In the end, none of the cybersmut censors are totally reliable at preventing access to questionable resources. Indeed, your first line of defense against Internet porn--whether you want to protect children or office workers-- should be an instilled sense of personal responsibility, not reliance on software that may or may not provide enough protection (Ken Reichard, PC Magazine, November 7, 1995, p.46).

These sober words ended a recent PC Magazine review of filtering software.

But there are other, equally basic reasons why filtering software is not an ideal solution for protecting children from inappropriate content.

Consider the actions of the parents and teachers at a private elementary school outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who devised and implemented the following plan:

NO filtering software on school computers.

Teach children to quickly distinguish appropriate and inappropriate material.

Make children responsible for immediately using their browsers' "Stop" and "Back" commands whenever they encounter inappropriate material.

Integrate discussions of values and personal responsibility into the computing curriculum.

Sally G. teaches eight to twelve year old students at this school how to use computers and the World Wide Web.

Sally G. tells the children, "I expect you to adhere to standards..."

How confusing it must be for Sally's students, then, when they use the Lycos search service just as they have been taught, and find themselves confronted with a Redbook ad that declares, "The Sex Skill Men Really Love."

At least these children will be likely, upon seeing the ad, to quickly scroll down to their search results (though the sizable percentage who have been sexually abused may become upset and have a difficult time focusing on the information).

But what's the message Sally's young students get when they see such ads on a service like the Lycos search engine?

What do these children learn from adults who provide search services used by children but seem not to, as their teacher admonishes them, "adhere to standards"?

Regardless...

Here are some basic points:

We must instill good values in children and teach them to responsibly protect themselves from people with compromised values, including advertisers who value profits over children's welfare.

Filtering technology has its uses, but children can only be safe when they have internalized good values and developed a strong capacity for self-control.

If we use filtering technology as a substitute for cultivating values and personal responsibility, or even depend on it too much, we will morally cripple children.

The necessity of teaching children how to use the World Wide Web as an educational resource makes it essential that these issues of values and responsibility be addressed in our schools.

The need to explicitly address these issues in elementary school curriculums is all the more acute for those abused and neglected children who are being taught incomplete values and insufficient self-control in homes where, compounding their suffering, advertisers and programmers bombard them with loveless sex and senseless violence through unfiltered televisions and computers.

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