When will such people realise that they are inhibiting the very soul of what education should be about? How many of them would ever consider telling a teacher, or a teacher-librarian, which books they can and cannot use in the classroom? I would hope not any (although, perhaps, some of them might!) - but for some reason they are happy to ‘protect’ the teachers and students who use their network from the multiple and incredible benefits to be gained from the expanding host of social networking sites and applications spreading across the Web. By doing so, they take on a responsibility that simply should not be theirs to take. Unfortunately, they get away with it because, by bringing the secure-all mindset of the corporate CIO into education, they forget that the network should be there to serve teaching and learning, rather than pedagogy having to be forced into a straitjacket designed by those who have no understanding of, or empathy for, the needs of learners today.

The most secure network, as we know, is the one that has been switched off. The final irony, of course, is that our ‘protectors’ deny us the right to use the fundamental virtues of education itself as the greatest protection that we can give young people, a protection that can last them a lifetime! If no access is possible to the myriad sites and applications that the sentinels define as dangerous in some sense, then teachers simply cannot do what they are there to do: namely, teach young people how to discriminate, how to recognise and avoid danger, how to survive in the online world that will be the environment within which many of them will live, work and play throughout their lives. By closing down the Web to our schools, they deny us the right to teach our children a critical set of life skills.