From: bh@anarres.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Brian Harvey)
Newsgroups: k12.ed.math
Subject: Re: COMPUSERVE AGAIN
Date: 6 Sep 1992 15:41:21 GMT
Organization: University of California at Berkeley
NNTP-Posting-Host: anarres.cs.berkeley.edu

Sheila.King@f315.n103.z1.fidonet.org (Sheila King) writes:
>Jack further stated:
>
>-> I am not in favor of any dealings with Compuserve. They are a
>-> commercial outfit which does not fit the "militantly free" spirit of
>-> K12net.  Furthermore, I am also against gating the Channels to
>-> USEnet because we would lose all control in the areas which are most
>-> oriented to classroom participation. We would lose all hope of
>-> keeping the "sickos" from destroying them.

Since I am a regular reader of k12.ed.math via Usenet, I feel a need to
respond to this.  (I don't care one way or the other about the question
of the commercialness of Compuserve, just about the general question of
connectivity.)

I am against any restriction of access to k12 for several reasons:

1.  Like many Usenet/Internet users, I'm at a university.  I think that
communication between university people and K-12 people is very important.
This is true both for educators and for students.  The universities have
primary responsibility for teacher training; it's good for the trainers
to be aware of the concern of people in schools!  Universities are
resources, providing access both to databases and to human expertise.
Indeed, NSF policy is to move toward wide-scale use of the Internet
directly by kids in schools, for these reasons.

2.  This notion of Usenet as populated by "sickos" is wrong on several
counts.  First, it's distorted because the news media get all excited
when there is one questionable message on Usenet, but aren't interested
in the tens of thousands of messages every day that are serious, interesting,
helpful, and sometimes vitally important.  (During the coup in the last days
of the Soviet Union, for example, Usenet was heavily used as a conduit of
information in and out about what was going on, benefitting both the
availability of news outside the Soviet Union and the organization of
resistance inside.)  Second, Usenet (like k12net) provides groups organized
by topic, so that you only have to read what you want to read.  There are,
for example, Usenet newsgroups devoted to sexual topics of various kinds.
*You don't have to read them if you don't want to!*  It is very rare that
a message is posted to an inappropriate group, and when it does happen, the
offender gets a lot of angry e-mail from thousands of Usenet subscribers.
Specifically, while I've been reading k12 newsgroups, there have been
several brouhahas about messages posted from within k12net itself, but I've
never seen any controversy about a message gatewayed to k12 from Usenet.
The characterization of Usenet as particularly problematic is simply
scapegoating.

3.  In any case, the apocalyptic view that the world will come to an end
if a kid reads an obscene message is just nonsense.  Let me tell you, kids
have plenty of sources of information besides k12net, and I doubt if
anything that appears *anywhere* on Usenet, even the alt.sex groups,
would shock any kid.  [I am *not* suggesting that k12net should therefore
carry the alt.sex groups.]  This is a cliche, but apparently it hasn't
been said quite often enough to get through Jack's head:  Violence, such
as kids see all the time on TV and in the movies, is sick.  Sex isn't sick.
Words with a particular number of letters don't have magic powers to rot
anyone's mind.  Watching people shoot people is what hurts kids, if
anything.

4.  Remember the First Amendment?  The Supreme Court has said that
children do not shed their constitutional rights when they enter a
school.  I find it hard to argue this point because the censors like
Jack don't say "I'm against the First Amendment."  Quite the contrary,
they wave the flag and make kids salute it and tell the kids how lucky
they are to live in a free country -- and then censor what kids can
see without noticing the contradiction.  At the (liberal, public) high
school where I used to teach, once upon a time the Marine Corps gave
the school a bunch of paper book covers printed with recruitment ads
to distribute to kids.  A few students and teachers got together to
produce and distribute their own book covers with anti-violence messages.
There was a big flap about this.  Nobody objected to the pro-violence
book covers!  But people wanted to censor the anti-violence ones.
The moral of the story is that the First Amendment doesn't say "you're
free to say anything the teachers approve of."  It's precisely about
things the authorities DON'T approve of!  Even when the law makes
exceptions to freedom of speech, as in obscenity or libel laws, there is
a very strong tradition against "prior restraint" -- such as preventing
connections between k12net and Usenet.  Instead, the law waits until you
say something forbidden and then punishes you.  The reason is that prior
restraint acts against broad groups of people and broad categories of
speech, and the law prefers to be very narrow in opposing specific speech
acts.  If you want to cut off thousands of responsible Usenet participants
just in case one person might post something you don't like, I suggest
that you might want to move to Albania.