Internet A Threat To Kids
We didn’t have access to smut or pornography in our library at St. Maries High School in the late 1940s. The closest thing to titillating graphics we could find were pictures in National Geographic, while the more concupiscent guys would share passages from dogeared copies of Erskine Caldwell’s “Tobacco Road.”
Sex education consisted of watching the birds and the bees along the St. Joe River and of hearing sometimes embellished tales of courtship from more worldly upperclassmen.
Fast-forward to the fall of 1996 and to the decision by Spokane School District 81 to allow students, from third grade on up, to have access to the “world’s biggest library” - and, ergo, to the world’s biggest cesspool of illicit information. Third-graders who hardly have learned to read will have access to the worst of humankind’s excesses in living color in the libraries of our public schools.
One cannot blame the schools - for the schools reflect the society, and a society with an insatiable appetite for titillation and self-indulgence no doubt will find an educational need for the latest in cyber technology, regardless of the dark side.
With the decision made, however, it behooves us to see how use of the Internet in schools can indeed become the “instructional tool of the future” which its supporters herald.
For example, access to the Internet may improve academic achievement: “Bobby, you have to get your math done before you can play on the Internet.”
Certainly, there will be an improvement in discipline with Internet access as an incentive: “Susie, you didn’t get your work done today, so you have to go out to recess while the rest of the students get to stay in and play on the Internet.”
Parent-child communication also may improve, with children having something to report about what they learned in school: “I learned how to access the Phil O. Ped Modeling Agency in my search for vocational opportunities. This really neat guy has invited me to New York for an interview and photo op.”
The reality is not virtual - it’s real. Our children are at risk, and no “Marian the Librarian” will be able to police this Hydralike electronic threat to our children’s safety, education and emotional well-being.
The only advice I can give parents who rightly are upset with this recent decision is to access “The Universal Web” - “http://uw.God.Hlp.Us.”
MEMO: “Your turn” is a feature of the Wednesday and Saturday Opinion pages. To submit a “Your turn” column for consideration, contact Rebecca Nappi at 459-5496 or Doug Floyd at 459-5466 or write “Your turn,” The Spokesman-Review, P.O. Box 2160, Spokane 99210-1615.