MODERATOR: What about the children? Our new technolo- gies expose children to information and ideas from all over the world. Some of it is information. Some of it is misinformation. Should we take steps to restrict this access? Ellen Lafontaine will explore this area with examples of educational alternatives to censorship. LAFONTAINE: Thank you, Joan. I have a little cold, so I hope that you can hear me. I hope I won't cough halfway through. As we all know, cyberspace or the InterNet is a very popular subject today. When one adds the issue of censorship it becomes even more compelling and controversial. Today you will be presented with the legal, political and technical viewpoints of the censorship debate. However, I contend that while these perspec- tives are illuminating there is the danger of missing the far more important issue of the right to free speech for students in its application to this medium of technology. This issue of censorship is not solely one of a technical nature, for instance how to block access to pornographic material and banned books. A cursory glance at the variety of news groups and conferences on the InterNet may seem, depending upon your point of view, as either provocative or offensive. For example, it is possible to obtain an erotic article from the news group ALT.REC.SEX.WITH.OTHERS, or a few passages from Huck Finn, a banned book in some school districts. Indeed many educators and parents spend a lot of time worrying over whether Susan or Jimmy will accidentally read material that's not appropriate for their age. However, restricting access to news groups and conferences dealing with objectionable content matter is simply a subtractive strategy, subtractive in the sense of a withdrawal. The real issue instead involves the much great social challenge of placing in our schools this technological medium that has the potential to encourage student dialogue on any number of controver- sial issues. Increasingly our schools have greater access to the InterNet. We can expect that some educators and parents will perceive its introduction as dangerous as rolling a Trojan Horse into the classroom. Therefore a different and far more interesting approach to the issue of censorship is to focus upon the students themselves and their right to free expression in the classroom. To us this is an additive strategy, allowing our students to confront difficult realities both on a local level and a global scale and to successfully engage in the necessary conflicts that will inevitably result. The questions that we need to ask are: Can we tolerate and actively promote the desanitizing of the curriculum by allowing this new form of communication and inquiry into the classroom? Can we encourage our students to pursue the right to free expression and not turn their backs on controversy when it ensues? And lastly, can we create a critical literacy among students so that they are not only better prepared to confront the issues of tomorrow but also can be instrumental in changing or improving today's world for the better? To illustrate my point I would like to tell a story drawn from a paper that I coauthored with Professor Dennis Sayers of New York University. The research was originally compiled for his forthcoming book, Brave New Schools. The story concerns the use of a global learning network in an English class at a high school in Long Island. The network, supported by the Copland Family Fund, is called IERN, which stands for International Educational and Resource Network. The IERN network allows students to use telecom- munications to carry out projects with students from other parts of the world. The students at Cold Spring Harbor use the network to collect articles written by students from many different countries for a magazine called The Contemporary. Although produced at the high school, The Contemporary is so much a part of the IERN network that it is considered an official publication of that network. As its editors write, "The Contemporary is a student news magazine, international in scope, that aims to provide teenagers with a way to learn about issues of national and global importance as the first step toward understanding how youth can have an impact on the direction taken by our world." And one point I'd like to make. These are 14 to 17-year-olds that write, so I think you're all going to be very impressed by the level of their writing. Even though at times these issues of national and global importance were controversial in nature, this didn't stop the student editors from writing about them. However they were soon to find out that encouraging a debate on one of these controversial issues would lead to not one but two conflicts and near losses of their right to free expression, and surprisingly from two entirely different directions. It all began with the Middle East section of the January 1994 issue, which contained writings from Palestinian and Israeli teachers and students. Kristin Lucas, the 11th grade editor of the special sections, recounts her original motivations for collecting the writings. "At the start of my project my goal was to inform students around the world about recent developments in the long lived Middle East crisis. I set out with the belief that students from Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories needed to realize the similarities in their hopes and fears in order to pave the way for a more peaceful future." Using electronic mail and video send (ph), Kristin and the other students editors were able to collect several pieces of writing from both Palestinian and Israeli students and teachers. It was their intention to pair these writings next to one another in the Middle Eastern section for maximum impact. However, as they were going to press one of the Palestinian teachers, upon learning of Kristin's decision to intersperse the Israeli and Palestinian writings, and also objecting to some of the content in Kristin's introductory article, threatened to pull every one of the Palestinian writings. Kristin and her fellow editors were astounded. She spent seven periods of two school days trying to reach a compromise that wouldn't breach her right to free expres- sion. At the end they published all of the letters, but in separate sections of the magazine. This was a disappointing compromise for Kristin and her co-editors. In their opinion the initial attempt to foster a student dialogue on a controversial topic had failed. So they decided to exploit the technology to an even greater extent. Instead of relying upon letters and articles sent through elec- tronic mail, they opened a conference area on the network hoping this time for a more extensive, true back and forth student dialogue. Little were they to know that world events would sadly offer them one more Middle Eastern controversy. As we can all recall, on February 23, 1994 Baruch Goldstein murdered 50 Arabs and wounded many others at a mosque in Hebron (ph). This massacre triggered many Palestinian demonstrations on the streets of the occupied territories, which led to beatings and killings by Israeli authorities and reprisal murders by members of extremist groups on both sides. As a result extensive curfews were enforced and schooling for the Palestinians was suspended. Thus the resulting turmoil provoked a flurry of letters back and forth on many topics, one of which was the Western media coverage of the events. As one 12-year-old writes, Ranin Kiryan (ph), "The Western media is always at the scene when both Israelis and Arabs are killed, and the coverage is much more in favor of the Palestinian side in the opinion of Israel's. My opinion in general is that the Palestinians deserve a country." A Palestinian student disagreed with Ranin Kiryan. "I believe the Western media is not always at the scene when both Arabs and Jews are killed, and the coverage is in favor of the Israelis. But it's not important that the media covers this or that. What is important is that the killings stop. I respect your opinion that the Palestinians deserve a State." These two excerpts out of a handful of many demonstrate the enormous power of telecommunications to foster student partici- pation in an open and free dialogue. These students are learning tolerance by respecting each other's opinions on a very controver- sial topic. They are communicating in a real fashion about issues of social justice. One Israeli student who wished to remain anonymous, likely because his or her opinion would have sparked debate among his or her Israeli classmates, disputed the frequent press descrip- tions of Baruch Goldstein as an insane killer who acted alone. He or she says, "I believe that the massacre was not the action of a lone lunatic but one taken by a gunman acting under the influence of a radical minority group. This group deserves to be condemned, but the entire Israeli population should not be blamed. Similarly, the extremists among the Palestinians should be condemned but not all the Palestinian people." Truthfully, how many adults can master that concept, the few do not represent the many, as our anonymous contributor obviously has? Moreover, how many could acquire this understanding on such a controversial issue so close to home? Clearly these excerpts from the students' writings demonstrate the success of Kristin's original goals, to promote dialogue on a hotly contested issue in the Middle East with the hopes of illuminating common ground for peaceful coexistence. The Contemporary included these and many other letters in the May 1994 issue. There were also letters from students in other countries sharing their opinions and applying lessons from what they were reading to their own reality at home. Phoebe McDunna, a student from Australia, writes: "In my country we have many people from different backgrounds and we have grown to communicate and to accept everyone. This all sounds like Australia is a very loving and understanding country, but the sad truth is our native Australians, the Aborigines, are the last ones to become accepted and to be treated equally." Thus the debate that Kristin had sparked on the political turmoil in the Middle East led to students in faraway countries extrapolating lessons about the expansionist policies at the roots of their own countries' origins. So in going to press with this final issue of the school year, Kristin and her fellow students were pleased that they had achieved the goal of using telecommu- nications for opening and sustaining an extensive dialogue on a controversial issue. Kristin writes, "I've had the opportunity to accomplish what many other students may never have a chance to attempt. Even though I don't have the influence to reverse the sometimes harsh sentiments of these people, I would like to come away thinking that at least I did something to help the peace process along." Unfortunately Kristin had no idea of the new conflict for the May issue, this time much closer to home. Peter Copland (ph) is the head of the Copland Family Foundation that has supported the IERN network since its inception. His vision was to explore the potential of telecommunications to give youth a voice in shaping and improving their world. To this end he established IERN, providing funding from the Copland Family Foundation to underwrite the network during its formative years until it established a clear identity and had become self sufficient. This support took many forms, ranging from assisting in covering the cost of telecom- munications for some schools in North America and in other countries to assure cultural diversity in the networking projects and to contributing to special projects such as the Holocaust Genocide Project, with a range of funding demands including publications and study trips to Poland and Israel. So when Peter Copland asked to meet with the editorial staff and the faculty adviser at Cold Spring High to voice objec- tions to their coverage in the Middle East sections they were all very surprised. In his view, however, the coverage was biased toward the Palestinian point of view. He also felt that the writings from the adult contributors was a major departure from the original mission of the student magazine. Although he insisted that he didn't want to limit their editorial freedom he felt that The Contemporary's designation as an official annual IERN project should be reconsidered, and the controversial nature of the topics it covered might generate disagreements within IERN and jeopardize the willingness of some schools, for example in Israel and the U.S., to continue participating in the network. So the student editors met and drafted a response to Copland's concerns, and I'll quote a few passages. It was a very long letter, but I think this is very important: We sought to give all interested parties a chance to state their views and respond to each other. Did the contributors hear one another? Well, most seemed to listen but a few seemed to hear very well. Did we try to make the Middle East section a safe place to conduct such a discussion? Yes, but we realize that when feelings run as hot as they do in the Middle East there may be no such thing as a safe place to discuss any subject. Does this mean that we did not make a contribution to the resolu- tion of the problems discussed? No. We feel progress in this instance ought to be measured simply by the fact that the contending parties at least talked to each other and read what each other was feeling and thinking. Finally, dialogue, no matter how contentious it may seem, is the first step toward resolving any problem. These responses demonstrate the remarkably high level of critical thinking generated by engaging in such projects on a global learning network over the InterNet. The students developed a working knowledge of how to confront the possible loss of their right to free speech. Once again they negotiated a compromise by relinquishing the annual IERN project status for The Contemporary and incorporating a disclaimer for each issue. The final result was a conceptual awareness of the relationship of free expression and of the media of telecommunication that went far beyond the issue of keeping objectionable material out of young peoples' hands. In closing I will quote one student's real understanding of the individual right to free expression: "I think free and open communication is a wonderful thing. Perhaps with this experience some students will prize dialogue more dearly in the future. Hope- fully if we try to understand each other more we might be more willing to talk things out instead of going to war over them." Thank you. * * *