4 ms·

More people should be upvoting this. Especially Americans. Even more so, any American with children, like me. The treatment this guy received is unethical at b

by jdawg77 12y ago

More people should be upvoting this. Especially Americans. Even more so, any American with children, like me. The treatment this guy received is unethical at best - if the adults in charge don't know what the (insert expletive here) they are doing when being paid for it, harassing an educated person, regardless of age, because they are smarter & better with technology is in no way a solution. What we need to do is stop educating the Americans we have, "Free speech," if these policies are reflective of the modern nation state we've built. If that's not the case and we still value some form of, "Free speech," then the way this has been handled should be investigated and dealt with. Not yet another Benghazi investigation. Seriously.

coldpie 12y ago
Mm, I don't think this really has anything to do with free speech. No one's speech is being restricted here. They're being prevented from doing off-hours activity on school grounds. Whether that helps or harms in a school's educational goals is an open question. But it's not a restriction of free speech in any meaningful way. What's more concerning to me is school administrators who are so quick with the stick when they could be using a carrot instead. Give this kid a study hour to work on stuff with the IT guy. Probably he could do a lot of good work for the school, effectively for free, and he'd have no reason to keep up the circumvention game. Which, to be clear, is what this is. It's fun to break the rules and feel you're speaking truth to power. I know I did that in high school, even taking apart a computer to remove the CMOS battery to reset the BIOS password to launch a different OS. No good reason for it, it's just fun. The trouble is it's a dangerous game this kid is playing. And it needn't be, they could turn this into a great learning opportunity. But no, school administrators keep up their tiny dictatorship image, and this kid will get expelled or something. Oh well.
- jdawg77 12y ago
  Free speech as in, doing investigation into what policies are and how they are setup. Read the article, they are restricting speech in the sense that they aren't sharing what they're doing in monitoring usage of the device, networks, etc. Is it so hard to publish the, "Rules of the road?" In my day, we called them, "Terms of Service," for private companies and public institutions have laws, etc, that govern their operation. All of that is how the system, near as I've ever been able to figure out, should function. Then this happens, when a kid can't actually find out what policies are or why, or who implemented them, or what rule was triggered to ban / block certain things, that run counter to the established curriculum...again, read the article. My children have multiple passports and I know very well how restrictions work in multiple countries, having worked in three so far full time for long enough to need to know. The way the high school in the article is being run, as well as the opaque nature of the system administrators rules, is abhorrent. Tax payer money being spent to...enshrine and embiggen the ego of some two bit hack who can't get a job in the private sector because their technical skills aren't up to par? From the sound of it, this may be the case. Sorry but regardless of public or private sector, a person needs to be qualified to hold the job they are hired to do. Somebody, please, fire the webmaster and the director here. Then let's start implementing some transparent policies or dump the notion of, "Free speech."
  - pionar 12y ago
    > Then this happens, when a kid can't actually find out what policies are or why, or who implemented them, or what rule was triggered to ban / block certain things, that run counter to the established curriculum...again, read the article. I did read the article, and there's no mention of what the student did to find any of this out. Did he ask anyone? You seem to be jumping to conclusions based on a one-sided account. My reading of this piece is that it's petulance, a child who doesn't get it that school internet access is not a right (hell, when I was in high school, there was one computer in the library that had access at all). When you use a school's internet service, you're subject to the rules of such privileges, and the administrator (in this case the DoT) is the final rulemaker. Don't like it? Do what he's doing now, and get your own internet service.
    - maxerickson 12y ago
      The voters that elect the school board are the final rule makers. Not the bureaucrats charged with carrying out the policies set by the school board. The actions of this student are easy to look at as activism designed to influence those voters.
      - sosuke 12y ago
        We see that issue throughout this thread, voters don't get to make the final rules in most things. They elect the school board, or elect whomever chooses the school board, and they put their trust in the ideals which that candidate has sold so that they rules that end up being put in place are most like the ones the voter would have chosen themselves. If the voters candidate doesn't win, or their candidate does win but changes his or her tune, that voter has little to no recourse until the next voting cycle. Voters don't get to set the minutia. Furthermore, for smaller government bodies, voters outside of the residential area for that government body don't have a vote at all! You have to go even higher to put your faith in a state or county school board candidate.
        maxerickson 12y ago
- dsp1234 12y ago
  They're being prevented from doing off-hours activity on school grounds. The article clearly states that it's not just "off-hours" activities that are being blocked. Our censorware, however, blocks material ranging from Twitter to comic books. Meanwhile, students are told to use Twitter as part of our Spanish classes and our school offers a course on comic books. Beyond blocking sites that are used in classes, there are also many false positives.
- mikeash 12y ago
  He was punished (denied a school-issued iPad intended to be given to every student, internet access cut off) merely for reading out loud a contract that everyone was being told to agree to. Sounds like a free speech issue to me.
- Zelphyr 12y ago
  > they could turn this into a great learning opportunity. Unfortunately, in this day of NCLB, unless its a great "preparation for taking a standardized test" opportunity they're uninterested.

by jdawg77 12y ago

coldpie 12y ago

Mm, I don't think this really has anything to do with free speech. No one's speech is being restricted here. They're being prevented from doing off-hours activity on school grounds. Whether that helps or harms in a school's educational goals is an open question. But it's not a restriction of free speech in any meaningful way. What's more concerning to me is school administrators who are so quick with the stick when they could be using a carrot instead. Give this kid a study hour to work on stuff with the IT guy. Probably he could do a lot of good work for the school, effectively for free, and he'd have no reason to keep up the circumvention game. Which, to be clear, is what this is. It's fun to break the rules and feel you're speaking truth to power. I know I did that in high school, even taking apart a computer to remove the CMOS battery to reset the BIOS password to launch a different OS. No good reason for it, it's just fun. The trouble is it's a dangerous game this kid is playing. And it needn't be, they could turn this into a great learning opportunity. But no, school administrators keep up their tiny dictatorship image, and this kid will get expelled or something. Oh well.

jdawg77 12y ago
Free speech as in, doing investigation into what policies are and how they are setup. Read the article, they are restricting speech in the sense that they aren't sharing what they're doing in monitoring usage of the device, networks, etc. Is it so hard to publish the, "Rules of the road?" In my day, we called them, "Terms of Service," for private companies and public institutions have laws, etc, that govern their operation. All of that is how the system, near as I've ever been able to figure out, should function. Then this happens, when a kid can't actually find out what policies are or why, or who implemented them, or what rule was triggered to ban / block certain things, that run counter to the established curriculum...again, read the article. My children have multiple passports and I know very well how restrictions work in multiple countries, having worked in three so far full time for long enough to need to know. The way the high school in the article is being run, as well as the opaque nature of the system administrators rules, is abhorrent. Tax payer money being spent to...enshrine and embiggen the ego of some two bit hack who can't get a job in the private sector because their technical skills aren't up to par? From the sound of it, this may be the case. Sorry but regardless of public or private sector, a person needs to be qualified to hold the job they are hired to do. Somebody, please, fire the webmaster and the director here. Then let's start implementing some transparent policies or dump the notion of, "Free speech."
- pionar 12y ago
  > Then this happens, when a kid can't actually find out what policies are or why, or who implemented them, or what rule was triggered to ban / block certain things, that run counter to the established curriculum...again, read the article. I did read the article, and there's no mention of what the student did to find any of this out. Did he ask anyone? You seem to be jumping to conclusions based on a one-sided account. My reading of this piece is that it's petulance, a child who doesn't get it that school internet access is not a right (hell, when I was in high school, there was one computer in the library that had access at all). When you use a school's internet service, you're subject to the rules of such privileges, and the administrator (in this case the DoT) is the final rulemaker. Don't like it? Do what he's doing now, and get your own internet service.
  - maxerickson 12y ago
    The voters that elect the school board are the final rule makers. Not the bureaucrats charged with carrying out the policies set by the school board. The actions of this student are easy to look at as activism designed to influence those voters.
    - sosuke 12y ago
      We see that issue throughout this thread, voters don't get to make the final rules in most things. They elect the school board, or elect whomever chooses the school board, and they put their trust in the ideals which that candidate has sold so that they rules that end up being put in place are most like the ones the voter would have chosen themselves. If the voters candidate doesn't win, or their candidate does win but changes his or her tune, that voter has little to no recourse until the next voting cycle. Voters don't get to set the minutia. Furthermore, for smaller government bodies, voters outside of the residential area for that government body don't have a vote at all! You have to go even higher to put your faith in a state or county school board candidate.
      - maxerickson 12y ago
dsp1234 12y ago
They're being prevented from doing off-hours activity on school grounds. The article clearly states that it's not just "off-hours" activities that are being blocked. Our censorware, however, blocks material ranging from Twitter to comic books. Meanwhile, students are told to use Twitter as part of our Spanish classes and our school offers a course on comic books. Beyond blocking sites that are used in classes, there are also many false positives.
mikeash 12y ago
He was punished (denied a school-issued iPad intended to be given to every student, internet access cut off) merely for reading out loud a contract that everyone was being told to agree to. Sounds like a free speech issue to me.
Zelphyr 12y ago
> they could turn this into a great learning opportunity. Unfortunately, in this day of NCLB, unless its a great "preparation for taking a standardized test" opportunity they're uninterested.