Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

A school district in Maine has (accidentally?) created an excellent learning program for its high school students.

The Portland, Maine school district is issuing laptop computers to some high school students for use in school. The computers are loaded with censorship filters that will keep the students away from social media web sites.

This may be the best education program I have seen in years. Imagine, you give teenagers computers and tell them, “We have software on these that tells us what you are doing. There is nothing you can do to escape our oversight.”

The school district has just turned on these teenagers.

The kids are going to dig and study and practice and learn and learn and learn until they hack their way past the adults’ software filters. These kids are going to learn more in this weekend exercise than they have learned in years of formal school programs.

The kids will learn so much that I have to wonder if the school district created this situation on purpose. Did some adult actually figure out a way to challenge the kids and turn them on?

Some well meaning adult may have created a situation actually believing that the kids wouldn’t try to break the censorship tools. That interpretation is hard for me to believe, but since a government body is involved, that is probably the truth.