I get a great deal of perspective from my friends and family. I know people from all sorts of walks of life, and it’s something I cherish, mostly because of the diverse perspective I get treated to on a daily basis.
Education is a big topic among my crowd, from the liberal teachers themselves, to the conservative parents, to the very much not conservative parents, to actual students (who have always been the last people whose opinions are sought on the topic of education). I don’t have any friends who are legislators or administrators though, food for thought there…
So, sex, and everything that comes with it, is kind of a big deal when you’re talking education. You pretty much either belong to the school of thought that children should only be introduced to the world of sexuality, first by an intimate conversation with family, taking into consideration their religious views, and anything beyond that is to be experienced with their spouse. The other is that people, including young people, are going to think about, and actively seek sex and that the best way to cope is to head them off before they get too far on their own and introduce them to correct information that is appropriately dissuading.
One of these groups is a lot easier to offend than the other. So, you’ve got those people I don’t speak to- legislators and administrators, running around in circles to make sure that none of their staff can say anything that might possibly lead to a young person knowing something about sex. The absence of a sex education class is by far not the first or last step in this process.
Children do need some protecting, and before we were arguing about what a health class should teach there were arguments about what kind of touching was appropriate and whether or not it was OK to require girls to wear revealing gym outfits. There were a lot of people that thought PC-ness was going mad over unnecessary trifles, but most people now say that these modifications were a sensible and necessary thing.
So, what about things being implemented now? Are they sensible things, good for the protection of young people? Or are they desperate attempts to soothe a beast that will never be soothed, that will only end up hurting the education of this and any following generations? Well, you have to ask that for each individual circumstance, and some will fall into each category. I think the big question that isn’t being asked, is about the line between protecting children from harm, and protecting them from growing up.
The reason I'm writing this now is because of some arguments about using youtube to show videos in the classroom. The problem is not the videos that teachers are choosing, but advertisements that play before some videos and also the videos being promoted in the sidebars and at the end of the chosen video that have content that can't be anticipated and might be of a sexualized nature. It's frustrating to teachers because they have this amazingly diverse and practically free resource at their fingertips that predecessors could have only dreamed of that is off limits. The insult to the injury is that teens are probably using the same website on their phones in between classes- or at home if phone confiscation has been particularly effective that day. I suppose the angle that parents and administrators are taking is that viewing in a classroom may have some sort of legitimatizing effect (though, with the average knowledge retention rate, they probably have less to worry about than they think).
As far as ads go, my personal stand on this is as follows: I haven't actually seen an ad on youtube since I installed AdBlock. The video sidebar and end of video mosaic are still present however. Most of the time those are absolutely harmless, though I guess sometimes those rock violinists get a bit too sexy for their own good. You know, it might be worth it for someone to contact youtube about having educator accounts that had a setting to not have those- or failing that, to have the thumbnails replaced with a black screen, so that the video was titled, and available for clicking, but that there was no image until the video had been selected.
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