My experience is a bit different. First, my high school was profoundly hypocritical, allowing teachers unfettered access while forcing students to deal with a

My experience is a bit different. First, my high school was profoundly hypocritical, allowing teachers unfettered access while forcing students to deal with a firewall -- I know this because one of the ways we discovered to defeat the firewall was to give your computer an IP address in the range assigned to the teachers' computers. Second, the punishments are neither appropriate nor acceptable in many cases, with suspensions, ludicrous bans on even touching school computers, and other draconian measures being doled out for things such as modifying boot scripts to display a message (my own pride and joy from middle school). Finally, the censorship is not limited, at least not by any definition I would use. You yourself said that your school's firewall blocked a website that had the word "games" in it. I have seen hackaday.com blocked for having words like "hack" in it. When I was a kid these firewalls would also block websites that had the word "vagina," "penis," "breasts," "semen," "nipples," and so forth appear enough times -- like, say, a medical website. This article mentions a ban on streaming music and social media. The blacklist is so long I have to wonder why they do not just switch to a whitelist, or why they even bother with Internet access at all. Even if the censorship were limited, I cannot see how it would be justified. Suppose only hardcore pornography were blocked -- how is that acceptable? Would it not be better to punish students caught watching pornography at school by having them write a lengthy essay about the history and politics of pornography (and wouldn't the ability access at least one pornography website be necessary?)? If the goal is education shouldn't the focus be on educating, rather than on trying to shield students from the world? Consider the flip side of this: as a kid I was once sent to a summer program for programming, and one of the other students was caught installing back orifice on the computers. His punishment was to explain the software to everyone, along with the ethics of installing it without permission.