Posted on 06/20/2014 2:23:43 PM PDT by NYer
Bill Donohue comments on the response by Jody Ian Goeler, Superintendent of Schools for Regional School District 14 in Connecticut, to accusations that the Vatican website has been blocked in district schools because it promotes “hate speech”:
Yesterday afternoon, I asked Superintendent Goeler to “please identify examples of ‘hate speech’ found on the Vatican’s website.” He responded last night saying that he never “stated or implied anywhere that the Vatican website promotes or has examples of hate speech.” This resolves nothing. In a public letter released today, Goeler admits that access is provided to liberal websites, but not conservative ones. Nowhere does he address the issue of censoring the Vatican (Islamic sites are okay).
Goeler would have us believe that some kind of technological glitch is at work; he is asking the filtering service provider, Dell SonicWALL, for an explanation. But this condition is not a technological fluke—it is the work of a left-wing ideologue. Goeler’s big mistake was to state his tolerance for intolerance. “The district is trying to determine the reason for the inconsistency and if bias is pervasive enough to justify switching to another content filtering provider.” (My italics.)
I spent 20 years in education, 16 as a professor, and I cannot believe that any seasoned educator would make such a remarkable comment. Goeler would have us believe that before he can rule on this matter, he needs to know if the “bias is pervasive enough to justify switching.” Just how many websites of a “conservative”—or for that matter a “liberal”—nature have to be blocked to merit a change? And how many Catholic websites have to be censored before action is taken? The man is not suitable to work in education.
We are taking this issue to Stefan Pryor, Commissioner of the State Department of Education in Connecticut. This is a serious matter. Abridging the First Amendment can only be allowed when there is some competing interest of overriding importance. Stopping students from accessing the Vatican’s website is not one of them.
Ping!
No indoctrination in our schools. Move along, now.
Jody Ian looks a little light in the loafers. One suspects personal animus.
And surely Bill is being rhetorically disingenuous in saying that he is surprised at an “educator’s” acting in this way.
(rant ON) What are the students doing on the Internet anyway? We got an excellent education, through college, with no more than a word processor. Get the kids off the freeping computers, and have them read dead-tree text and write with pencils. (rant OFF)
In this situation, the student was preparing for a debate and wanted to provide both views. His initial discovery was that the National Rifle Association’s website was blocked, but not anti-gun websites. But the more websites Lampart tried to reach, the stranger it got. The State Democrat web site was unblocked but the GOP site was blocked. Lampart checked out websites related to abortion. He discovered that the National Right to Life website was blocked, but not Planned Parenthood or NARAL Pro-Choice America’s websites. Lampart had similar results when checking out religious websites. Christianity.com and the Vatican’s web site were both blocked, but Islam-guide.com was not.
Lampart brought this to Fox News where it has now been picked up by others.
Just look at the Hate that is in the ten commandments! We can’t have children to be taught to hate sin, hate lying, hate stealing, hate murdering (sarcasm)
leftists being leftists
and they are in charge of the molding of millions and millions of childrens minds
I still think they should be off the computer at school, using books. When I was doing debate, it was an “extracurricular activity,” and you were doing it outside school time with your own library and other resources. (rant OFF)
This is not to say that, if the school is too pathetic to have books, they should be allowed to limited computer access to a leftist perspective. They still should just have books.
Of course not. That would be intolerant and judgmental.
“(rant ON) What are the students doing on the Internet anyway? We got an excellent education, through college, with no more than a word processor.”
You had WORD PROCESSORS? We didn't even have TYPEWRITERS!! We didn't even have PAYPYRUS!! We had to pound out our answers in STONE!!
My senior thesis weighed four TONS!!
Misspellings were a B!TCH to correct!!
sitetest
Dear sitetest,
Snert.
I made some money in college because I had a manual typewriter, which worked when the power was off, which was a lot of the time. If you had a paper due, you’d pay me a per-page fee, plus wine and candles, to get it done during a power failure.
Maybe they’ve fixed the power issue in the last 25 years.
The web page for this particular product states the following:
"Granular content filtering capabilities allow administrators to block all predefined categories or any combination of categories. Filtering can be scheduled by time of day, such as during school or business hours. Dell SonicWALL content filtering solutions also enhance performance by filtering out IM, MP3s, streaming media, freeware and other files that drain bandwidth... Administrators can enforce multiple custom policies for individual users, groups or specific category types. Local URL filtering controls can allow or deny specific domains or hosts. To block objectionable material more effectively, administrators can also create or customize filtering databases."
So regardless of their protestations, someone at the school district is responsible for deciding to block those site or that category of sites. If the Vatican web site was being blocked under the category of "Violence/Hate speech", someone at the district had to deliberately put it in that category, because no content filter vendor I have seen (and I have evaluated many over the years in the course of my job) would ever categorize it as such - they would risk losing too much business, especially from parochial/Christian schools.
>> “someone at the district had to deliberately put it in that category” <<
.
Yup!
And school districts are lefty hate central.
.
Soft pitch. Couldn't resist taking a smack at it. My older son would likely groan for taking the easy hit.
In truth, I worked at a lab with pretty much state=of=the=art minicomputers when I was in college, and we actually had a primitive word processing program.
We also had IBM Selectrics in the lab.
I also had a manual typewrite at home.
And stone tablets with a chisel and a hammer.
I was multi-media.
sitetest
I had a Selectric II at That Insurance Company. I loved it. I wish I had one now.
My kids are all techy-fied, too, until you ask them to put a roll of toilet paper on a spindle. Then they stare at you blankly, like newly-awakened reptiles.
Show them a Commodore 64
lol
bkmk
My husband had one and used it to play computer games, with a cassette-tape drive. We had TRS-80s in high school.
“I still think they should be off the computer at school, using books.”
Amen.
http://www.amazon.com/High-Tech-Heretic-Reflections-Contrarian/dp/0385489757
WIN. Found in my library catalog! I’m often pleasantly surprised by the People’s Republic of Charlotte-Mecklenburg. Obviously someone in the bowels of the library system just likes books.
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