Internet Limits Also Limit Learning

Two controversies converge around the issue of access to the Internet, our Information Highway. One involves filtering Internet content in the name of protecting children from the highway’s seamier byways, which has resulted in large measure from the decade-old Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA). The second hinges on current debates about so-called net neutrality, or the maintenance of equality of access and treatment of data on the Internet, something that some would like to abandon in favor of privileging certain users who can afford to use the fast lane, relegating the bulk of users to the slow lane.

An alarming number of policy makers and school officials are advocating the elimination of school librarians, something so patently short-sighted and ill-advised that it seems incredulous to thinking parents and educators. In the Digital Age the concept of “library” has expanded exponentially. Libraries have never been static repositories, whether of clay tablets, scrolls, printed books, or digital files; and librarians are more essential than ever before in history to order, select, advise, guide, and teach relative to these multimodal resources.

And so it is fitting that the American Library Association in its recent report, Fencing Out Knowledge: Impact of the Children’s Internet Protection Act 10 Years Later (from http://www.ala.org) finds that “over-filtering,” as a result of CIPA, limits legitimate access to educational resources and, according to ALA President Barbara Stripling, “consequently reduces access to information and learning opportunities for students.” This is all the more worrying in light of two current trends, namely, 1) the aforementioned elimination of librarians, who are information-savvy folk prepared to guide the young and uninitiated along the Information Highway and its many byways, and 2) the vast amount of resources now available, sometimes exclusively, on the Internet that cannot be captured or replicated in physical, books-on-shelves libraries, librarians or none.

Education is about access to information, and a too-vigorous attempt to “protect” learners blunts learning. That’s the bottom line.

But it leads naturally to the second controversy. Net neutrality is related to the “common carrier” concept, which in common law countries refers to persons or companies that transport goods or people for the benefit of the general public, in contrast to “contract carriers,” which transport only for certain clients and can refuse transport for others. Recently, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been considering new rules that would permit Internet service providers to use faster lanes of data transmission to favor certain users, namely wealthy corporations.

Blocking or limiting access to Internet content is anathema to education for the common good. Commodifying access by privileging wealthy corporations at the expense of rendering everyone else second class risks substantial educational harm to institutions and individuals and upends the democratic ideals of equity and equality regardless of socioeconomic status and other potentially discriminatory factors.