?
Sadly, the sweet old lady was the exeption in my college career.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You: Wut? That right there is a good reason for why schools are failing at their job.
Actually, that attitude is the same as the one presented in college, where America is the best in the world.
And, that is the exact opposite of the attitude in high school and below, where America is
You need to start earlier than that... (Score:3, Insightful)
The debate about whether teachers as a group are crappy or not is a false dicotemy. The fact is, our (US) public school system broken on just about every level.
Re:Teachers have a tough job (Score:5, Interesting)
It's no wonder they're turning out idiot students -- the poor kids are being taught by idiots of the first order.
Parent