This morning I came across a post titled Are We Safer in the Dark? by Brian Crosby at Learning is Messy. Brian describes a scenario where the parents of a child, afraid of the danger of the street in front of the house, build a wall to keep their child from seeing the street, don’t talk about the street in front of their child, and do as much as possible to keep their child from seeing images of children playing in streets on television or other media.
In one of my previous posts I compared the act of blocking MySpace (and other social networking sites, blogs, etc.) with the practice of teaching abstinence instead of teaching safe sex.
In responding to Brian’s post, I realized something…
If our response to the “dangers” in life is to simply block all of them from our children… build walls, set up filters, don’t talk about it, hide it, block their access, don’t let them buy it, etc…. then how long will it be before we end up like the adults (“The Elders”) in the movie The Village
If you haven’t seen the movie yet, I won’t spoil the ending for you. But if you have seen it, then you understand the connection that I am making between overreaction and extreme measures to ensure the safety and security of our children.
Our solution lies not in “hiding” — but in “educating”… hopefully more of us will continue to share this message in the blogosphere and, as Wesley Fryer states, in face-to-face conversations…
Technorati Tags: MySpace, DOPA, blogging, instructional technology, social networking, education
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Thanks for linking to that article. I have to agree with both of you here. It doesn’t make sense to “hide” things from our kids, particularly since that will only serve to make the off-limits things more attractive.
I agree — the more we make things “off-limits”, the more they will appear attractive to children and teens.
As a teacher who teaches in a district where abstinence is taught over safe sex, I can tell you… it doesn’t work. Ingnoring or hiding from the choices our students have to make on an everyday basis is not the way to help them make the best decisions. We need to be educating them on how to use Myspace safely, how to have safe sex (if they choose), why to say no to drugs, etc.
I haven’t seen this movie yet, so now I am adding it to my Netflix queue! Conversations are the key, but I think we have to find ways to extend those increasingly outside the blososphere. Like Dr. David Berliner encouraged us at the TTU College of Education on Friday, we need to become more communitarian. We need to hang out on front porches and talk to each other, tell stories, go to civic group meetings, even go talk to the school board. If we don’t get these conversations going, who is going to? It is up to us.