Access Denied: How Internet Filters Impact Student Learning in High Schools
Powered By Xquantum

Access Denied: How Internet Filters Impact Student Learning in H ...

Chapter 2:  Framing the question: A review of the relevant literature
Read
image Next

This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.

particularly distressful, little more than nuisances” (p. 350). On the other hand, 24% said they were very or extremely upset by the unwanted exposure.

Marjorie Heins (2001) pushes the question of harm the furthest by challenging the assumption that children must be protected from sexually explicit speech because of the psychological harm it does to them.

The argument here is not that commercial pornography, mindless media violence, or other dubious forms of entertainment are good for youngsters or should be foisted upon them. Rather, it is that, given the overwhelming difficulty in even defining what it is we want to censor, and the significant costs of censorship to society and to youngsters themselves, we ought to be sure that real, not just symbolic, harm results from youthful pursuit of disapproved pleasures and messages before mandating indecency laws, Internet filters and other restrictive regimes. … The simultaneous titillation, anxiety and confusion spawned by forbidden speech zones may do more harm than good … Some older children and adolescents need access to information and ideas precisely because they are in the process of becoming functioning members of society and cannot really do so if they are kept in ideological blinders until they are 18. (p. 11—12)

Heins traces the history of censorship back to the days of Plato in ancient Greece, and follows it through the English and then American courts. This is in marked contrast to the Middle Ages, when she bluntly points out that far from being isolated from sex, a child “learned about intercourse by being in the same bed with parents when they did it” (p. 20). However, beginning in the 18th Century and continuing to some extent to