CNN ran with a story today headlined "Online Student-Teacher Friendships Can Be Troublesome". The article discusses how some states and school boards are crafting policies to deal with student-teacher friendships on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. In most cases, as the article points out, the relationship is either benign or sometimes a positive thing. In some cases the students use the sites to ask questions about assignments, seek advice about school; as well as learn more about who their teacher is outside of the school. But there have been a few cases where teachers and students alike breach the bounds of acceptable behavior, and sometimes break the law with sexual relationships.
It is because of those rare cases that people want to restrict all teachers' behavior online.
Consider the following from the article:
...[S]tate legislator Jane Cunningham is sponsoring a bill in the Missouri House of Representatives that would ban elementary school teachers from having social-networking friendships with their students.
[Snipped]In addition to the bill in the Missouri legislature, other school boards, teacher unions and parent-teacher associations across the country are drafting policies and issuing advisements about which online or text-messaging relationships are acceptable.
The Lamar County School Board in Missouri recently implemented a policy forbidding teachers and students from having any text-message conversations or social-networking friendships.
(source: http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/08/12/studentsteachers.online/index.html)
This is an emotional issue, to be sure. I'm not immune to sadness or rage when I hear about children being hurt and killed by predators. But it never benefits us to legislate out of emotion. So, walk with me as we think about it rationally for a moment.
If the teachers are such a big threat to the students online then why are they allowed around them at all? There are parents and teachers out that seek to restrict a teacher's behavior online but they're okay with letting these same teachers be with them in person five days a week? That doesn't add up. Furthermore, for a lot of these sites, like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc, a good portion of the interaction happens in public. If a child and teacher are having some manner of contact online it's visible and searchable. Even private conversations between parties are stored on a server somewhere. It can be requested by the police and examined for evidence of wrong-doing. What a child and teacher do in person is not, so isn't this potentially safer?
This type of reaction comes from the "WON'T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN???" argument. I have never bought that screechy argument. It is used so often by special interest groups and legislators to cram intrusive laws into the books. It is the exploitation of fear to achieve a political goal and I find it despicable. I don't think that all people are acting out of some ulterior motive, but they're exploiting fear to get what they want.
So I find this movement to restrict teachers' behavior online outright silly. I also find it a little sad. I understand that teachers are in a sense public figures, role models, and mentors, and therefore need to be more cautious about what they share and how, but does it hurt anyone if a student goes on Facebook and finds out that their math teacher is also a huge Iron Maiden fan? Or that their English teacher really loves to watch "Ninja Warrior"? I don't think it does. It humanizes the person grading their work, and builds a connection between them.
Thinking further out about this I find it amusing that culturally we bemoan the lack of social bonds between people, the empty homes that kids go to after school, and the separation people feel from each other, and yet want to reinforce the isolation for children by limiting the contact they can have with some of the most important people in their lives.
Clearly there needs to be some middle ground that can be reached between protecting children from legitimate predators and allowing our children to reach out and build the connections they should have with the people who matter. But banning contact outright between teachers and students is not the answer.
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