I am a student of the human body. Meaning, in Athletic Health Care, I’m required to research anatomy. And on the school computers, googling “muscle anatomy” leads me to few sites that worked, but plenty that didn’t. Why? WebWasher, the schools blocking software, has blocked a good many of them under the filter “Education/Reference; Personal Pages.”

Forgive me if I’m wrong, but aren’t we supposed to be using the school computers for exactly that? Referencing sources and educating ourselves? That’s what I thought.

I can understand the need for a filter. There are a few people out there who think the best way to spend their time on the computer is by either socially networking (which is the big problem), playing games or looking up less-than-polite material. Obviously we can’t have the school’s funding into our electronic sources go to waste, so there’s a legitimate argument there.

But the site blocking is getting ridiculous. Google Images was one of the first ones to go, with some weight behind it. But opinion forums? Forget about it. Doing a project on breast cancer? Good luck finding an educational site that isn’t blocked, or has its links blocked. Even sites with personal page ads, which the host site lets on because they are paid for the ad space, won’t make it past WebWasher.

But is this a First Amendment issue? Oh, you better believe it. We aren’t allowed to post and read others expressions of opinion on most websites, which infringes on our rights to say as we please, in an open forum communiqué. We aren’t privy to information that may be necessary for research, because some person---who we didn’t ask---decided that it wasn’t appropriate.

High school students have just as many opinions as adults do. And contrary to general idea, we actually think about things other then social gossip. The election weighs big on almost everyone’s mind, but we can’t publically post our opinion from a blog at our school, or read what many others have to say. Radical right-wing and left wing websites are easily blocked due to something as mundane as profanity, which---face it---we all have heard whether or not we use it. We’re in high school, we’re held to a more mature standard, we can handle it.

Some control obviously needs to be had. Obviously, pornography is a big no-go. Yet, time-wasters are everywhere. But what should be understood is that if people want to waste time online, they will find easy ways to get their game on. For the rest of us who need information that could otherwise be deemed inappropriate, i.e. anatomy, let us deem it for ourselves